Digital Sovereignty in the classroom

Throughout this semester, OpenTech(AUC) has been proudly supporting experiments with Jupyter Hub in the new programming course offered by Amsterdam University College (AUC), called “Programming in Digital Societies” (PIDS).

In a nutshell, for many weeks now, students are building, running and sharing their Jupyter Notebooks in an environment that is fully owned and controlled by the PIDS lecturing team.

This environment is running on a VPS that OpenTech(AUC) is renting on https://gandi.net (V-R16, 8CPU’s, 16GB RAM, 30 GB storage). The VPS runs Ubuntu, and on top of that an installation of JupyterHub (following the steps of this manual).

As a result, students can play/work/collaborate with Python in their browser, without being forced to accept the terms of agreement of corporate players like Google Colab. At the same time, lecturers are building the skills and the experience necessary to take advantage of the constantly improving quality FOSS solutions for education.

PIDS combines collective reflection of critical literature (what does our digital world look like? how did we get here? what alternatives exist?) with an exploration of Python and how it can be applied to study the digital world (e.g. social media and news platforms).

OpenTech(AUC) is happy that with courses like PIDS, the university is (again) becoming a place where in-house technical experimenting can meet critical political reflection.

(By the way, if you’re curious to check it out, please reach out to us in our Nextcloud Talk channel for a guest account).