Paradoxes of freedom. An archaeological analysis of educational online platform interfaces

ABSTRACT

Many schools and students across the globe are now engaging with educational digital platforms in their teaching and learning experience. Platforms are changing what education is and how it is experienced. In response, educational research has devoted increasing attention to the so-called platformisation of education. This article contributes to this focus of attention, proposing a conceptual framework for the analysis of the configuration of platforms and the kinds of learning experience and learners they create the conditions of possibility for. Using Foucauldian archaeological methods, we present an analytics that focuses on three interrelated axes, the spatial, temporal and ethical configurations of educational platforms. We identify some theoretical tools for the analysis of the educational experience that platforms make possible, thinkable and desirable. We show how digital platforms produce a paradoxical kind of digital learner, whose autonomy and freedom to choose, connect, produce, accumulate, perform and enact is configured within an epistemological space demarcated by the tensions between modularisation and hypertextuality, linearity and co-existence, performance and character/potential. Reflecting on this, we consider the working of a careful, unrelenting, and empirically vigilant digital gaze, which secures a very specific educational experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational online platforms
• digital learner
• digital gaze
• neoliberalism
• archaeology

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their stimulating and constructive comments and suggestions on the early draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emiliano Grimaldi

Emiliano Grimaldi is Associate Professor of Sociology of Education at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples Federico II. His research is in education policy sociology and has centred on educational governance and evaluation, NPM reforms in education, inclusive education and social justice.

Stephen J. Ball

Stephen J. Ball is Emeritus Professor of Sociology of Education at the University College London, Institute of Education, a Fellow of the British Academy and the Society of Educational Studies, a Laureate of Kappa Delta Phi, and Consulting Editor of the Journal of Education Policy.