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Amid the increasing digitisation of schools, relatively little work has examined the ways in which digital technologies are reconfiguring the work of school principals. With an approach based on the sociology of work, this paper draws on 19 in-depth interviews with Australian school principals to examine their everyday experiences of digital work--with particular attention paid to the enduring influence of email as a key work tool. On one hand, email was seen as a constant and unremarkable feature of 'modern' school leadership. Yet, these accounts also highlighted how the intensification and extension of individual principals' labour practices were being exacerbated by multiple layers and technologies of surveillance, expectations of constant availability, and increased accountabilities imposed through email. Of particular significance were the detrimental ways in which email-based work was described as reshaping the affective dimensions of principals' work. Against this background, the paper considers what steps might be taken to mitigate such pressures, and perhaps move towards alternate forms of digitally-supported work that are more sustainable.

This article examines digital data use within three Australian secondary schools, drawing on in-depth interviews with 50 school staff to explore tensions between: (i) established logics of "data-driven" schooling; and (ii) emerging "datafied" practices associated with digital systems, platforms and devices. Using sociological theorisation of institutional logics, the article examines how promises of digital "dataism" are thwarted by the entrenched temporal organisation of schooling, and teacher-centred understandings of students as coerced subjects. As such, prevailing logics of state bureaucracy and professionalism combine in ways that temper the prospect of individualism, self-regulation, continuous feedback, and other implicit promises of digital data. The paper considers the extent to which school data logics can endure amid the increased digitisation of K-12 education.

This paper considers how facial recognition technology is coming to find a place in contemporary schooling. Drawing on the 'script analysis' approach from the field of Science and Technology Studies, the paper examines the development of a facial recognition-based classroom recognition system by an Australian start-up company -- 'AutoRoll'. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary data, the paper details the ongoing negotiations and mechanisms of adjustment between start-up founders, developers, marketers, policy and education actors as this socio-technical object progresses through successive phases of scripting, deinscripting and rescripting. These accounts illustrate how an initially contested technology enters a local educational system and begins to be sold to schools. In particular, the paper considers the ways in which a spirit of tech industry 'solutionism' is used to manufacture trust and legitimacy in the face of the disjointed governance and limited oversight of ed-tech by government and other public agencies.

This paper explores the significance of schools' data infrastructures as a site of institutional power and (re)configuration. Using 'infrastructure studies' as a theoretical framework and drawing on in-depth studies of three contrasting Australian secondary schools, the paper takes a holistic look at schools' data infrastructures. In contrast to the notion of the 'platformatised' school, the paper details the ad hoc and compromised ways that these school data infrastructures have developed -- highlighting a number of underlying sociotechnical conditions that lead to an ongoing process of data infrastructuring. These include issues of limited technical interoperability and differences between educational requirements and commercially-led designs. Also apparent is the disjuncture between the imagined benefits of institutional data use and the ongoing maintenance and repair required to make the infrastructures function. Taking an institutional perspective, the paper explores why digital technologies continue to complicate (rather than simplify) school processes and practices.

In the wake of COVID-19, enthusiasm is growing for hybrid and other blended forms of teaching. Before celebrating the hybrid future of education, however, it is instructive to interrogate its hybrid presence. Accordingly, this article explores pedagogical challenges prompted by the pandemic pivot to online teaching. Analysing qualitative survey data from Danish university teachers (n=488), we identify five critical stances towards educational technology: (1) technologies are fine when used correctly; (2) technical issues are a major obstacle; (3) hybrid teaching is overwhelming; (4) one's sense of students suffers online; and (5) students hide behind their screens. Based on these results, this article identifies two challenges for the hybrid future of education: the problem of presence and the webcam-related tension between surveillance and care.

The use of digital technologies within schools is leading to the increased generation, processing and circulation of data relating to students. To date, academic research around this 'datafication' of schools and schooling has tended to focus on institutional issues of governance and commercialisation, with relatively little consideration of students' experiences. Drawing on focus group discussions with 62 students across three Australian secondary schools, the paper explores students' experiences of school datafication in terms of power, surveillance and affect. It highlights students' relatively constrained and distanced relations with school technology use, schools' use of data to enforce student accountability and self-regulation of behaviour, as well students' perceived powerlessness to engage agentically in digital practices. Drawing on notions of 'digital resignation' and 'surveillance realism', the paper concludes by considering the extent to which students might be supported to meaningfully engage with (and possibly resist) the constraining 'atmospheres' of datafication.

