Standards, and the infrastructures they rely on, are heavily intertwined with numerous everyday practices, both in and outside education, and hold the potential to make particular things work together (Star & Lampland, 2009). More specifically, technical standards have proliferated as education increasingly turns to digital means (e.g. digital learning platforms, learning management systems, and digital learning environments), and are caught in a web of public and private interests. Whereas European governments and educational institutions typically pursue transparent connections between different systems and data streams, "edtech" companies integrate multiple services into their products without disclosing much about how connections are formed (Kerssens & Dijck, 2021). As digital means progressively turn educational reality into quantified data for analysis and further use, such datafication requires infrastructures; systems that uphold data flows and can be moulded to support them. Standards, then, allow using and sharing data amongst the different players in the same infrastructure, but equally raise questions about how standards work, for whom, and for what goal (Williamson, 2018). In short, standards are especially implicated in today's data practices, "the actions, performances, and the resulting consequences, of introducing data-producing technologies in everyday situations" (Decuypere, 2021, p. 67).

The purpose of this contribution is to gain a critical understanding of how technical standards work in data-driven, digital education and their relation to curricula. Although previous research has scrutinised how policy standards function in governing the European educational landscape (Brøgger, 2019), and how educational standards fabricate specific sorts of students (Popkewitz, 2004), less attention has been devoted to understanding the relations between standards and digital curricula (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2020). A focus on the interplay of digitalisation, datafication, and standardisation matters because these processes pervade the management of learning – often under the pretence of being an open, transparent process – while regularly perpetuating top-down, centralised control over learning activities and curricula (Selwyn, 2011). The following research questions guide the inquiry: (1) How do technical standards perform in data practices of digital education? (2) How do standards relate to specific infrastructures? And (3) how do standards relate to curricula?

To answer these questions, this contribution draws on the theoretical tenets of sociomaterial approaches, such as Actor-Network Theory (Fenwick, 2010), to understand "the doings ofstandards,"rather than to investigate them as something pre-existing or to be implemented (Ceulemans, Simons, & Struyf, 2014, p. 73). On the one hand, these approaches offer sensibilities to recognise how standards are the result of assemblages: the coming-together of heterogeneous actors – people, technologies, and policies – that give shape to reality. On the other hand, sociomaterial approaches recognise that standards are not neutral entities; they have performative qualities and wide-spread consequences for related people and objects (Landri, 2019).

Different sorts of 'standards,' i.c. educational, curricular, governmental, and technical, are deployed as sensitising concepts to direct our gaze in the inquiry. An empirical inquiry regarding (data) practices helps us to refine the theoretical understanding of standards, curricula, and how they are related (see, for example, the work of Nespor, 1994). We purposefully sampled one digital university, a European institution that provides distance education through digital means, because it deals with standards in two situations. First, the university's educational practices are explicitly 'standardised' in the sense that they accentuate default ways of learning and evaluating in digital learning environments. Second, there is 'standardisation' in the university's data practices since the learning environments gather, analyse, and share data among different infrastructures and players. The challenge, then, is to get a specific understanding of what digital stuff does in these particular practices (Ruppert, Law, & Savage, 2013).

