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

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.

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.

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the increasing datafication of schooling, which has become a salient topic in comparative education and education policy research. Specifical...

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

By comparing two federal education systems, namely Germany and the U.S., and their reactions to PISA we show how international, large-scale student assessments (ILSA) have been used by national sta...

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...

This article contributes to a growing body of research on global policy transfer and flows in education, arguing that a large number of such research has too often viewed nation-states as uniform policy containers, focusing mainly on national-level policy changes or using binary understandings of reform adaptation versus reform resistance. Consequently, it often neglected the internal complexities of nation-states, which include ambiguous modes of ongoing global-local “recontextualization,” local meanings of reforms, but also (changing) influence of national and local actors who may operate as policy “brokers.” Using data from an empirical case study on the German state Bremen, we illustrate how global-local policy dynamics played out locally in sequences of school structural reforms between 2002 and 2010. Hereby, we combine the theory of path dependency with the conceptualization of policy fields to better understand the various complexities and dynamics within a multilevel educational reform movement.

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.

This article focuses on the growing development towards new forms of ‘distributed’ governance within current large-scale educational reforms. The emphasis is on so-called ‘governance through standards’ as a transformative reform complex which manifests itself in a simultaneous process of regulative destabilisation and (global) reconstruction of policy control. This newly emerging regulative policy ‘ensemble’ is found to be directly related to the growing collaborative activity of cross-field networks between governmental, non-governmental and private actors. Empirically, this article refers to the so-called Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative which has fundamentally reshaped US education policy since 2001. The initiative comprised the negotiation, implementation and controlling of supra-state core skill standards for K-12 education as the benchmark for other regulating instruments such as assessments, monitoring and teacher training. In the context of the CCSS, the aforementioned new str...

During the last 30 years, a new model of transnational educational governance including a specific knowledge production regime has been implemented. Its increasing national impact has caused enormous change within the German educational system. Particularly, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Developments statistical reports and benchmarking procedures like the Programme for International Student Assessment have challenged the German system, which has usually been remarkably resistant to reform, and have pushed it towards fast and deep transformation. Demonstrated with the case of Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s largest states, effects of massive political uncertainty in terms of educational principles, rules of governance as well as school practice can be identified. They result in an increasing authorization of so-called agents of change who offer both knowledge production and education service to policy and school practice. In the case of Lower Saxony, the Bertelsmann Foundation has been suc...