The datafication of education is an ongoing concern. With datafication we mean the increasing translation of educational practices into digital data, as well as the implementation of processes and tools necessary to support these translations. Some concerns addressed by us and other scholars are the decontexualisation of learning (learning cannot always be translated into measurable data) but also the issue of data privacy, especially since student data is often collected by commercial platforms and can potentially be shared with third parties.

Little has been said, however, about the role that dashboards play in the datafication of education. There are mainly three forms of dashboarding:

(1) the use of dashboards in learning platforms that provide information about student activities and outcomes, such as their learning progress or their engagement.

(2) the use of dashboard for regulatory purposes, implemented by government authorities to track local or national school metrics

(3) the use of dashboards for individual school governance, to be used by all staff (or students).

In Australia, where we do our research, we have come across some far-reaching instances of dashboarding of the latter kind.

One of the schools we worked with implemented a bespoke dashboard using Power-BI. Leadership told us that the dashboards were used to judge teacher performance. This was partly based on a battery of standardised tests that the students were subjected to, and which were visualised on the dashboards, as well as fine-grade comparisons of GPA averages per cohort. Rather than disciplining teachers directly, the school envisioned teachers would internalise the metrics of the dashboard and would ask for help if ‘their’ results were not up to scratch.

Another concerning example of dashboarding we found in the literature. In a 2021 article is described how a school in Sydney implemented a student dashboard to encourage ‘goal setting’ and ‘self-regulation’. A target GPA for each subject was calculated based on a variety of factors, such as standardised test results and previous years’ GPA. Students were then provided with a dashboard filled with graphs and charts, so they could ‘track’ any progress over time but also where they sat in relation to other students. In this case, we feel that students were taught to see themselves in terms of numbers, with the constant reminder that their ‘targets’ needed to be met.  

Both examples point to the increasing surveillance of teachers and students using data. Dashboards facilitate a form of self-internalised control in which students and teachers are ‘trained’ to compare themselves to others and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Of course, it is a noble aim to increase student learning, but the data presented on the dashboard only shows part of the picture of a student’s learning.

Both examples are also illustrative of the ‘professionalisation’ of schooling, or, to put it more bluntly, to make schools operate more like businesses, using ‘data-driven’ decision-making. It is worth noting that both examples are drawn from private schools, which play an important role in Australia’s educational landscape: around 30 percent of Australian secondary school-aged children attend a private school. Some of these schools charge considerable fees. It is fair to say that these schools operate very much as businesses, looking for ‘new markets’, for instance, by recruiting international students from South-East Asia. To be successful in this highly competitive market, schools must have good results that they can market to parents of potential students. As such, it is only logical that the dashboards they use focus on cohort views, suggesting that the main objective is to manage collective performance, rather than individual students’ growth.

The dashboarding of schools also raises the risk of algorithmic bias. On the Australian markets there are a number of providers that offer plug-ins to schools such as IntelliSchool and TrackOneStudio that offer data analytics visualised on seemingly easy-to-understand dashboards. These companies rely on large datasets from participating schools, which some use to train their AI-model. One of the features promoted informally by these companies is the prediction of student’s final year’s outcomes. In a highly competitive educational system this can be used to disqualify disadvantaged students on the basis of biased data.

The dashboarding of education is not unique to Australia. In the Netherlands, for instance, around 20 percent of primary schools make use of Leeruniek, an edtech provider that promises useful insights into student progress and ‘trends’. Companies like Leeruniek, generate the data but are also providing the means to make sense of it, both highlighting the problem (there is too much data) and offering a solution (the dashboards). Leeruniek shares aggregated data with government and researchers and as such the data may be used to inform policy. We are concerned that third parties are becoming influential intermediaries influencing policymakers with enormous sets of rich but decontextualised data.

We argue for restraint using dashboards and data analytics, as they often only sketch part of the picture of students’ learning. Furthermore, dashboards enable a perversive form of control that is more about number management then about creating genuine educational opportunities.

Der Beitrag „The Dashboarding of Education” erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.

