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What do we want from digital education?
Siân Bayne, The University of Edinburgh, @sbayne
Digital Education research groupdigital cultures in educationdigital education policylearning analyticschildren and technology
the promises and threats of digital educationthe human-technology divide and beyondapplying the thinkingfrom ‘what works?’ to ‘what do we want?’
Digital education: promises and threats
efficiencyscale and reach
relevanceeffectivenessmeasurability
co-presenceembodimentcommunitysurveillancede-professionalisation
Essentialism: “technology drives social practice and change...humans must adapt to technical demands, while technology, like a Newtonian god, watches unaffected as the drama unfolds.”
Instrumentalism: “technologies are seen as neutral means employed for ends determined independently by their users.”(Hamilton and Friesen 2013)
“pedagogy should drive technology”“using technology to enhance learning”“developing toolkits for innovative teaching”
“harnessing the power of technology”“technology is transforming education”“course design for digital natives”
Humans and non-humans are engaged in a history that should render their separation impossible.(Latour 2003)
The point is that material things are performative and not inert... They act together with other types of things and forces to exclude, invite and regulate particular forms of participation in enactments, some of which we term education.(Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011)
“One does not have to fix ones gaze on a material world from which all traces of humanity have been expunged; or on a social world from which the material world has been magically whisked away by linguistic conjuring tricks. The world itself does not impose this division upon us. ...Though none of the traditional disciplines does this, one can trying seeing double: seeing the human and the nonhuman at once, without trying to strip either away.”(Pickering 2005)
‘Seeing double’ in digital educationIntrona and Hayes: plagiarism detection
Introna, L. D. and Hayes, N. (2011) ‘On sociomaterial imbrications: what plagiarism detection systems reveal and why it matters’. Information and Organization, 21: 107-122.
Knox: active algorithmsKnox, J. K. (2014). ‘Active algorithms: sociomaterial spaces in the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.’ Campus Virtuales, 3(1): 42-55.
Bayne: teacherbotBayne, S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4): 455-467.
Culturally specific ways of knowingA new ‘regime of knowledge’Normalisation of Turnitin and the ‘winnowing’ algorithm
The delegation of plagiarism detection to a technical actor produces a particular set of agencies and intentionalities (a politics one might say) which unintentionally and unexpectedly conspires to constitute some students as plagiarists (who are not) and others as not (who are).(Introna and Hayes 2011)
Aggregating blog posts on a MOOC (E-learning and Digital Cultures)
1,340 posts displayed during the first instance of the course 931 RSS feed URLs added to the Google spreadsheetvisited 1,430 times by 997 unique visitors over course period
1. A Google spreadsheet behind a web form which allowed participants to submit the RSS feed to their blog
2. 48 individual Yahoo Pipeseach fetching 20 feeds from the Google spreadsheetfiltering posts according to publishing time and the presence of the course hashtagsorting posts according to date
3. A WordPress instance using the FeedWordPress plugin to display aggregated posts
— Pipes limits posts to those published within 72 hours of each ‘collection’
— Wordpress aggregates posts in pages, 100 per page— Viewers only tended to view/engage with the first page of
EDCMOOC news— FeedWordpress more likely to ‘fetch’ posts made in the same
time zone (GMT)— Global spread of participants
The EDCMOOC News front page is thus a complex performance of human contribution, algorithmic process, and spatial ordering… It is determined by a number of interrelated and co-constitutive factors that are human and non-human, social and algorithmic.(Knox 2014)
An intervention in teacher automation
“One can predict that in a few more years millions of school children will have access to what Philip of Macedon’s son Alexander enjoyed as a royal prerogative: the personal services of a tutor as well-informed and responsive as Aristotle.”(Suppes, 1966)
“Productivity: Improved quantity or quality of learner achievement per unit of teacher time, and/or learner time.”(Laurillard 2011)
The goal [of corporate strategists and ‘futurologists’] is to replace (at least for the masses) face-to-face teaching by professional faculty with an industrial product, infinitely reproducible at decreasing unit cost. (Feenberg 2003)
The critical pedagogy approach re-focuses attention away from the functionality of e-learning environments back to the core relations between students and teachers and the conditions in which they find themselves.(Clegg 2003)
“Mobilization in defense of the human touch.”(Feenberg 2003)
....the ideological shaping of educational technology along individualistic, neo-liberal and new capitalist lines.(Selwyn 2014)
E-learning and digital cultures MOOCc.12,000 enrolments from 158 countries4,000+ in the student Facebook group9,000+ in the student G+ group4000+ tweets to #edcmooc over course run1,900 posts in Coursera forumsc.50% with postgraduate degreesc.50% working in Education
twitterbots
“Twitter bots are, essentially, computer programs that tweet of their own accord... it’s a code-to-code connection, made possible by Twitter’s wide-open application programming interface, or A.P.I.”(Dubbin 2013)
“8.5% of all active users used third party applications that may have automatically contacted our servers for regular updates without any discernable additional user-initiated action.”(Twitter 2014)
made by Amit Agarwal made by Bill Snitzer
made by Felix Jung
At a time when even our most glancing online activities are processed into marketing by for-profit bots in the shadows, Twitter bots foreground the influence of automation on modern life, and they demystify it somewhat in the process.(Dubbin 2013)
Teacherbot
#edcmooc
“While I was trying to figure out what the hell ‘post-humanism’ means, the teacher bot led me on a merry chase looking up quotes and obscure academic references, which had the interesting side effect of ‘ambush teaching’ me. I will happily admit, that I do not feel like I have been to a class. I do not feel like I have been taught, either. I do, however, think I have learned something. I’ve certainly been prompted to think. Isn’t this what every good teacher/trainer strives for?”Giddens 2013
deficit excess
what works? what do we want?
