Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms have become central to interaction and participation in contemporary societies. New forms of ‘platformized education’ are rapidly proliferating across education systems, bringing logics of datafication, automation, surveillance, and interoperability into digitally mediated pedagogies. This article presents a conceptual framework and an original analysis of Google Classroom as an infrastructure for pedagogy. Its aim is to establish how Google configures new forms of pedagogic participation according to platform logics, concentrating on the cross-platform interoperability made possible by application programming interfaces (APIs). The analysis focuses on three components of the Google Classroom infrastructure and its configuration of pedagogic dynamics: Google as platform proprietor, setting the ‘rules’ of participation; the API which permits third-party integrations and data interoperability, thereby introducing automation and surveillance into pedagogic practices; and the emergence of new ‘divisions of labour’, as the working practices of school system administrators, teachers and guardians are shaped by the integrated infrastructure, while automated AI processes undertake the ‘reverse pedagogy’ of learning insights from the extraction of digital data. The article concludes with critical legal and practical ramifications of platform operators such as Google participating in education.

KEYWORDS:

• API
• automation
• datafication
• Google
• pedagogy
• platforms
• surveillance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlo Perrotta

Carlo Perrotta is Senior Lecturer in Digital Literacies in the Faculty of Education, Monash University. He is interested in the sociological and psychological ramifications of digital technology in education. His current research focuses on the social and political accountability of algorithms, automation and artificial intelligence.

Kalervo N. Gulson

Kalervo N. Gulson is a Professor in the School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Australia, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. His research investigates whether new knowledge, methods and technologies from the life and computing sciences, including Artificial Intelligence, will substantively alter the processes and practices of education policy.

Ben Williamson

Ben Williamson is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. His current research focuses on digital technologies and data infrastructures in higher education, and on the role of data science in the production of policy-relevant knowledge.

Kevin Witzenberger

Kevin Witzenberger is a Scientia PhD candidate in the School of Arts and Media  at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He researches the automation of governance in education and the potential impact of artificial intelligence on education policy.