Education as a domain of natural data extraction: analysing corporate discourse about educational tracking

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms and learning analytics are becoming increasingly widespread in the education sector: commercial corporations argue their benefits for teaching and learning, thereby endorsing the continuous automated collection and processing of student data for measurement, assessment, management, and identity formation. Largely missing in these discourses, however, are the potential costs of datafication for pupils’ and teachers’ agency and the meaning of education itself. This article explores the general discursive framing by which these surveillant practices in education have come to seem natural. Through a study of commercial suppliers of educational platforms, we show how the prevailing vision of datafication in their discourses categorises software systems, not teachers, as central to education, reimagining space, time, and agency within educational processes around the organisation of data systems and the demands of commercial data production. Not only does this legitimate the new connective environment of dataveillance (that is, surveillance through data processing), but it also naturalises a wider normative environment in which teachers and students are assigned new roles and responsibilities. In the process, the panoptic possibilities of ubiquitous commercial access to personal educational data are presented as part of a virtuous circle of knowledge production and even training for good citizenship. This broader rethinking of education through surveillance must itself be critiqued.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• datafication
• data collection
• surveillance
• dataveillance

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Enhancing Life programme (http://enhancinglife.uchicago.edu/), funded by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by the University of Chicago, which funded this research under the project title ‘The Price of Connection'.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Our approach will focus primarily on the ‘discourse’ of educational platform providers. For a parallel critical approach that focusses on broadly organisational convergences in education from which platforms benefit, see Van Dijck et al. (2018).

2 There are potential parallels here with developments in areas such as policing (Van Brakel, 2016) and territorial control (Amoore, 2013).

3 Such sources with regularly changing websites and quotations are cited without date, unless referring to a distinct document.

4 In this sense, we were inspired by some versions of Discourse Analysis (Potter, 1990), though our study is not formally a discourse analysis. Compare for a parallel strategy looking for absences as well as presences in educational discourse, Lindh and Nolin (2016) on Google Apps for Education.

5 For more detail, see Couldry and Yu (2018); Couldry and Mejias (2019).

6 For further discussion on metaphors of data use, see Lindh and Nolin (2017); Nolin (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John Templeton Foundation; University of Chicago.

Notes on contributors

Jun Yu

Jun Yu has recently passed his PhD viva, with a thesis entitled ‘Social Solidarity in the Age of Social Media and Algorithmic Communication,’ at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His interests include social theories, solidarity, privacy and dataveillance, platformisation, datafied education, and algorithmic culture. [Email: [email protected]]

Nick Couldry

Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His interests include media power, voice, media ethics, media’s contribution to democracy, and the social consequences of datafication and surveillance. [Email: [email protected]]