supercession entanglement
embrace/resistance play
Instead of falling back on the sedimented habits of thought that the humanist past has institutionalised, the posthuman predicament encourages us to undertake a leap forward into the complexities and paradoxes of our times. (Braidotti 2013)
Bayne, S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4): 455-467.
Clarke, A. C. (1980). Electronic Tutors. Omni Magazine. June 1980.Clegg, S., Hudson, A. and Steel, J. (2003) The Emperor's New Clothes: Globalisation and Elearning
in Higher Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(1): 39-53.
Fenwick, Tara, Richard Edwards and Peter Sawchuk. 2011. Emerging approaches to educational research: tracing the sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
Giddens, Seth (2013) Chatting to Teacherbot. Why Posthuman Teachers Can Never Happen In My Lifetime. http://www.digitalang.com/2014/11/chatting-to-teacherbot-why-posthumanism-can-never-happen-in-my-lifetime/comment-page-1/#comment-47433
Hamilton, Edward C. and Norm Friesen. 2013. Online Education: A Science and Technology Studies Perspective. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. 39 (2).
Introna, L. D. and Hayes, N. (2011) ‘On sociomaterial imbrications: what plagiarism detection systems reveal and why it matters’. Information and Organization 21: 107-122.
Knox, J. K. (2014). ‘Active algorithms: sociomaterial spaces in the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.’ Campus Virtuales, 3(1): 42-55.
Laurillard, D. (2011) Productivity:Achieving higher quality and more effective learning in affordable and acceptable ways. http://www.tlrp.org/docs/ProdBeta.pdf
Pickering, A. (2005). Asian eels and global warming: a posthumanist perspective on society and the environment. Ethics and the Environment, 10(2), 29-43.
Selwyn, N. (2014) Distrusting Educational Technology Critical Questions for Changing Times. London: Routledge.
Suppes, P. (1966). The uses of computers in education. Scientific American, 215(2): 206-20.
Imagesslide 1: L'Adolessencefrom Le Livre de la Sante by Joseph Handler (Monte Carlo: Andre Sauret, 1968), volume 13: Adolescence, Hygienes, Viellissement. http://50watts.com/L-Adolessence
slide 4: 1) Milton Glaser, illustration for story by Apollinaire. http://50watts.com/Milton-Glaser-and-World-Literature; 2) Photochromosomes 2, http://50watts.com/Photochromosomes-2
slide 6: Riding an Ostrich, Cawston Ostrich Farm, South Pasadena, California http://50watts.com/Riding-an-Ostrich
slide 8: Marchioness of Waterford - The Writing Lesson. http://www.myartprints.co.uk/a/waterford-marchioness-of/the-writing-lesson-1.html
slide 13: Dedicated to you but you weren’t glistening. http://50watts.com/Dedicated-to-you-but-you-weren-t-glistening
slide 17: clips from OMNI magazine (1980). https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine
slide 18: 25 Vintage Cosmetics Ads from Japan, http://50watts.com/25-Vintage-Cosmetics-Ads-from-Japan
slide 19: 2014 robot calendar, July. Sophia A Zhou on Deviant Art. http://sophiaazhou.deviantart.com/art/2014-Robot-Calendar-July-421230808
slide 26: E-learning and digital cultures MOOC sociogram, courtesy of Peter Evans
slide 29: Ukranian space invaders, http://50watts.com/Ukrainian-Space-Invaders