This paper explores the ways in which students perceive digital technology as being helpful and/or useful to their schooling. Drawing upon survey data from students (n=1174) across three Australian high schools, the paper highlights seventeen distinct digital 'benefits' in domains such as information seeking, writing and composition, accessing prescribed work, scheduling and managing study tasks. While these data confirm the centrality of such technologies to students' experiences of school, they also suggest that digital technology is not substantially changing or 'transforming' the nature of schools and schooling per se. Instead, students were most likely to associate digital technologies with managing the logistics of individual study and engaging with school work in distinctly teacher-led linear and passive ways. As such, it is concluded that educationalists need to temper enthusiasms for what "might" be achieved through digital technologies, and instead develop better understandings of the realities of students' instrumentally-driven uses of digital technology.

In light of fast-growing popular, political and professional discourses around AI in education, this article outlines five broad areas of contention that merit closer attention in future discussion and decision-making. These include: (1) taking care to focus on issues relating to 'actually existing' AI rather than the overselling of speculative AI technologies; (2) clearly foregrounding the limitations of AI in terms of modelling social contexts, and simulating human intelligence, reckoning, autonomy and emotions; (3) foregrounding the social harms associated with AI use; (4) acknowledging the value-driven nature of claims around AI; and (5) paying closer attention to the environmental and ecological sustainability of continued AI development and implementation. Thus, in contrast to popular notions of AI as a neutral tool, the argument is made for engaging with the ongoing use of AI in education as a political action that has varying impacts on different groups of people in various educational contexts.

This article summarizes some emerging concerns as learning analytics become implemented throughout education. The article takes a sociotechnical perspective -- positioning learning analytics as shaped by a range of social, cultural, political, and economic factors. In this manner, various concerns are outlined regarding the propensity of learning analytics to entrench and deepen the status quo, disempower and disenfranchise vulnerable groups, and further subjugate public education to the profit-led machinations of the burgeoning "data economy." In light of these charges, the article briefly considers some possible areas of change. These include the design of analytics applications that are more open and accessible, that offer genuine control and oversight to users, and that better reflect students' lived reality. The article also considers ways of rethinking the political economy of the learning analytics industry. Above all, learning analytics researchers need to begin talking more openly about the values and politics of data-driven analytics technologies as they are implemented along mass lines throughout school and university contexts.

This paper considers the subjectivation of students in light of the increasing amounts of digital data that are now being produced within schools. Taking a lead from critical data studies and the sociology of numbers, the paper draws on staff interviews in three Australian secondary schools to explore the various types of student data being generated, and the forms of student subjectivities that result. In particular, the paper contrasts the 'holistic' possibilities that some school leaders and administrators ascribe to data in terms of expanding the capacity to 'know' students, against the limited ways that data is actually being used within the schools. Most notably, the paper details how digital data appears to be configured within schools' official data procedures and practices to build student subjectivities and position students in narrow terms of performance and attendance. The paper also highlights how teachers make practical use of these limited data 'profiles' in a relational manner -- as a way of stimulating dialogue with students to know them better, rather than a source of precise calculation. In this sense, the paper considers how 'data' might be reframed in educational discourse as a practical starting-point for teacher inquiry and professional judgment rather than an imagined source of all-encompassing knowledge.

Educational researchers are showing a growing interest in Participatory Design (PD) and other collaborative co-design approaches. This paper considers the ways in which education researchers considering PD can benefit from drawing on the approach's heritage in the 1970s' Scandinavian 'cooperative inquiry' tradition. In particular, the paper highlights four core principles from the Scandinavian tradition, i.e.: the pursuit of socio-ethical outcomes, sustained consideration of what constitutes 'participation' and 'practice', and PD as a design process. While positioning these principles in school-based research is not easy, the paper considers how this has been achieved within the field of child-computer-interaction -- an area of research that is also often conducted with children in educational institutions. While remaining mindful of the institutional constraints of school-based research, we argue that these Scandinavian principles can be borrowed and built upon by educational researchers -- thereby extending the scope and ambitions of educational PD research.

Schools now face considerable pressure to be using educational data to inform decision-making and become more efficient. Key to this rise of the 'data-driven' school is the increased use of digital technologies -- with computer-based data processing fuelling hopes for the technology-driven 'smart schooling' and a general 'datafication' of education. Against this background, the present paper explores the realities how data-work is taking place within individual schools with the aid of digital technologies. In particular, it draws on empirical data generated from in-depth ethnographic studies of digital data practices within three secondary schools in the Australian state of Victoria. Using concepts from the sociology of numbers, the paper takers these empirical findings to develop productive and relational accounts of the predominant ways that data work was being carried out within these schools. In contrast to the idea of 'Big Data', schools were most often found to be engaging in small-scale, improvised forms of spreadsheet work. The paper considers the social, cultural and political reasons underpinning schools' reliance on such forms of 'small data' -- particularly in contrast to the more sophisticated, automated and continuous forms of data analysis that are now available.

