Can we avoid digital structural violence in future learning systems?

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the concept of digital structural violence and examines the negative role it could have in future learning systems. To address it, we propose a new interdisciplinary research agenda at the intersection of three current but disparate lines of work that:

1. Use the concept of epistemic privilege to theorise the inclusion of marginalised learners in the design of learning systems, and utilise participatory action research and emancipatory methodologies to pragmatically ensure this happens;

2. Support young learners and teachers to understand and build their own artificial intelligence algorithms;

3. Develop sustainable interdisciplinary links with computer science to address digital structural violence at the algorithmic level and to make its societal implications and underlying processes more widely understood, especially by teachers.

Taken together, these provide for a material form of resistance to digital structural violence and a theoretically and methodologically coherent future research agenda for building just learning systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Learning technologies
• structural violence
• digital inequality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Niall Winters is Professor of Education and Technology at the Department of Education, University of Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College. His main research interest is to design, develop and evaluate technology enhanced learning (TEL) programmes for healthcare workers in the Global South. He co-edits the British Journal of Educational Technology.

Rebecca Eynon holds a joint academic post between the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. Her research explores the relationships between education, the Internet and inequalities, and she has carried out projects in a range of settings (higher education, schools and the home) and life stages (childhood, adolescence and late adulthood). She co-edits Learning, Media and Technology.

Anne Geniets is a Research Fellow with the Learning and New Technologies Research Group She is a developmental psychologist and communications & media scholar, with a research focus on health, social justice, training and technology in low- and middle-income countries. Anne’s main research interest is in exploring the links between health, training, inequality and technology.

James Robson is a SKOPE Research Fellow and Course Convenor for the MSc in Higher Education. He is co-chair of the research staff forum and is supporting the development of REF2021 impact case studies for the department.

Ken Kahn has been a senior researcher at the University of Oxford since 2006. He is the designer and developer of ToonTalk a programming system for children that provides concrete analogs of advanced computational abstractions with a video game look and feel.

ORCID

Niall Winters http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8597-2914

Rebecca Eynon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2074-5486

Notes

1 https://ipkl.gu.se/english/Research/research_projects/online-instructional-videos-and-learning-of-practical-skills.

2 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2.

3 https://medium.com/@blacksirenradio/fat-be-wilin-deb56bf92539.

4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc2aJxnmzh0.

5 https://www.blog.google/technology/ai/fighting-fire-machine-learning-two-students-use-tensorflow-predict-wildfires/.

6 https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com and https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk.