With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.
This contribution reports on a symposium that aimed to collectively discuss different approaches to deal with processes of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of education. Inspired by Asimov's Laws of Robotics and Pasquale's recently published New Laws of Robotics, the symposium's purpose was to collectively advance laws that would be specifically tailored to the field of education. In that regard, the term eduautomation seeks to propose ways of conceptualizing and imagining automation as an educational endeavor; that is, not as a purely technical-factual matter that is subsequently translated into educational practice, but equally as a matter of educational concern. Through three narratives and propositions, this contribution discusses similarities and differences between the concepts of automation and AI, and shows some of the different features that tie education and automation together. The variety and substantial differences between the three accounts shows that automation and AI cannot be approached single-sidedly, and that in order to come to a profound understanding of this phenomenon, we need to deploy a variety of theoretical, educational, and normative standpoints and positions.
In open and higher education, digital technologies are increasingly used to enable flexible learning pathways and unbundle programs into separate courses. Whereas technologies have been praised for enhancing the flexibility of curricula, the implications of going digital have yet to be fully explored in curriculum studies. This article aims to critically investigate how an open education platform, OpenLearn, describes, prescribes, and enacts a particular form of curriculum. Rather than understanding platforms as passive tools for facilitating education, the article draws on theoretical and methodological ideas from science and technology studies (STS) to approach "curriculum" as a collection of socio-technical practices in which platforms play an active role. The findings of our analysis detail how networks of human and other-thanhuman actors are situated in a wider ecology and enact five curricular practices: prescribing, mobilising, enrolling, evaluating, and rebundling. We propose "platform curriculum" as a sensitising concept to investigate how technologies enable and constrain these practices instead of simply flexibilising them. With this article, we argue for the further adoption of STS in curriculum studies to disentangle the specific ways in which technologies, too, shape education.
Decuypere, M. (2022). What is there to learn from the Open Gym? Developing new pedagogical notions of sports by an empirical engagement with a DIY sports infrastructure, Sport, Education and Society.
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