Responding to sociotechnical controversies in education: a modest proposal toward technical democracy

ABSTRACT

The use of automated decision-making systems is increasing in education. While the potential impacts of ADM are becoming widely known amongst experts, the perspectives of those impacted by ADM remain peripheral. To broaden expertise and participation, this paper proposes that ADM needs to be considered as a sociotechnical controversy, as part of a technical democracy approach that utilises hybrid forums. Following Callon and colleagues, in this paper, technical democracy refers to the process of learning through uncertainty about sociotechnical controversies, and hybrid forums refer to the specific sites of democratisation. This paper first identifies key uses and concerns with ADM in education. Second, it proposes that restricted capacity for participation can be addressed through technical democracy. Last, it proposes that hybrid forums can create moments of democratisation through shared uncertainty, material politics, and collective experimentation.

KEYWORDS:

• Technical democracy
• hybrid forums
• education
• automated decision-making
• artificial intelligence

Acknowledgments

Research on this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council (Grant ID: FT180100280) and the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney, including a James Fellowship for Greg Thompson. Additionally, we thank members of the Technical Democracy Collective for feedback on an earlier version of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FT180100280].