Cruel optimism in edtech: when the digital data practices of educational technology providers inadvertently hinder educational equity

Macgilchrist, Felicitas

doi:10.1080/17439884.2018.1556217

Cited by 80 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…The ranking of political goals over pedagogical goals hear is mostly contrary to teachers' understanding of teacher proficiency. The observation that digital tools are not successfully integrated into teacher training may be related to optimistic expectations associated with the use of digital technology in our society [42,43]. In further studies, this technological optimism must critically examined, which has promoted an unrealistic view of the capacity of digital tools in education.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoding the Digital Gap in Teacher Education: Three Perspectives across the Globe

Thorvaldsen¹,

Madsen²

2021

Teacher Education in the 21st Century - Emerging Skills for a Changing World

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Educational use of technology is regularly assessed, and results often show a gap between educational policies and what is actually practiced. This chapter will help clarify how teacher educators experience the changing educational contexts due to the digital revolution, how their meaning-making shifts, and how outside forces influence those processes. The results are based on comparative international studies. Central for this study is practitioners’ professional digital competence, their attitudes towards digital technology and the use of digital technology in education. We found that the influence and contribution of digital practice is carried out quite differently across the globe. Our research questions were: How do practitioners experience teaching in a rapidly changing context? How do attitudes change due to top-down governing of education? and What motivates teacher educators to implement digital technology?

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decoding the Digital Gap in Teacher Education: Three Perspectives across the Globe

Thorvaldsen¹,

Madsen²

2021

Teacher Education in the 21st Century - Emerging Skills for a Changing World

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“…Some platforms are reported to employ psychological behavioural management techniques and rankings to model student behaviour according to the system (Manolev et al 2019). This begs a question whether these platforms actually support better learning and connects with recent discussions on ethics (Macgilchrist 2019;Slade and Prinsloo 2013) and the impact of datafication and surveillance (Jarke and Breiter 2019). Wider sociological impact of digital platforms and their links to market-driven platform capitalism are also prominent areas of critique (Srnicek 2017;Williamson 2020a, b).…”

Section: Education Technology and Datafication: Seller's Marketmentioning

confidence: 96%

Post-Covid-19 Education and Education Technology ‘Solutionism’: a Seller’s Market

et al. 2020

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The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing that followed have affected all walks of society, also education. In order to keep education running, educational institutions have had to quickly adapt to the situation. This has resulted in an unprecedented push to online learning. Many, including commercial digital learning platform providers, have rushed to provide their support and ‘solutions’, sometimes for free. The Covid-19 pandemic has therefore also created a sellers’ market in ed-tech. This paper employs a critical lens to reflect on the possible problems arising from hasty adoption of commercial digital learning solutions whose design might not always be driven by best pedagogical practices but their business model that leverages user data for profit-making. Moreover, already before Covid-19, there has been increasing critique of how ed-tech is redefining and reducing concepts of teaching and learning. The paper also challenges the narrative that claims, ‘education is broken, and it should and can be fixed with technology’. Such technologization, often seen as neutral, is closely related to educationalization, i.e. imposing growing societal problems for education to resolve. Therefore, this is a critical moment to reflect how the current choices educational institutions are making might affect with Covid-19 education and online learning: Will they reinforce capitalist instrumental view of education or promote holistic human growth? This paper urges educational leaders to think carefully about the decisions they are currently making and if they indeed pave the way to a desirable future of education.

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“…With the possibilities emerging from e-learning, m-learning, and u-learning, recent concerns have shifted from technology determinism and constant efforts to prove the effectiveness of educational technology to ethical and equity issues. For instance, datafication, justice and equality (Macgilchrist 2019), ethics and privacy in big data and learning analytics (Ifenthaler &…”

Section: -2014: Online Learning and Higher Education Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Educational Technology Research Patterns in the Realm of the Digital Knowledge Age

Bozkurt

2020

JIME

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Educational technology (EdTech) is a dynamic, evolving field and as such, in identifying and mapping research patterns in this field, a systematic approach is required. Starting from when the World Wide Web became publicly available, this study conducts a systematic review of educational technology research patterns. The review showed that after 1993, there was a sudden increase in the number of educational technology publications, and that in terms of subject areas, social sciences dominate the field, which suggests that there is a need for more interdisciplinary research. Regarding the geographical distribution of the research, the review found that most of the contributions come from the same developed countries. The following themes from over the course of almost three decades were identified: 1993-1999 multimedia learning and instructional design; 2000-2004 convergence of educational technology, distance education and online learning environments, and educational technology integration in traditional learning settings; 2005-2009 revising curriculum for educational technology, educational technology in higher education and distance education, and the bottleneck of the significant differences in educational technology research; 2010-2014 online learning and higher education, integration of ICT and full potential of educational technology; and 2015-2019 data-driven, smart educational technology, big data, and learning analytics. While critical views are increasing, this study also observed that some discourse, such as arguments that EdTech will change education and replace teachers, are constantly articulated throughout the literature.

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Cruel optimism in edtech: when the digital data practices of educational technology providers inadvertently hinder educational equity

Cited by 80 publications

References 27 publications

Decoding the Digital Gap in Teacher Education: Three Perspectives across the Globe

Decoding the Digital Gap in Teacher Education: Three Perspectives across the Globe

Post-Covid-19 Education and Education Technology ‘Solutionism’: a Seller’s Market

Educational Technology Research Patterns in the Realm of the Digital Knowledge Age

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