Both digitalisation and education are often identified in policy as enablers for change and innovation with regards to contemporary global “wicked problems”. Education is not only expected to play a leading role for the digitalisation of society but also to utilize the opportunities offered by new technologies in order to improve student learning. Our research focuses on how ‘digitalisation’ and related concepts are constructed and promoted in Higher Education policy, and aims to uncover underlying ideology, imaginaries, and hidden tensions in relation to welfare values, pedagogy and the role of HE. We are particularly interested in how depoliticisation is used as a discursive strategy in policy texts that propose changes that could have far-reaching consequences for the educational sector and society at large. We argue that depoliticisation of fundamental socio-economic conditions for education in educational policy discourse facilitates the promotion of a neoliberal political agenda by placing the responsibility for achieving social inclusion on individuals – especially individuals within marginalized communities – rather than on governments.

Policy represents normative choices that are based on hegemonic practices, while depoliticisation can be defined as a “the set of processes (including varied tactics, strategies, and tools) that remove or displace the potential for choice, collective agency, and deliberation around a particular political issue” (Fawcett, Flinders, Hay, & Wood, 2017). Depoliticisation, therefore, offers a way of excluding certain issues from political discussions and decision-making by “placing them outside politics” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 241). This allows policy to deny political antagonism and emphasize rational consensus among stakeholders rather than opening up for ideas that challenge the prevailing hegemony. Depoliticisation is a common feature in neoliberal governance and allows the state to cooperate with a large number of actors, from the private as well as the public sector, in an informal way, in order to drive change without parliamentary debate and democratic negotiations (Clarke, 2012; Foster, Kerr, & Byrne, 2014).

Private actors and corporations have high stakes in the promotion of digitalisation of education and are able to influence educational policy through their involvement in complex national and supra-national policy networks. Especially in countries like Sweden, that still holds onto an identity as a traditional Nordic welfare state, this could possibly create ideological conflicts in policy discourses on digitalisation. We have, in a previous publication (Ljungqvist & Sonesson, 2022), shown how Swedish policy depoliticises various potentially contentious aspects of digitalisation and its social and political context, such as the financialised constructions of knowledge, learning, educational institutions, teachers and students. Depoliticisation is partly accomplished through ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘educationalisation’ (a particular instantiation of the former), i.e. the delegation of tasks and problems to citizens, groups, and institutions, as well as to education, teachers and students, that are beyond their mandate, role or power to solve. By emphasising choice, individual responsibility and the need for a more skills-based educational system, the policy directs attention away from structural inequalities that might prevent large groups of individuals from participating in and/or benefitting from education. For example, the school of the future is described as challenge-driven and entrepreneurial, and students are represented as highly motivated, self-regulated, socially adept individuals expected to take responsibility for their own learning and able to, through problem-solving exercises “discovering what knowledge they need”. Furthermore, the policy defuses potential objections that could be raised in relation to traditional Nordic welfare ideals, such as universality, solidarity and market-independence, by framing its proposals with just these ideals, thus stretching their conceptualisations.

Also in policy at the European level, depoliticisation strategies are used in order to mitigate tensions between welfare values and the paradigm of late capitalism, and we suggest that its employment has come to be intensified in tandem with the widening of social inequalities, and a growing pressure on policy makers to (superficially) address such issues, for example social inclusion (Mikelatou & Arvanitis, 2018). Here, the discourses on ‘lifelong learning’ are particularly interesting for critical research on the digitalisation of education, both because this concept is often narrowly framed in terms of economic growth, productivity and skills-orientation, and because of the political emphasis on digitalisation as a means for realising national and European lifelong learning objectives. Recent EU education policy initiatives put a strong focus on equity and social fairness but places the responsibility for achieving these objectives largely on the individual, or rather, as the European Commission’s fact sheet on Individual Learning Accounts and Microcredentials states: puts them in “the driving seat”. The fact sheet emphasises the importance of European citizens “having a strong skillset” in order to achieve social inclusion (besides being “good for the competitiveness for the economy”). It identifies “motivation, time and funding” as the main barriers for “upskilling and reskilling”, thus depolitising the unequal social, cultural and economic conditions that may prevent people from engaging in educational provision (regardless of how attractively that provision is packaged). It also reduces education and training to quick, flexible and personalized “stacking” of skills and competencies rather than a deep, slow and meaningful collective experience.

