Ben Williamson

Digital Education Governance: Data Visualization, Predictive Analytics, and "Real-Time" Policy Instruments.

Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a massive online data bank, produced by Pearson Education, which deploys highly sophisticated digital interactive data visualizations to construct knowledge about education systems. The second case considers ‘learning analytics’ platforms that enable the tracking and predicting of students’ performances through their digital data traces. These digital policy instruments are evidence of how digital database instruments and infrastructures are now at the centre of efforts to know, govern and manage education both nationally and globally. The governing of education, augmented by techniques of digital education governance, is being distributed and displaced to new digitized ‘centres of calculation’, such as Pearson and Knewton, with the technical expertise to calculate and visualize the data, plus the predictive analytics capacities to anticipate and pre-empt educational futures. As part of a data-driven style of governing, these emerging digital policy instruments prefigure the emergence of ‘real-time’ and ‘future-tense’ techniques of digital education governance.

Algorithmic Skin: Health-Tracking Technologies, Personal Analytics and the Biopedagogies of Digitized Health and Physical Education.

The emergence of digitized health and physical education, or ‘eHPE’, embeds software algorithms in the organization of health and physical education pedagogies. Particularly with the emergence of wearable and mobile activity trackers, biosensors and personal analytics apps, algorithmic processes have an increasingly powerful part to play in how people learn about their own bodies and health. This article specifically considers the ways in which algorithms are converging with eHPE through the emergence of new health-tracking and biophysical data technologies designed for use in educational settings. The first half of the article provides a conceptual account of how algorithms ‘do things’ in the social world, and considers how algorithms are interwoven with practices of health tracking. In the second half, three key issues are articulated for further exploration: (1) health tracking as a ‘biopedagogy’ of bodily optimization based on data-led and algorithmically mediated understandings of the body; (2) health tracking as a form of pleasurable self-surveillance utilizing data analytics technologies to predict future bodily probabilities and (3) the ways that health-tracking produces a body encased in an ‘algorithmic skin’, connected to a wider ‘networked cognitive system’. These developments and issues suggest the need for greater attention to how algorithmic systems are embedded in emerging eHPE technologies and pedagogies.

The datafied child: The dataveillance of children and implications for their rights:

Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices that generate detailed data about them, and critical data researchers and privacy advocates are only just beginning to direct attention to these practices. In this article, we provide an overview and critique of these varied forms of datafication and dataveillance of children, from in utero through to the school years. Our approach is informed by recent calls for research on children’s rights in the digital age that examines the conditions that give rise to children’s needs and guide provision of resources necessary for development to their full potential, the array of specific harms they may encounter and the significance of and particular opportunities to participate in matters that affect their wellbeing and enable them to play an active part in society. There remains little evidence that specific instruments to safeguard children’s rights in relation to dataveillance have been developed or implemented, and further attention needs to be paid to these issues.

Digital education governance: An introduction

Educational governance today increasingly needs to be understood as digital educational governance. The monitoring and management of educational systems, institutions and individuals is taking place through digital systems that are normally considered part of the backdrop to conventional policy instruments and techniques of government; technical systems that are brought into being and made operational by certain kinds of actors and organizations, and that are imbued with aims to shape the actions of human actors distributed across education systems and institutions. The aim of the original articles collected in this special issue of the European Educational Research Journal is to bring into the foreground the digital technologies, software packages, database platforms and related forms of technical expertise involved in the rise of digital educational governance. The authors seek to understand how such digital technologies and techniques may be contributing to, or transforming, trends such as governing through data, the globalizing and Europeanizing of educational policy, accountability and performativity, global comparison and benchmarking, and to emerging local, national and supranational objectives.

Centrifugal Schooling: Third Sector Policy Networks and the Reassembling of Curriculum Policy in England.

This article examines changes in curriculum policy in secondary education in England. It is concerned with recent curriculum policy and reform, and the proliferation of non-government actors in curriculum policy creation. It examines the emergence of a loose alliance of third sector organisations and their involvement in a series of alternative ‘curriculum experiments’. The third sector curriculum policy network revolves around a policy vision of decentralisation constituted by public–private partnership, media-friendliness, social enterprise and an ‘open source’ or network-based organisational logic. It assembles a policy ideal of ‘centrifugal schooling’ which links together ideas about ‘networked governance’ with ‘flexible’ learning and ‘entrepreneurial’ curricula. The article traces and discusses some of the inter-organisational relations, materials and discourses of the third sector network of alternative curriculum policy developments, and provides a case study of a prototypical third sector curriculum programme. It examines the organisational relations and practices by which the project was produced and the conditions leading to its failure.