Despite climate heating and rising ecological instability, environmental issues feature rarely in discussions of educational technology. Most commentators presume the continued unfettered use of digital education resources bolstered by occasional claims that emerging technologies might support the 'greening' of school and university provision. In contrast to such business-as-usual complacency, this article anticipates ongoing environmental degradation of the planet as radically upending the continued expansion of digital technologies in education. On the one hand, depletion of natural resources and energy curtailments might put paid to established 'abundant' forms of digital technology use. On the other hand, more frequent climate-related disasters might necessitate emergency forms of education for displaced and unsettled populations. As such, the article argues for a new paradigm of educational technology that is both wholly sustainable and targeted towards displaced and disadvantaged populations. The article considers a number of ways that such an 'Ed-Tech Within Limits' might be pursued -- outlining fundamental shifts in thinking necessary to reorient educational technology along environmentally concerned lines.

Contemporary schooling is seen to be altering significantly in light of a combined 'digitisation' and 'datafication' of key processes. This paper examines the nature and conditions of the datafied school by exploring how a relatively prosaic and longstanding school metric (student attendance data) is being produced and used in digital form. Drawing on empirical data taken from in-depth qualitative studies in three contrasting Australian secondary schools, the paper considers 'anticipatory', 'analytical' and 'administrative' aspects of how digitally-mediated attendance data is produced, used and imagined by school staff. Our findings foreground a number of constraints, compromises and inconsistencies that are usually glossed-over in enthusiasms for 'data-driven' education. It is argued that these findings highlight the messy realities of schools' current relationships with digital data, and the broader logics of school datafications.

The past 20 years have seen the steady 'datafication' of school systems -- i.e. the rendering of key aspects of school practice into data that is digitally collected, processed and circulated. In contrast to assumptions of 'data-driven' schools as sites of more efficient and automated forms of data work, this paper examines the extensive human labour that now supports data production within schools. Drawing on in-depth interview data generated within three Australian secondary schools, the paper explores three distinct stages of data production involving the increased labour of teachers, school leaders, administrative and technical staff, parents and students. These findings highlight how the production of digital data within schools is associated with heightened levels of human labour -- from formally recognised activities to less visible infrastructural maintenance and 'repair' work. The paper concludes by discussing how 'school data' corresponds with broader tensions relating to school working conditions, occupational cultures, employment relations and worker organisation. Rather than being a source of more efficient and machine-led work with data, the increased prevalence of digital data seems to perpetuate some of the less desirable features of schools as workplaces.

The ongoing 'datafication' of contemporary society has a number of implications for schools and schooling. One is the increasing calls for schools to help develop young people's understandings about the role that digital data now plays in their everyday lives -- especially in terms of the 'data economy' and 'surveillance capitalism'. Reporting on three research projects, we explore the challenges of doing 'critical data education' in schools with young people. Each project was based on three learning objectives: materialising data and data processing; understanding the implications of data processing; and trialling strategies and tactics to manage and protect personal data. Our findings highlight technological, ethical and social issues encountered and the need for data education programmes to articulate with young people's expectations for media use. The paper concludes by considering how this might be achieved in schools through re-imaging the dominant forms of digital 'cybersafety' education in schools.

There is now an emerging worldwide trend for mobile phones being banned from classrooms and schools. While some academics working in the area of educational technology have raised concerns, many others have so far failed to respond to what is a significant shift in the ongoing development of digital education. The paper considers how academic researchers and other educational technology stakeholders can respond to what might be perceived as the curtailment of some forms of digital education. In particular, the paper argues that this current turn away from digital devices offers an opportunity to advance understandings about a number of seemingly problematic issues regarding the continued use of digital technologies in schools. In particular, the paper reconsiders five such areas of concern that are associated with banning phones from school: (1) technology addition; (2) digital distraction; (3) cyberbullying; (4) surveillance capitalism; and (5) environmental sustainability of digital education.

This article addresses the deliberately speculative question of 'What might the school of 2030 be like?', with a specific focus on the influences of digital technologies. The article adopts the methodological approach of 'social science fiction' to explore the ways in which digital technologies might be used in one Australian high school in 2030 (Lakeside), and what this might mean for the people whose lives are enmeshed with these technologies. Through the co-construction of five social science fiction 'vignettes' about life within Lakeside, the article considers the increasing prevalence of dataveillance, digital deskilling and the de-territorialization of schooling. The article then goes on to consider changing relationships between time/place, material and coded structures, as well as the increasingly platformized and data-driven nature of schooling in the 2020s. The article ends by considering the ways in which critical scholars can continue to use the methodological approach of social science fiction writing with regard to unpacking the politics of digital education futures.