In our current research, we explore depoliticisation as a phenomenon in transnational educational policy processes in relation to discourses on digitalisation. This is especially relevant in the wake of the covid-pandemic. The pandemic has led to a stronger influence of EdTech industry over educational practices and politics, but also pushed governments and educational institutions into an ‘unfreezing’ (Lewin, 1947) process that includes ‘attempts to thoroughly embed public education systems and practices, at international reach, in increasingly powerful technological systems’ (Williamson, Eynon, & Potter, 2020, pp. 107-108). This further stresses the importance of critical research on how the influence of policy networks may affect policy discourses in relation to national and supranational efforts and projects that aim to digitalise education.

References

Clarke, M. (2012). The (absent) politics of neo-liberal education policy. Critical Studies in Educational Policy, 53(3), 297-310. doi:10.1080/17508487.2012.703139

Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Fawcett, P., Flinders, M., Hay, C., & Wood, M. (2017). Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance. In P. Fawcett, M. Flinders, C. Hay, & M. Wood (Eds.), Anti-Politics, Depoliticization, and Governance (pp. 3-27). doi:10.1093/oso/9780198748977.003.0001

Foster, E. A., Kerr, P., & Byrne, C. (2014). Rolling back to roll forward: depoliticisation and the extension of government. Policy & Politics, 42(2), 225-241. doi:10.1332/030557312X655945

Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and Social Change. Human Relations, 1(1), 5-41. doi:10.1177/001872674700100103

Ljungqvist, M., & Sonesson, A. (2022). Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 8(2), 89-102. doi:10.1080/20020317.2021.2004665

Mikelatou, A., & Arvanitis, E. (2018). Social inclusion and active citizenship under the prism of neoliberalism: A critical analysis of the European Union’s discourse of lifelong learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(5), 499–509. doi:10.1080/00131857.2017.1382348

Williamson, B., Eynon, R., & Potter, J. (2020). Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during the coronavirus emergency. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 107-114. doi:10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641

Der Beitrag Depoliticisation as a discursive tool for digitalising education erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.

In our digitised lives, more and more decisions are taken with the help of automated decision-making systems, and opaque algorithms, filter bubbles, recommendations and likes determine which content users see and how users behave online. ‘Digitally sovereign’ citizens use digital technologies in an informed manner and take part in the development of more social technologies. How this ideal goal can be reached in light of citizens’ limited agency in datafied societies, and what this means in practice for youth and adult education was discussed at the online symposium. Besides presentations from Sigrid Hartong and Annika Gramoll, several ideas workshops about diverse topics such as escape games in education or data protection in online games were offered.

Der Beitrag Online symposium ‘Digital Sovereignty – Theory meets Practice’ erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.

The report on the Germany-wide MünDig Study is now available in German, with a brief English abstract. While the existing press coverage focuses mainly on the RESULTS of the study within the Waldorf kindergarten and school sample, this comment will explore why the METHODS of investigation used in the study, more specifically the Media Maturity Matrix (MMM, described in detail in Chapter 3 of the report) are at least equally – if not more – compelling.

A recap: Jesper Balslev concluded in his guest commentary on lessons learned during the pandemic in autumn 2021: We need analogue control groups. He has expanded on this previously in his PhD thesis (p. 154): “[…] compare analogue and digital interventions more systematically […] Can we train programmers without the use, or with very limited use, of technology? How would students perform in settings that focused on attaining the grammatical, mathematical, logical and social skills that often constitute the background support factors of much digital professionalism? […] there is a technological bias at play, witnessed by the absence of analogue control groups”.

A second recap: The introductory question in UNBLACK THE BOX´s alternative checklist reads as follows: “Are we aware that digital education can also be ‘analogue’ (without the use of digital technologies)?”

