Coding the biodigital child: the biopolitics and pedagogic strategies of educational data science

Abstract

Educational data science is an emerging transdisciplinary field formed from an amalgamation of data science and elements of biological, psychological and neuroscientific knowledge about learning, or learning science. This article conceptualises educational data science as a biopolitical strategy focused on the evaluation and management of the corporeal, emotional and embrained lives of children. Such strategies are enacted through the development of new kinds of digitally-mediated ‘biopedagogies’ of body optimisation, ‘psychopedagogies’ of emotional maximisation, and ‘neuropedagogies’ of brain empowerment. The data practices, scientific knowledges, digital devices and pedagogies that constitute educational data science produce new systems of knowledge about the child that are consequential to their formation as ‘biodigital’ subjects, whose assumed qualities and capacities are defined through expert practices of biosensing, emotion analytics, and neurocomputation, combined with associated scientific knowledges. The article develops the concept of transcoding to account for the processes involved in the formation of the biodigital child

Mapping an emergent field of ‘computational education policy’: Policy rationalities, prediction and data in the age of Artificial Intelligence

“…Adams (2016) contends that, similarly, contemporary policy aims to posit the most efficient options against ends of instrumental rationality, 'set against courses of action technically arrived at through the utilisation of explanatory-causal accounts' (Adams, 2016: 293). This instrumental rationality is congruent with what Williamson (2016) has identified as a form of data science in education which draws together various forms of computational thought and methods. Williamson (2016: 401) suggests that '[f]or its advocates, educational data science is a hybrid of data scientific practices drawing from statistics, computer science, information science, and machine learning, combined with expertise in psychology and neuroscience from the existing field of the ''learning sciences'''.…”

Interdisciplinarity and technology-enhanced learning: Reflections from art and design and educational perspectives

“…Alongside this, the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study and knowledge transfer is increasingly prevalent and increasingly documented and analysed (Perrotta and Williamson, 2016;Williamson, 2014Williamson, , 2017a2017b). The nexus of these developments was described by the Education for the Crisis group as the 'dehumanisation crisis', resulting in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange and the commodification of the person, education (Williamson, 2016) and the arts.…”

The Servitization of Australian K-12 Educational Settings

“…Commercial apps and platforms are now used in Australian K-12 classrooms for a variety of reasons (Rennie et al 2019), including behavior management, such as Classdojo, 1 and learning support, such as Mathletics. 2 As a result, K-12 educational settings in Australia have been exposed to the datafication of everyday tasks (van Dijck 2014) and digital services have penetrated almost every aspect of educational settings (Williamson 2016a). The large amounts of data collected in and around school settings have allowed commercial apps to develop service-based platforms, resulting in the servitization of educational practice.…”

“…Therefore, the historical progression of MOOCs and associated marketing claims to democratizing education provide a lens to which any restructuring of K-12 into 'yet another appendage of capitalism' (Mirrlees and Alvi 2019: 10) may be explored. Building on research related to the commercialization of K-12 settings (Lingard et al 2017;Selwyn et al 2017;Williamson 2016a), claims of how servitization may democratize K-12 educational practice form the focus of this paper. The paper draws on data from the author's Ph.D. research (the Apps in Australia Classrooms Project).…”