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This paper examines ways in which the ethics of data-driven technologies might be (re)politicised, particularly where educational institutions are involved. The recent proliferation of principles, guidelines, and frameworks for ethical ‘AI’ (artificial intelligence) have emerged from a plethora of organisations in recent years, and seem poised to impact educational governance. This trend will be firstly shown to align with a narrow form of ethics - deontology - and overlook other potential ways ethical reasoning might contribute to thinking about ‘AI’. Secondly, the attention to ethical principles will be suggested to focus excessively on the technology itself, with the effect of masking political concerns for equity and justice. Thirdly and finally, the paper will propose a more radical form of participation in ethical decision-making that not only challenges the assumption of universal consensus, but also draws more authentically on the capacities for debate, contestation, and exchange inherent in the educational institution.

The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth, and the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest, making digital inequality in educational settings impossible to overlook. Given this reality, we, all educators, came together to find ways to understand and address some of these inequalities. As a product of this collaboration, we propose a methodological toolkit: a theoretical kaleidoscope to examine and critique the constitutive elements and dimensions of digital inequalities. We argue that such a tool is helpful when a critical attitude to examine ‘the ideology of digitalism’, its concomitant inequalities, and the huge losses it entails for human flourishing seems urgent. In the paper, we describe different theoretical approaches that can be used for the kaleidoscope. We give relevant examples of each theory. We argue that the postdigital does not mean that the digital is over, rather that it has mutated into new power structures that are less evident but no less insidious as they continue to govern socio-technical infrastructures, geopolitics, and markets. In this sense, it is vital to find tools that allow us to shed light on such invisible and pervasive power structures and the consequences in the daily lives of so many.

It would be somewhat easy, dare I say tempting, to see the ‘posthumanism’ in the title of this book as engaging a rather passe area of theory, given not only the particular prominence of the term i...

This article develops a post-determinist and a post-instrumentalist understanding of education and educational research through the lens of postdigital theory. We begin with historicizing current postdigital research by showing its intellectual ancestry and recognizing its rapidly changing nature. We move on to current state of the art, which we present in three wide themes. The first theme is the great convergence of various lower-level techno-scientific convergences, such as analogue–digital, physics–biology, and biology–information, which results in new epistemologies, ontologies and practices. The second theme is some consequences of the great convergence for education and pedagogy, which result in new postdigital ecopedagogies. The third theme is postdigital research, which is reconfigured by the great convergence towards a closer collaboration between traditional scientific fields and disciplines. We briefly outline four such reconfigurations (multidisciplinary, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and antidisciplinarity) and their implications. The article concludes with a brief list of directions for future work in the field.

This special issue of Learning, Media and Technology contributes to a growing need, not only for critical accounts of digital education that resist the global, but also for a more diverse represent...

This paper examines visions of ‘learning’ across humans and machines in a near-future of intensive data analytics. Building upon the concept of ‘learnification’, practices of ‘learning’ in emerging big data-driven environments are discussed in two significant ways: the training of machines, and the nudging of human decisions through digital choice architectures. Firstly, ‘machine learning’ is discussed as an important example of how data-driven technologies are beginning to influence educational activity, both through sophisticated technical expertise and a grounding in behavioural psychology. Secondly, we explore how educational software design informed by behavioural economics is increasingly intended to frame learner choices to influence and ‘nudge’ decisions towards optimal outcomes. Through the growing influence of ‘data science’ on education, behaviourist psychology is increasingly and powerfully invested in future educational practices. Finally, it is argued that future education may tend toward very specific forms of behavioural governance – a ‘machine behaviourism’ – entailing combinations of radical behaviourist theories and machine learning systems, that appear to work against notions of student autonomy and participation, seeking to intervene in educational conduct and shaping learner behaviour towards predefined aims.