No, ‘we’ are not aware of that, it seems. Or, more precisely: The answer depends on whom the word ‘we’ refers to.

1. Educators. The results of the MünDig Study show that teachers, parents – and students – in progressive-education (= reformpädagogisch) settings are aware of the option of fostering digital skills via analogue means, and put this awareness into practice. Many other teachers, especially at kindergarden and primary education level, may be aware of it, and may have been practicing such activities for years. But there is a lack of studies that would confirm or disprove it.
2. Researchers. Judging by the questions asked and the survey instruments used, most researchers investigating attitudes towards and practice of digital education are not aware of analogue options in digital education. They do not ask about drawing pictures by hand for creativity and innovation, nor about writing letters to communicate and cooperate, nor about asking other people for information to conduct research and use information, nor about drawing a giant sorting network on the schoolyard with chalk to foster problem solving as part of basic programming skills. (The phrases highlighted in bold letters are directly copied from a K-12 ICT skills framework, the italicised phrases are part of the Media Maturity Matrix) What they do ask about – often in great detail – is the availability of digital devices and activities where teachers and students make use of these devices (for a more nuanced reporting and critique of existing research approaches see p. 22 and chapter 6.7 in the MünDig report). I was witness to a presentation of results from a study as part of a Bachelor Thesis on digital education in nature/forest/outdoor kindergardens at the conference of the German Nature and Outdoor Kindergarten Association. The young presenter saw great cause for concern and a pressing need for change, because outdoor educators in one German Nation-State had answered most of his questions with a NO: No, digital devices are not available to the children in Outdoor Kindergardens. No, the children did not use laptops, Tablet PCs, Smartphones, very few used digital cameras. Even more alarming to him: most educators did not even see any need for change. They did not want to be trained for increased future use of tablets in their kindergartens. The audience – consiting mainly of outdoor kindergarden educators – intervened: They criticised the METHOD of his survey. Bluntly, they said he had asked the wrong questions, he had asked only about all the screen-based digital activities they DID NOT do, and omitted all questions about the many analogue activities in media education they DID do. They said they understood the limitations of his data: The survey results could only show digital deficits instead of analogue resources. They concluded he should have used the Media Maturity Matrix instead. This was on day two of the conference. On day one, I had presented a lot of preliminary results for the Nature/Outdoor sample from the MünDig Study – which used MMM (Media Maturity Matrix). MMM is a new online tool we developed which allowed us to record self-reported attitudes and practice of educators in media education (“Medienbildung”) in three dimensions: a) which medium (analogue or digital) b) for which purpose c) at what age? The Matrix encompassed 60 different exemplary activities – both analogue and digital – which are not specific for Waldorf or Montessori or Outdoor education, so the survey tool could be used in regular kindergardens and schools. The 60 items are shown in an illustration as well as in text format. I am told that apart from the original research purpose, the 60 activities in ten areas have also been used by educational institutions as a blueprint to structure their media curricula and/or to inspire and enrich their practice. Back to the outdoor kindergarten conference: The audience was pleased to receive from me an account of the variety of – analogue – activities in digital education they were already implementing, and eager to hear about suggestions for expanding and improving it. Nevertheless, I could not help but wonder how the audience would have reacted if they had only heard one of the two perspectives: What if I had not been there – or not been there first? Would the audience have accepted the narrative of their deficient digital education and backwardness?
3. Policy makers. Most politicians and stakeholders shaping digital educational policy are not aware of analogue alternatives either. Take a look at the current priorities in the EU Digital Education Action Plan. I cannot find any mention of analogue activities that could foster digital skills, not even for the youngest age groups. That is the bad news. The good news is that this is not in line with other EU and international publications. The importance of hands-on experience and direct interaction with caretakers for young children is stressed in the General comment 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, and the revision of the European DigComp (Digital Competences Framework) underlines the “importance of healthy personal digital balance regarding the use of digital technologies, including non-use as an option”. (DigComp, slide 8)

To sum up: The newly published results for the Waldorf sample and the upcoming results for Montessori and Nature/Outdoor samples of the MünDig Study are interesting. For future research, practice and policy in the field of education in the digital age it would be very promising to compare these findings with equally rich data for other, ‘regular’ kindergardens and schools, as hardly any reliable data on the question of ‘analogue means for digital ends’ is available for these settings. Not only do we need analogue control groups for sound technology assessments, but also adapted survey tools that allow for reliably recording what is gained AND what is lost when increasing the time children spend with digital screen-media in educational institutions.

