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ispartof: Learning Media And Technology vol:48 issue:1 pages:138-152 status: published

ZusammenfassungInspiriert von methodologischen Diskussionen zu den „Hinterbühnen“ von Forschungsprojekten, zielt dieser kurze finale Beitrag im Buch darauf, einen Einblick in einige soziale, materielle, kontextspezifische und rekursive Forschungspraktiken während des DATAFIED Verbundvorhabens zu geben. Der Beitrag reiht sich somit in die Tradition derjenigen Publikationen ein, welche die praktischen und sozialen Aspekte des „doing research“ eruieren, mit dem Ziel, Lesenden ein besseres Verständnis unserer Erforschung von Datafizierung an Schulen zu geben.

This contribution reports on a symposium that aimed to collectively discuss different approaches to deal with processes of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of education. Inspired by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and Pasquale's recently published NewLawsofRobotics, the symposium’s purpose was to collectively advance laws that would be specifically tailored to the field of education. In that regard, the term edu-automation seeks to propose ways of conceptualizing and imagining automation as an educational endeavor; that is, not as a purely technical-factual matter that is subsequently translated into educational practice, but equally as a matter of educational concern. Through three narratives and propositions, this contribution discusses similarities and differences between the concepts of automation and AI, and shows some of the different features that tie education and automation together. The variety and substantial differences between the three accounts shows that automation and AI cannot be approached single-sidedly, and that in order to come to a profound understanding of this phenomenon, we need to deploy a variety of theoretical, educational, and normative standpoints and positions.

ZusammenfassungZiel dieses Kapitels ist es, die wachsende Datafizierung von Schulaufsicht aus einer critical data studies Perspektive heraus zu betrachten und ein entsprechend differenziertes Verständnis für die Wirkmächtigkeit von Dateninfrastrukturen zu entwickeln. Mit dem Blick auf Schulaufsichtspersonen wird eine Personengruppe in den Fokus gerückt, die im Rahmen datenbasierter Educational Governance eine zentrale, aber auch ambivalente Rolle spielt – nämlich „zwischen“ Kontrolle und Beratung, Pädagogik und Verwaltung sowie hierarchisch regulierter und autonom professionalisierter Steuerung. Dennoch ist die Schulaufsicht gerade in der Datafizierungsforschung bislang tendenziell unterbelichtet geblieben. Diese Lücke adressierend, führten wir im Kontext von DATAFIED sowohl eine umfangreiche Dokumentenanalyse als auch eine Interviewstudie durch, um die Dateninfrastrukturen, in denen sich Schulaufsichtspersonen bewegen, ebenso wie damit zusammenhängenden vielfältigen und spannungsreichen Datenpraktiken systematischer zu erfassen und zu reflektieren.

ZusammenfassungDieses Kapitel beschäftigt sich mit Datenflüssen und spezifischer der Frage, wie Daten innerhalb von Dateninfrastrukturen „beweglich“ gemacht werden. Während Datenflüsse im Rahmen datenbasierter Steuerung bzw. Schulentwicklung oftmals funktional betrachtet und auch visuell dargestellt werden – also etwa bezüglich einer möglichst „reibungsfreien“ Datenweitergabe – liegt der Fokus dieses Kapitels im Sinne einer critical data studies Perspektive vor allem auf den für Datafizierung hochgradig konstitutiven Reibungen, Brüchen, Spannungen sowie auf der aktiven „Herstellung“ von Datenbewegung als Festschreibung, aber auch als Verhandlung bestimmter datafizierter Sichtbarkeiten. Gleichzeitig stellt sich die Frage, ob und wie die Darstellung einer derartigen Perspektive modelliert und damit visualisiert werden kann. Beides diskutieren wir am Beispiel von Unterrichtsausfalldaten, deren Produktion, Verarbeitung und Weitergabe uns im DATAFIED-Verbund als hochpolitischer, und als ebenso komplexer und ambivalenter Prozess begegnet ist.

Zentrale Thesen Medienbildung sowie kritisch-reflexiver Umgang mit digitalen Bildungstechnologien lassen sich nicht auf Skills und Anwendungskompetenzen reduzieren. Es braucht eine Demystifizierung der ‹Potenziale› digitaler Technologien und eine differenzierte Sicht auf Chancen und Problemfelder. Der Ausbau der Vermessung von Bildung ist kein Konsens! Die Rolle und der wachsende Einfluss der IT-Wirtschaft im Bildungsbereich müssen kritisch reflektiert und transparent gemacht werden.

