Machine behaviourism: future visions of ‘learnification’ and ‘datafication’ across humans and digital technologies

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Behaviourism
• behavioural economics
• data science
• nudging
• machine learning
• reinforcement learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Knox is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Posthumanism and the Massive Open Online Course: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education, with Routledge.

Ben Williamson is a Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Big Data in Education: the digital future of learning, policy, and practice (Sage).

Sian Bayne is Professor of Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education.

ORCID

Jeremy Knox http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3486-9487

Ben Williamson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9356-3213

Sian Bayne http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0133-7647

Notes

1 What better cultural indicator of such a shift than, at the time of writing, Wikipedia redirecting ‘course management system’ links to the ‘virtual learning environment’ page.

2 https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/.