Paula Bleckmann

P.S.: You are welcome to send an email to my team at medienmuendig@alanus.edu – we can send you an English conference poster on the Media Maturity Matrix and will inform you when the English version of the MünDig Study report is available.

P.P.S.: Paula wants to thank two fellow UNBLACK THE BOXers: Sigrid (Hartong) for contributing to the development of the Media Maturity Matrix as part of the scientific advisory board in the MünDig Study project, and Sieglinde (Jornitz) for valuable contributions to chapter 6.7 in the report.

Der Beitrag The MünDig Study, the Media Maturity Matrix and its potential for research, practice and policy erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.

Although a growing number of initiatives in initial and further teacher training address ‘data literacy’, most of these take a functional perspective (e.g. meaningful data usage), and a critical reflection of the implications of data technologies in terms of a critical data literacy is often missing. Also an understanding and scrutiny of the use of data technologies in educational settings is hardly fostered as yet. Through the workshop, we were able to get to know a number of highly interesting pioneer projects that focus on fostering digital sovereignty in the sense of a critical data literacy.

Der Beitrag Workshop: Critical Data Literacy in Initial and Further Teaching Training erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.

For the last six years I have studied policy papers on the value, effects, and/or the potentials of digital learning technologies in education. It is a fascinating field to study. Especially one enigma has emerged: how self-conscious is “political” or “institutional” thinking really? Is there somewhere in the political sphere (at global levels, at EU-levels, or at national levels) a unifying consciousness (or just an intelligent database) that synthesises the evaluations, the whitepapers, the strategies, the visions, and the reports for the benefit of future writers and researchers – or are the systems populated with groundhog-day writers, who start praising the potentials anew, every day?

Corona
Reports show that companies behind products like Microsoft Teams and Zoom have experienced remarkable growth rates the last couple of years. This, of course, is caused by the choice of schools and educational institutions to use their platforms to compensate for the inability to teach physically during lock-down periods.

Corona lockdown has been a gift for the learning sciences, in the sense that it created an ideal test situation over a longer period. On the same day, in Denmark, practically the whole nations’ pupils and students, from first grade to university students, were subjected to a similar educational situation: taught virtually through Microsoft Teams or Zoom platforms. This, one might think, ought to provide a convincing empirical base, to answer a range of questions, that were more difficult to answer before, when the use of digital platforms was more sporadic, differed from school to school and from municipality to municipality.

In the following I will try to find out whether political investments in ICT are warranted by evaluations, in the wake of Corona, i.e., thirteen published evaluation reports  published between April 2020 and February 2021.

Some of them are published by higher education (HE) institutions, others by different consortia of HE-institutions, some by unions, some by government-funded think tanks, and finally by government funded evaluation institutes and educational boards (“styrelser”). Some have commissioned the services of consultancies, some are “home-crafted”; methodologically most of the reports use survey methods.

Let us go through some of the most startling findings, starting with the negative findings:

• Motivation: in a survey sent out to 12.000 pupils, two thirds indicated that remote teaching is less motivating than normal. In another study, 40% of the students expressed that they had difficulties in maintaining concentration and motivation in virtual environments.
• Teaching: The danish consultant house Rambøll concluded that teachers found it difficult to gauge the students’ reactions in virtual environments, making it hard to practice adaptive teaching. A study published by the danish institute of evaluation made the startling observation that only 4% of pupils preferred online teaching. An evaluation commissioned by a consortium of 9 HE-institutions, concluded that most students found that their experience of online-teaching was negative. 56% of teachers made the assessment that the use of virtual tools “under normal circumstances” would create lesser learning. 7/10 experienced less joy when using virtual platforms.
• Socially: The same study concluded that there is a loss of sense of belonging and loss of collective engagement. Another study concluded that pupils are “pressured on their social well-being” – 92% of the pupils missed their friends, 70% missed the teaching, and 60% missed their teachers. Nearly half of the students felt lonely in pure, virtual environments. 

