Secret codes: the hidden curriculum of semantic web technologies

Abstract

There is a long tradition in education of examination of the hidden curriculum, those elements which are implicit or tacit to the formal goals of education. This article draws upon that tradition to open up for investigation the hidden curriculum and assumptions about students and knowledge that are embedded in the coding undertaken to facilitate learning through information technologies, and emerging 'semantic technologies' in particular. Drawing upon an empirical study of case-based pedagogy in higher education, we examine the ways in which code becomes an actor in both enabling and constraining knowledge, reasoning, representation and students. The article argues that how this occurs, and to what effect, is largely left unexamined and becomes part of the hidden curriculum of electronically mediated learning that can be more explicitly examined by positioning technologies in general, and code in particular, as actors rather than tools. This points to a significant research agenda in technology enhanced learning.2

Open Praxis, volumen 5 issue 1

“…Considerable work is needed within the open education movement to unveil the processes involved in the production of technology, acknowledging the broad pedagogical, philosophical and political presuppositions already encoded in the systems used. The practices of standardisation and coding have been highlighted as rarely acknowledged factors in the use of educational software, constituting a hidden curriculum (Edwards & Carmichael, 2012). This approach does not suggest that there are intentionally unproductive or malevolent forces being covertly imbedded into educational technologies, but rather that the effects of standardisation and coding practices cannot be predicted in their entirety (Edwards & Carmichael, 2012).…”

Multimodal profusion in the literacies of the Massive Open Online Course

“…Videoscribe thus illustrates a tension between software accessibility and usability on the one hand, and openness and user agency on the other. The more polished the user interfaces, the more sophisticated and inaccessible the underlying code (Edwards and Carmichael 2012). The focus on interface usability is indicative of perceiving software in terms of a 'tool' or 'application' that can accomplish particular tasks, such that the use of technology becomes 'seamless and unremarkable' (Edwards and Carmichael 2012, p. 5).…”

“…Simply to consider what kind of 'literacy' is exemplified by 'World Builder: a crowd-sourced tag heart' would appear to dismiss the rich, situated socio-material practices which performed and instantiated the particular arrangement of words. Constituents of this enactment, as we have seen, are software codes and algorithms, which we consider to be independent actors (Edwards and Carmichael 2012). With reference to the website TripAdvisor, Scott and Orlikowski (2013) state that rather than viewing the algorithm as 'as a mirror of conscious socio-technical choices Á a snapshot produced from a passive collage of human intention Á we have reframed it as a highly specific, active, partial, generative (performative) engine involved in re-making the world of travel' (p. 78).…”

“…Rather, we propose that digital literacy be perceived as a practice always and already enmeshed in composite socio-material assemblages, in which human involvement needs to be recognised as partial, irreducible and sometimes modest. Edwards and Carmichael (2012) call into question the emancipatory ideal of utilising digital technologies for creative meaning-making practices, rather than simply consuming media. Digital literacy as liberation is premised on ideas of mastery, in which the user is re-centred and digital systems become subservient to human intention and their capacity to act discounted.…”

Digital analytics in professional work and learning

“…Drawing on some aspects of software studies, Edwards and Carmichael (2012) argue that the work of code in the uptake of digital technology in education could be examined as an aspect of the hidden curriculum. This challenges those approaches to curriculum and pedagogy wherein digital technologies are considered as simply tools by which the curriculum is 'delivered'.…”