Drawing upon the growing datafication of contemporary schooling, our purpose in this article is to use topological thinking as an analytical device to better understand the professionals and practices within emergent data infrastructures. We address this by attending to an influential national (and subnational) data infrastructure of school monitoring in the United States, managed by the federal Department of Education, known as EDFacts. Informed by policy documents relating to EDFacts, as well as by various related software platforms and portals, we explore the whom and how of datafication, and expose the increasing presence and influence of otherwise ‘hidden’ technology mediators, or ‘shadow professionals’. In particular, we argue that the increasing dependency of EDFacts on data has necessitated the introduction of new professional roles associated with optimising the flow of data, and thus stabilising and normalising the topological space of the infrastructure. We conclude by suggesting that EDFacts encourages teaching professionals and shadow professionals alike to engage in acts of data submission; that is, providing data to EDFacts and, at the same time, positioning themselves as wholly responsive to the infrastructure and its datafied renderings of schooling.

This contribution takes a critical perspective on digital school performance platforms (SPP), which today play a key role in US state education monitoring and accountability. Using examples from tw...

Over the last decades, the way we think about space and time in relation to the field of education has changed substantially. New societal evolutions have urged scholars to come to grips with the increasing difficulty of approaching educational practices in terms of existing “static” (e.g. topographical) representations of space and “linear” (e.g. chronological) models of time. As a result, different lines of research have been developed that seek to extend our spatiotemporal understanding not only conceptually and theoretically, but also through novel methodologies and new kinds of empirical analyses. This Special Issue extensively discusses and further elaborates on one approach informing these lines of research: (social) topology. In this editorial, we outline the topological lens and discuss its origins in the field of mathematics. After discussing how topology was adopted in the broad field of the social sciences, we show how it has gradually come to inform educational research as well. We argue that the topological lens is particularly fruitful to investigate the (mutual) construction of space and time. Briefly discussing each contribution in the Special Issue, we show how the Special Issue contributes to the further development, and making accessible, of topology as an educational research approach.

The ongoing trend towards educational globalisation has brought about various dynamics of education policy ‘rescaling’, resulting in a growing number of governmental arrangements, which are operati...

The past few decades have witnessed a global enforcement of ‘governance by data’ in education policy, including a significant increase of assessments and quantified evaluation. Within this context, this article focuses particularly on the intensifying evolvement of new (digital) information technologies and ‘mediated’ infrastructures of data flows. The premise is that such technologies and actors of mediation reveal a crucial potential for implementing a new mode of digitalized governmentality in education, which, as ‘governance by big data’, reaches far beyond policy, into educational administration, school practice and individual learning activities. The strategic mediation of (big) data in education (such as that generated through assessments) involves actors, structures and technologies that operate between policy, politics, administration, schools and individuals as well as between data production, consumption and the data itself, for example by applying practices of data visualization or technical data services around software and databases. However, as this article seeks to demonstrate, such mediators comprise various types of actors who operate very differently within the diverse sectors of education policy, indicating a highly ambiguous yet powerful composition of digitalized governmentality.

Contributing to a rising number of Critical Data Studies which seek to understand and critically reflect on the increasing datafication and digitalisation of governance, this paper focuses on the field of school monitoring, in particular on digital data infrastructures, flows and practices in state education agencies. Our goal is to examine selected features of the enactment of datafication and, hence, to open up what has widely remained a black box for most education researchers. Our findings are based on interviews conducted in three state education agencies in two different national contexts (the US and Germany), thus addressing the question of how the datafication and digitalisation of school governance has not only manifested within but also across educational contexts and systems. As our findings illustrate, the implementation of data-based school monitoring and leadership in state education agencies appears as a complex entanglement of very different logics, practices and problems, producing both new capabilities and powers. Nonetheless, by identifying different types of ‘doing data discrepancies’ reported by our interviewees, we suggest an analytical heuristic to better understand at least some features of the multifaceted enactment of data-based, increasingly digitalised governance, within and beyond the field of education.