On the positive side:

• A segment of pupils appreciated the fact that classes started on time, and that were not disturbed by their classmates.
• All institutions succeeded in maintaining educational offerings, despite physical lock-down.
• Flexibility and less time used on transport together with more efficient meetings has been cited as a positive effect.
• The students mentioned flexibility and videos that can be revisited, as a positive aspect.
• 70% of the pupils found that the teachers did well under Corona, and a corresponding share of parents agreed with their children: The teachers handled the situation with great skills and enthusiasm.

Prior to Corona, larger synthesizing meta-analyses concluded that

• “The results […] show no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in ICT for education”. (OECD, 2015)
• ”The implications from these findings suggest that we should not expect large positive (or negative) impacts from ICT investments in schools or computers at home.” (Bulman & Fairlie, 2016)
• “However, 60 years of evaluation data show no major quantum leap in the impact of technology on learner outcomes. Most of the current technological interventions in schooling remain average or below in their ability to enhance student learning—when the technology is used in schools and classrooms.” (Hamilton & Hattie, 2020)

Conclusion:

The corona-evaluations do not alter that image: it is difficult to claim that digital tools have caused improvements in student achievement, we cannot expect positive or negative impacts from ICT investments, it is safer to expect that technological interventions remain average or below in their ability to enhance student learning.

Evaluations show that notions of “digital generations” that are especially motivated by technology is impossible to corroborate. It is a myth that we should now safely bury, once and for all. It is also difficult to corroborate that technology facilitates adaptive teaching, or that technology is intrinsically motivating.

On the other hand, findings seem to stress that (perceptions of) successful learning presupposes physical meetings, collective teaching, and many social aspects of education. Schools have been, and should remain social institutions.

Furthermore, we should resist the temptation to think that different evaluations, made by different actors, in different settings and that measure on different parameters are commensurable.

• Synthesising research requires coordination between actors, and problems must be addressed one a time. The evaluation practice in Denmark, consists of a flurry of actors measuring each their point of interest, rarely building on the efforts of others.
• It is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of Edtech if it co-exists with commercial offerings (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc.) in the same interface as learning platforms and learning materials.
• We need analogue control groups. The Danish evaluations should be compared with schools that have used, or experimented with, analogue, remote teaching methods. This would create a clearer picture of the value of digital learning environments.
• The potential of digital non-use should be explored to address the many sources of frustration. Potential to improve remote education by implementing non-use of commercial platforms, or to decrease the scope, the scale or the intensity of digital platforms needs to be investigated.
• Finally: There is no sense in evaluating if consequences are not drawn! Results seem to show that digital learning environments consistently have failed to meet a lot of the hype from vendors throughout the decades. This should lead to a more systematically skeptical practice, vis-à-vis the adoption of Edtech, and risks should be shared between vendors and educational institutions.

Jesper Balslev

Der Beitrag Is the current use of ICT in education in Denmark warranted by Corona-evaluations? erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.

Goals of the event were:

“to share knowledge and experience, and identify opportunities for further work and international collaboration.“

The event aimed to provide:

(1) insights into the present state of datafication in education and the challenges it creates;

(2) a platform for initiatives, groups and projects around the globe to share experiences of developing data literacy with teachers and teacher organisations in different contexts, and to address common challenges; and

(3) an opportunity to discuss how we can develop and advance strategies for building data literacy at global scale.

You can find a report about the workshop, the recorded keynote presentations as well as the abstracts by all participants online.

Der Beitrag Workshop: Building Data Literacy with the Teaching Profession at Global Scale erschien zuerst auf unblackthebox.org.