Cruel optimism in edtech: when the digital data practices of educational technology providers inadvertently hinder educational equity

ABSTRACT

As digital data become increasingly central to education, hopes for educational equity are pinned more strongly on educational technology providers. This paper examines the data practices of edtech providers who are not simply making token gestures towards justice and equality. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, it presents three data stories. The paper suggests that datafication in education provides a showcase of cruel optimism, i.e., when the object of desire is blocking one’s flourishing. The conclusion considers the constitutive paradoxes of datafied education, and implications for the current phase of edu-technical transformation.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational technology
• datafication
• data practices
• inequality
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Felicitas Macgilchrist is Head of the ‘Media Transformations’ department at the Georg Eckert Institute of International Textbook Studies, Braunschweig, and Professor of Media Research at the University of Goettingen, Germany. Her current research draws on ethnography, discourse studies and cultural theory to explore the socio-political implications of educational technology.

ORCID

Felicitas Macgilchrist http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2828-4127

Notes

1. To retain the relative anonymity of the interviewees, the sources of descriptions are not provided. All information is from the websites and/or interviews conducted in 2017.

2. This refers to standardised assessment tools available from the not-for-profit organisation NWEA.

3. Projects such as the Schulbuch-O-Mat propose open source alternatives which prioritise public participation, collective deliberation and community control over the algorithms for adaptive processes (www.schulbuch-o-mat.de).