Introduction (Networked Learning Editorial Collective): Since the turn of this century, much of the world has undergone a tectonic socio-technological change. Computers have left the isolated basements of research institutes and entered people's homes. Network connectivity has advanced from slow and unreliable modems to high-speed broadband. Devices have evolved: from stationary desktop computers to ever-present, always-connected smartphones. These developments have been accompanied by new digital practices, and changing expectations, not least in education, where enthusiasm for digital technologies has been kindled by quite contrasting sets of values. For example, some critical pedagogues working in the traditions of Freire and Illich have understood computers as novel tools for political and social emancipation, while opportunistic managers in cash-strapped universities have seen new opportunities for saving money and/or growing revenues. Irrespective of their ideological leanings, many of the early attempts at marrying technology and education had some features in common: instrumentalist understanding of human relationships with technologies, with a strong emphasis on practice and 'what works'. It is now clear that, in many countries, managerialist approaches have provided the framing, while local constraints and exigencies have shaped operational details, in fields such as e-learning, Technology Enhanced Learning, and others waving the 'Digital' banner. Too many emancipatory educational movements have ignored technology, burying their heads in the sand, or have wished it away, subscribing toa new form of Luddism, even as they sense themselves moving to the margins. But this situation is not set in stone. Our postdigital reality results from a complex interplay between centres and margins. Furthermore, the concepts of centres and margins 'have morphed into formations that we do not yet understand, and they have created (power) relationships which are still unsettled. The concepts … have not disappeared, but they have become somewhat marginal in their own right.' (Jandrić andHayes 2019) Social justice and emancipation are as important as ever, yet they require new theoretical reconfigurations and practices fit for our socio-technological moment. In the 1990s, networked learning (NL) emerged as a critical response to dominant discourses of the day. NL went against the grain in two main ways. First, it embarked on developing nuanced understandings of relationships between humans and technologies; understandings which reach beyond instrumentalism and various forms of determinism. Second, NL embraced the emancipatory agenda of the critical pedagogy movement and has, in various ways, politically committed to social justice (Beaty et al. 2002; Networked Learning Editorial Collective 2020). Gathered around the biennial Networked Learning Conference,1 the Research in NetworkedLearning book series,2 and a series of related projects and activities, the NL community has left a significant trace in educational transformations over the last few decades. Twenty years ago, founding members of the NL community offered a definition of NL which has strongly influenced the NL community’s theoretical perspectives and research approaches (Goodyear et al. 2004).3 Since then, however, the world has radically changed. With this in mind, the Networked Learning Editorial Collective (NLEC) recently published a paper entitled 'Networked Learning: InvitingRedefinition' (2020). In line with NL's critical agenda, a core goal for the paper was to open up a broad discussion about the current meaning and understandings of NL and directions for its further development. The current collectively authored paper presents the responses to the NLEC's open call. With 40 contributors coming from six continents and working across many fields of education, the paper reflects the breadth and depth of current understandings of NL. The responses have been collated, classified into main themes, and lightly edited for clarity. One of the responders, Sarah Hayes, was asked to write aconclusion. The final draft paper has undergone double open review. The reviewers, Laura Czerniewicz and Jeremy Knox, are acknowledged as authors. Our intention, in taking this approach, has been to further stimulate democratic discussion about NL and to prompt some much-needed community-building. lict

This collectively written article explores postdigital relationships between science, philosophy, and religion within the continuum of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment. Contributions are broadly classified within four sections related to academic fields of philosophy, theology, critical theory, and postdigital studies. The article reveals complex and nuanced relationships between various disciplinary perspectives, religions, and political positions, and points towards lot of commonalities between their views to the enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment continuum. Some commonly discussed questions include: Where do the mythical, mystical and spiritual end and the rational, objective and empirical begin? How do we find our bearings in the midst of this complexity and where do we search for resources that are trustworthy and reliable? While the article inevitably offers more questions than answers, a common thread between all contributions is the need for an open postdigital dialogue conducted in the spirit of mutual understanding and respect. It is with this conclusion that the article offers a possible route for further development of such dialogue in the future.

This paper examines the political economy of artificial intelligence (AI) and education in China, through an analysis of government policy and private sector enterprise. While media and policy discourse often portray China’s AI development in terms of a unified national strategy, and a burgeoning geopolitical contestation for future global dominance, this analysis will suggest a more nuanced internal complexity, involving differing regional networks and international corporate activity. The first section considers two key policy documents published by the central Chinese government, which are shown to implicate educational institutions as influential actors in national and regional strategies for AI development, with a significant role in plans to train domestic expertise. The second section outlines three prominent private education companies: New Oriental Group, Tomorrow Advancing Life (TAL), and Squirrel AI. These companies are selected to represent important aspects of China’s development of educational AI applications, including the influence of a well-established private education sector, and a growing interest in international corporate activity. The paper concludes with the suggestion that while central government policy reserves a significant role for education in the national AI strategy, the private sector is utilising favourable political conditions to rapidly develop educational applications and markets.

