Abstract
Like other parts of the social system, education is becoming an information-driven venture: data technologies pervade all levels of the system. This datafication of education seems to take place alongside a general turn to learning that Gert Biesta has called learnification: a progressively singular focus on the manipulable features of individual learning in education. Given rapidly rising levels of datafication, it seems timely to take up Luhmann and Schorr’s contention that education entails a technology deficit and discuss datafication as reflection issue in the system of education. Against their argument that human learning is not amenable to a technology, I develop the counter-argument that data technologies are replacing human learning outright with data at the level of organisation. Data thus present a concretely digital form of what Raf Vanderstraeten has called education as an ersatz order. In a data-driven form of organising education, human dimensions of learning become secondary to a systemic dimension: making learning visible as data and so susceptible to databased manipulation. The text treats school-wide positive behaviour support interventions as an evidence-based exemplar of this trend towards datafication in the system of education.
Highlights
On the Datafication of EducationWiebe Bijker, known for his analyses of technology and society, is credited with a deceptively simple claim: ‘We live in a technological culture—in a culture that is thoroughly influenced by modern society and by technology’ (Bijker 2001: 19)
An insatiable craving for data, not in the least corresponding to growth in evidence-based practices, is presently boosting the digitisation of education systems world-wide
Put in more general terms, an increasing number of the categories and kinds through which we order and make sense of the world are an artifice of data technologies
Summary
Wiebe Bijker, known for his analyses of technology and society, is credited with a deceptively simple claim: ‘We live in a technological culture—in a culture that is thoroughly influenced by modern society and by technology’ (Bijker 2001: 19). Like all other educational tests and assessments, it establishes both a technique and the instruments needed for ranking and monitoring that involves pupils and staff in a school, as well schools committing as organisational entities to the enforcement, administration and reporting of PBS prevention and intervention strategies These intervention regimes are technologies, second, in the sense of typically involving scientific knowledge encoded as practical instructions, for example deriving from functional behaviour assessments and behaviour management systems based on the possibilities of new motive acquisition (McClelland 1965) and using contemporary forms of operant conditioning derived from behavioural psychology. It should not prove surprising that even in advanced western systems of education, the levels of instrumental pragmatism and material resourcing that are needed in order to meet the sorts of scientific standards of rigour encapsulated in such schemes as school-wide PBS, remain a real challenge to implement in practice. One apriori claim of this text is that data technologies as such re-specify learning and education, for all involved, on terms commensurate with computational means
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