Learning in the matrix: the datafication of education
How is the business strategy of social media being applied in schools? Some further thoughts on big data in education.
Following my previous post on the value (or lack of it) of ‘big data’ in education, I’ve been having some further thoughts about the purpose of all this data-production, and its consequences for teachers and students. I’ve been provoked by reading Ben Williamson’s book Big Data in Education, of which more shortly; but I also want to consider what a critical media education perspective might have to offer here.
The case of the PIRLS study raised some questions about the use of big data at the level of education policy. But the intensifying ‘datafication’ of education is also a fact of mundane everyday life in schools and classrooms. This fixation on digital data isn’t just about testing. It’s also apparent in the administration and management of schools; in the design of curriculum content, classroom resources and learning processes; in schools’ internal and external communication; and in the regimes of inspection and performance management that now govern education.
Teachers are spending growing proportions of their time gathering, inputting, processing and presenting data. Most secondary schools in the UK will now have a ‘data tsar’, a senior member of staff who is responsible for collating and managing this data, and attempting to interpret it. Behind them stand the inspectors, constantly seeking to ambush schools if their data is not correctly in place, and to exert sanctions on those deemed to be ‘underperforming’. In the marketised system that now prevails in the UK, this provision of data also drives the competition between schools and the construction of league tables. It sometimes seems as though the process of education has been turned into a matter of control-by-spreadsheet.
These processes may be intensifying, but they are by no means new. Nor, of course, is the use of technology in schools – or indeed the role of commercial companies in providing it: I’ve written about all these things at length elsewhere. What is new, however, is that the business model of social media is increasingly being applied in schools. It’s no longer just about the selling of equipment or learning materials: it’s about the gathering and management of data for profit.
Again, I’ve discussed this business model in earlier posts on this blog. Within the wider economy of social media – or what is being termed ‘platform capitalism’ – data has become the new oil; and schools are increasingly productive wells to be mined. User data is a commodity that is being gathered, analysed and traded, for immense profit. In education, as in social media more broadly, these companies appear to be offering or donating ‘free’ services, yet they are doing so in exchange for data that can be sold on to third parties – raising privacy issues that apply not just to children but also to parents.
In recent years, the leading social media companies – Google/Alphabet and Facebook (through its Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) – have now joined more established brands such as Apple, Microsoft and Pearson in this educational marketplace. These companies are now centrally involved in the making of educational policy, at a governmental level; and in some instances, their approach to marketing these data services, using cohorts of technology evangelists and visionaries, has many similarities with the methods used by Big Pharma corporations.
Datafication is often justified by a rhetoric that emphasizes, not just modernization and efficiency, but also learner autonomy and individual choice. Through the use of technology, education is apparently becoming more ‘personalised’ or adapted to the needs of the individual learner.