Knowing public services: Cross-sector intermediaries and algorithmic governance in public sector reform

Discourses of public sector reform in the UK have been shaped in recent years by the participation of new kinds of hybrid cross-sector intermediaries such as think tanks, social enterprises and other third sector organisations. This article provides a documentary analysis of Demos, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the Innovation Unit as intermediary organisations in public sector reform, exploring their promotion of modes of digital governance and their mobilisation of new software technologies as models for new kinds of governing practices. These intermediary organisations are generating a model of knowing public services that operates through collecting and analysing big data, consisting of personal information and behavioural data on individual service users, in order to co-produce personalised services. Their objective is a new style of political governance based on human–computer interaction and machine learning techniques in which citizens are to be governed as co-producers of personalised services interacting with the algorithms of database software.

The social life of Learning Analytics: cluster analysis and the ‘performance’ of algorithmic education

ABSTRACT This paper argues that methods used for the classification and measurement of online education are not neutral and objective, but involved in the creation of the educational realities they claim to measure. In particular, the paper draws on material semiotics to examine cluster analysis as a ‘performative device’ that, to a significant extent, creates the educational entities it claims to objectively represent through the emerging body of knowledge of Learning Analytics (LA). It also offers a more critical and political reading of the algorithmic assemblages of LA, of which cluster analysis is a part. Our argument is that if we want to understand how algorithmic processes and techniques like cluster analysis function as performative devices, then we need methodological sensibilities that consider critically both their political dimensions and their technical-mathematical mechanisms. The implications for critical research in educational technology are discussed.

Digital methodologies of education governance: Pearson plc and the remediation of methods:

This article analyses the rise of software systems in education governance, focusing on digital methods in the collection, calculation and circulation of educational data. It examines how software-mediated methods intervene in the ways educational institutions and actors are seen, known and acted upon through an analysis of the methodological complex of Pearson Education’s Learning Curve data-bank and its Center for Digital Data, Analytics and Adaptive Learning. This calls for critical attention to the ‘social life’ of its methods in terms of their historical, technical and methodological provenance; their affordances to generate data for circulation within the institutional circuitry of Pearson and to its wider social networks; their capacity to configure research users’ interpretations; and their generativity to produce the knowledge to influence education policy decisions and pedagogic practices. The purpose of the article is to critically survey the digital methods being mobilized by Pearson to generate educational data, and to examine how its methodological complex acts to produce a new data-based knowledge infrastructure for education. The consequence of this shift to data-based forms of digital education governance by Pearson is a challenge to the legitimacy of the social sciences in the theorization and understanding of learning, and its displacement to the authority of the data sciences.

Governing methods: policy innovation labs, design and data science in the digital governance of education

Policy innovation labs are emerging knowledge actors and technical experts in the governing of education. The article offers a historical and conceptual account of the organisational form of the policy innovation lab. Policy innovation labs are characterised by specific methods and techniques of design, data science, and digitisation in public services such as education. The second half of the article details how labs promote the use of digital data analysis, evidence-based evaluation and ‘design-for-policy’ techniques as methods for the governing of education. In particular, they promote the ‘computational thinking’ associated with computer programming as a capacity required by a ‘reluctant state’ that is increasingly concerned to delegate its responsibilities to digitally enabled citizens with the ‘designerly’ capacities and technical expertise to ‘code’ solutions to public and social problems. Policy innovation labs are experimental laboratories trialling new methods within education for administering and governing the future of the state itself.

Educating the smart city: Schooling smart citizens through computational urbanism

Coupled with the ‘smart city’, the idea of the ‘smart school’ is emerging in imaginings of the future of education. Various commercial, governmental and civil society organizations now envisage education as a highly coded, software-mediated and data-driven social institution. Such spaces are to be governed through computational processes written in computer code and tracked through big data. In an original analysis of developments from commercial, governmental and civil society sectors, the article examines two interrelated dimensions of an emerging smart schools imaginary: (1) the constant flows of digital data that smart schools depend on and the mobilization of analytics that enable student data to be used to anticipate and shape their behaviours; and (2) the ways that young people are educated to become ‘computational operatives’ who must ‘learn to code’ in order to become ‘smart citizens’ in the governance of the smart city. These developments constitute an emerging educational space fabricated from intersecting standards, technologies, discourses and social actors, all infused with the aspirations of technical experts to govern the city at a distance through both monitoring young people as ‘data objects’ and schooling them as active ‘computational citizens’ with the responsibility to compute the future of the city.