A common recommendation in critiques of datafication in education is for greater conversation between the two sides of the (critical) divide -- what might be characterised as sceptical social scientists and (supposedly) more technically-minded and enthusiastic data scientists. This article takes the form of a dialogue between two academics representing these different perspectives -- Dragan Gasevic (a data scientist who is one of the founders of the 'learning analytics' field) and Neil Selwyn (a social scientist and long-time critic of educational technology). Over the course of a six-month email exchange, we explore various arguments for and against the datafication of higher education. Thus, we are able to add a computational dimension to well-worn social criticisms of data representativeness, reductionism and injustice, as well as exploring social tensions inherent in technical claims to data-based precision, clarity and predictability. Crucially, these exchanges allow us to explore ways in which our two viewpoints converge, and therefore highlight opportunities for productive inter-disciplinary exchange and collaboration.

Facial recognition technology is now being introduced across various aspects of public life. This includes the burgeoning integration of facial recognition and facial detection into compulsory schooling to address issues such as campus security, automated registration and student emotion detection. So far, these technologies have largely been seen as routine additions to school systems with already extensive cultures of monitoring and surveillance. While critical commentators are beginning to question the pedagogical limitations of facially driven learning, other this article contends that school-based facial recognition presents a number of other social challenges and concerns that merit specific attention. This includes the likelihood of facial recognition technology altering the nature of schools and schooling along divisive, authoritarian and oppressive lines. Against this background, the article considers whether or not a valid case can ever be made for allowing this form of technology in schools.

In Applied AI, or 'machine learning', methods such as neural networks are used to train computers to perform tasks without human intervention. In this article, we question the applicability of these methods to education. In particular, we consider a case of recent attempts from data scientists to add AI elements to a handful of online learning environments, such as Khan Academy and the ASSISTments intelligent tutoring system. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), we provide a detailed examination of the scholarly work carried out by several data scientists around the use of 'deep learning' to predict aspects of educational performance. This approach draws attention to relations between various (problematic) units of analysis: flawed data, partially incomprehensible computational methods, narrow forms of 'educational' knowledge baked into the online environments, and a reductionist discourse of data science with evident economic ramifications. These relations can be framed ethnographically as a 'controversy' that casts doubts on AI as an objective scientific endeavour, whilst illuminating the confusions, the disagreements and the economic interests that surround its implementations.

One notable "disruptive" impact of massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been an increased public discussion of online education. While much debate over the potential and challenges of MOOCs has taken place online confined largely to niche communities of practitioners and advocates, the rise of corporate "xMOOC" ventures such as Coursera, edX and Udacity has prompted popular mass media interest at levels not seen with previous educational innovations. This article addresses this important societal outcome of the recent emergence of MOOCs as an educational form by examining the popular discursive construction of MOOCs over the past 24 months within mainstream news media sources in United States, Australia and the UK. In particular, we provide a critical account of what has been an important phase in the history of educational technology--detailing a period when popular discussion of MOOCs has far outweighed actual use/participation. We argue that a critical analysis of MOOC discourse throughout the past two years highlights broader societal struggles over education and digital technology--capturing a significant moment before these debates subside with the anticipated normalization and assimilation of MOOCs into educational practice. This analysis also sheds light on the influences underpinning how many people perceive MOOCs thereby leading to a better understanding of acceptance/adoption and rejection/resistance amongst various professional and popular publics.

This article considers growing calls for the integration of so-called 'maker technologies' and associated 'maker' practices into schools and other formal education settings. Moving on from the largely celebratory literature in this area, the article seeks to further explore the tensions between the educational potential of maker technology and the realities of its use in school and classroom contexts. In particular, the article focuses on fundamental -- but so far little acknowledged -- tensions surrounding the social, cultural, political contexts of maker education, alongside the epistemological and pedagogical characteristics of maker technologies as tools for learning. It is concluded that maker education must not be seen as a ready fit with formal schooling. Instead, teachers and schools are likely to require sustained support to make the most of maker technologies within the demands and constraints of contemporary school contexts.

Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the 'policy mobilities,' 'fast policy' processes and distributed 'policy assemblages' that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture capital firms, think tanks and philanthropic foundations, non-profit organizations and commercial companies alike have promoted computer programming in schools according to a variety of purposes, aspirations, and commitments. This paper maps and traces the evolution of the organizational networks in each country in order to provide a comparative analysis of computing in schools as an exemplar of accelerated, transnationalizing policy mobility. The analysis demonstrates how computing in schools policy has been assembled through considerable effort to create alignments between diverse actors, the production and circulation of material objects, significant cross-border movement of ideas, people and devices, and the creation of strategic partnerships between government centres and commercial vendors. Computing in schools exemplifies how modern education policy and governance is accomplished through sprawling assemblages of actors, events, materials, money and technologies that move across social, governmental and geographical boundaries.