This article examines how algorithms are shaping student learning in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Following the dramatic rise of MOOC platform organisations in 2012, over 4,500 MOOCs have been offered to date, in increasingly diverse languages, and with a growing requirement for fees. However, discussions of learning in MOOCs remain polarised around the “xMOOC” and “cMOOC” designations. In this narrative, the more recent extended or platform MOOC (“xMOOC”) adopts a broadcast pedagogy, assuming a direct transmission of information to its largely passive audience (i.e. a teacher-centred approach), while the slightly older connectivist model (“cMOOC”) offers only a simplistic reversal of the hierarchy, posing students as highly motivated, self-directed and collaborative learners (i.e. a learner-centred approach). The online nature of both models generates data (e.g. on how many times a particular resource was viewed, or the ways in which participants communicated with each other) which MOOC providers use for analysis, albeit only after these data have been selectively processed. Central to many learning analytics approaches is the desire to predict students’ future behaviour. Educators need to be aware that MOOC learning is not just about teachers and students, but that it also involves algorithms: instructions which perform automated calculations on data. Education is becoming embroiled in an “algorithmic culture” that defines educational roles, forecasts attainment, and influences pedagogy. Established theories of learning appear wholly inadequate in addressing the agential role of algorithms in the educational domain of the MOOC. This article identifies and examines four key areas where algorithms influence the activities of the MOOC: (1) data capture and discrimination; (2) calculated learners; (3) feedback and entanglement; and (4) learning with algorithms. The article concludes with a call for further research in these areas to surface a critical discourse around the use of algorithms in MOOC education and beyond.

In many ways, the passing of another decade is nothing remarkable. The world does not transform periodically every ten years. Nevertheless, the fact that the 2020s are now upon us provides good rea...

This article is a multi-authored response to an editorial ‵Postdigital Science and Education′ published in 2018 by Petar Jandrić, Jeremy Knox, Tina Besley, Thomas Ryberg, Juha Suoranta and Sarah Hayes in Educational Philosophy and Theory as a mission statement for the journal Postdigital Science and Education. Nineteen authors were invited to produce their sections, followed by two author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. Authors’ responses signal the sense of urgency for developing the concept of the postdigital and caution about attempts at simplifying complex relationships between human beings and technology. Whilst the digital indeed seems to become invisible, we simultaneously need to beware of its apparent absence and to avoid over-emphasizing its effects. In this attempt, authors offer a wide range of signposts for future research such as ‘the critical postdigital’ and ‘postdigital reflexivity’; they also warn about the group’s own shortcomings such as the lack of ‘real’ sense of collectivity. They emphasize that postdigital education must remain a common good, discuss its various negative aspects such as smartphone addiction and nomophobia, and exhibit some positive examples of postdigital educational praxis. They discuss various aspects of postdigital identities and point towards the need for a postdigital identity theory. With these varied and nuanced responses, the article opens a wide spectrum of opportunity for the development of postdigital approaches to science and education for the future.

This article is a multi-authored experimental postdigital dialogue about postdigital dialogue. Fourteen authors were invited to produce their sections, followed by two author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. Authors were invited to reflect on Petar Jandric’s book Learning in the age of digital reason (2017) or to produce completely new insights. The article also contains a summary of book symposium on Learning in the age of digital reason held at the 2017 American Educational Research Conference (AERA). The authors are tentatively confident that this article produces more knowledge than the arithmetic sum of its constituent parts. However, they are also very aware of its limits and insist that their conclusions are not consensual or homogenous. As traditional forms of research increasingly fail to describe our current reality, they present this article as an experiment and a possible starting point for developing new dialogical research approaches fit for our postdigital reality.

We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life. This has inspired the emergence of a new concept—‘the postdigital’— which is slowly but surely gaining traction in a wide range of disciplines including but not limited to the arts (Bishop, Gansing, Parikka, & Wilk, 2017 ; Monoskop, 2018), music (Cascone, 2000), architecture (Spiller, 2009), humanities (Hall, 2013 ; Tabbi, in press), (social) sciences (Taffel, 2016), and in many inter-, trans-, and post-disciplines between them (Berry & Dieter, 2015). Through this research, the term postdigital is slowly entering academic discourse. The University of Edinburgh’s Center for Research in Digital Education is seriously considering rebranding toward the postdigital (Bayne & Jandrić, 2017, p. 204, see also Jandrić, 2017, p. 201) ; Coventry University recently established the Center for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University, 2018) ; authors of this editorial are editors for the forthcoming journal Postdigital Science and Education

This paper will review existing literature on Open Educational Resources (OER). It is intended to examine and critique the theories which underpin the promotion of OER in higher education, not provide guidance on their implementation. (1) I will introduce the concepts of positive and negative liberty to suggest an under-theorisation of the term ‘open’. (2) OER literature will be shown to endorse a two-tiered system, in which the institution is both maintained and disaggregated. (3) I will highlight a diminishing of the role of pedagogy within the OER vision and the promotion of a learner-centred model for education. (4) This stance will be aligned with humanistic assumptions of unproblematic selfdirection and autonomy. (5) I will discuss the extent to which the OER movement aligns itself with economically orientated models of the university. I offer these critiques as a framework for the OER movement to develop as a theoreticallyrigorous area of scholarship.

As the most prominent initiative in the open education movement, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is often claimed to disrupt established educational models through the use of innovative technologies that overcome geographic and economic barriers to higher education. However, this paper suggests that the MOOC project, as a typical example of initiatives in this field, fails to engage with a theory of the subject. As such, uncritical and problematic forms of humanism tend to be assumed in the promotion and delivery of these courses: the expectation of rational and self-directing individuals, with a universal desire for education. This fundamental orthodoxy limits both the understanding of technology and the possibilities for a concept of ‘openness’ in education. Given the global scale of the MOOC, and its high-profile associations with elite universities, the need for critical alternatives is pressing. In this paper I draw on critical posthumanism – an umbrella term for a range of philosophical and theoretical positions – for two purposes. Firstly and principally as a perspective through which to critique the educational reliance on humanism that is maintained in the project of the MOOC, and secondly to suggest alternative frameworks for thinking about the intermingling of humans and technologies in education. Space and time are considered as the two principal sites with which technological change is realised, and the promotion of the MOOC is shown to mask spatial and temporal conditions through adherence to an underlying humanist framework.

Learning in the Age of Digital Reason is a collection of impressively rich and wide-ranging conversations between Petar Jandric and a notable line-up of educators, theorists, historians, artists an...

This special issue is concerned with developing critical approaches to open education: about delving deeper into what we mean when we use this term, how it is recognised and understood, and how the...

This short article describes an experimental radio-frequency identification (RFID) system designed to playfully explore the possibilities of object agency, in the form of ‘tweeting books’. The use of web-enabled sensors is discussed in the context of the emerging field of Learning Analytics. The analysis of the ‘tweeting books’ prototype challenges the idea of straightforward ‘non-human’ data and the isolation of specific and localised agency. I will draw upon sociomaterial theory, which encompasses a broad reconsideration of the divisions between culture and nature, the human and the non-human. As such, the production of data can be thought of as the entanglement of human user and non-human technology, rather than the privileging of human intention as the exclusive source of agency. This will be suggested to have important implicationsfor Learning Analytics, which is often premised on a commitment to the idea that data directly represents human behaviour.

While education has been both open and online, the sizeable enrolment numbers associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are somewhat unprecedented. In order to gauge the significance of education at scale, this article analyses specific examples of massive participation derived from E-learning and Digital Cultures, a MOOC from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with Coursera. Student-created content, user statistics, and survey data are illustrated to examine the experiences and repercussions of engaging with educational activity where participants number in the tens of thousands. This activity is shown to mirror established instructionist or constructivist approaches to pedagogy. However, rather than working with “massiveness,” these positions are suggested to oppose large participant numbers. Concluding remarks propose an irreducible diversity of participation, rather than a generalised categorisation of “student,” and call for future considerations of the MOOC to move beyond individualism and self-interest.

“Openness” has emerged as one of the foremost themes in education, within which an open education movement has enthusiastically embraced digital technologies as the central means of participation and inclusion. Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have surfaced at the forefront of this development, claiming unprecedented educational reform. This paper provides a critical perspective on these prominent initiatives, highlighting a tendency to view access to online material as the principal concern of the open education movement. It will analyse the portrayal of technology in academic literature and media coverage of OERs and MOOCs, suggesting underlying assumptions of technology instrumentalism and essentialism. Alternative perspectives will be offered, drawing on critical technology studies and the philosophy of technology. The inclusion of “open processes” is proposed, involving the active engagement of learners in participation and dialogue, as well as further critical explorations of the relationships between technology and education.