To sense the agency of digital technologies in everyday situations, and remain true to the ideas of the sociomaterial approaches, we performed a digital ethnography. Digital ethnography offers reflexive and innovative ways to investigate practices and search for tentative ways to make technologies talk. Although the digital is not the centre of the inquiry, it requires an attuned methodology to consider its specific role (Pink et al., 2016). Following suggestions for investigating data practices, our ethnographic inquiry includes four entry points: (a) the interfaces of digital environments (i.e. what happens "on" the platform); (b) the usage by students and educators (i.e. what happens "with" the platform); (c) the design by the technical staff (i.e. what happens "behind" the platform); and (d) the situatedness in a wider ecology (i.e. what happens "beyond" the platform) (Decuypere, 2021). Zooming in on the data collection, we engage in extensive fieldwork, interviews, observations, and screenshot-making for multiple months. Two high-profile Bachelor degree programs are selected to narrow-down our trajectory at the university. These degrees are predominantly organised online, via the university's digital learning environment, and gather students, academic staff, as well as technical staff. This results in thick descriptions about how standards work in data practices, that is, their actions, performances, and consequences. Moving on to the data analysis, we perform a combined set of methods to understand how different assemblages (incl. humans, technologies, policies) do standards in data practices, how their related infrastructures are (re)shaped along the way, and how they emerge within a particular ecology (Decuypere, 2021). We perform a sociomaterial analysis that attempts to show how standards are formed in a relational and topological sense, as opposed to the more common chronological and geographical one. That is, the analysis shows different forms and dependencies that bring standards about across time and space, and vice versa (see Ceulemans et al., 2014). Concretely, the analysis defamiliarises the standards by articulating different scenarios about how the users – students, educators, technical staff, and the researchers – co-constitute standards during their trajectory at the digital university. We de-familiarise by making visual presentations of how, and through what infrastructures, these standards appear and situate this process in a specific ecology.

Drawing on sociomaterial approaches and digital ethnography, the analysis provides a critical understanding of how standards – technical and otherwise – function in an increasingly data-driven, digital education landscape. Results are not meant to offer suggestions for developing policies or open standards, such as Creative Commons Licences, or to ameliorate educational practices (see, for instance, Yang & Kinshuk, 2017). Instead, we provide critical accounts about (1) the way (technical) standards perform in digital education, (2) how these standards relate to infrastructures, and (3) how standards affect curricula or vice versa. Analogue to earlier studies, results present different dimensions of standards: e.g. how they are nested in each other, distributed unevenly in an ecology, relatively including/excluding for those encountering them, connected to various systems, and embodying particular private/public values (see Star & Lampland, 2009). Additionally, the results transcend the topic of standardisation alone. That is to say, results also shed light on how particular sorts of standards govern digital education and its curricula. This helps to concretise the wider, ongoing trend in education where "digital systems accompany the current wave of standardization of education [and are] focused on educational performance indicators ('learning outcomes') and the centralisation of curriculum" (Landri, 2018, p. x). Positioning 'digitalisation,' 'datafication,' and 'standardisation' in a wider ecology generates new insights about how curricula are governed and enacted in digital education. Brøgger (2019), for instance, has discussed how the EU's Bologna Process safeguards the comparability of qualifications in higher education by means of quality assurance and standards. This broader process affected curricula by aligning them with "generic outcome-oriented education standards" (p. 159) and creating conditions for the soft governance of involved member states and institutions. In sum, this sociomaterial inquiry aims to present how "everything starts to look alike" by scrutinising standardisation in the concrete data practices of digital education.

Brøgger, K. (2019). How education standards gain hegemonic power and become international: The case of higher education and the Bologna Process. European Educational Research Journal, 18(2), 158–180. Ceulemans, C., Simons, M., & Struyf, E. (2014). What — if anything — do standards do in education? Topological registrations of standardising work in teacher education. European Educational Research Journal, 13(1), 73–88. Decuypere, M. (2021). The Topologies of Data Practices: A Methodological Introduction. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 9(2), 67. Fenwick, T. J. (2010). (un)Doing standards in education with actor-network theory. Journal of Education Policy, 25(2), 117–133. Kerssens, N., & Dijck, J. van. (2021). The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–14. Landri. (2018). Digital governance of education: technology, standards and Europeanization of education. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Landri, P. (2019). Cartographies of the Digital Governance of Education. (S. Sellar, R. Gorur, & G. Steiner-Khamsi, Eds.), World Yearbook of Education 2019: Comparative Methodology in the Era of Big Data and Global Networks. New York, NY: Routledge. Nespor, J. (1994). Knowledge in Motion: Space, Time and Curriculum in Undergraduate Physics and Management. London: The Palmer Press. Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice. London: SAGE Publications. Popkewitz, T. S. (2004). Educational Standards: Mapping Who We Are and Are to Become. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 13(2), 243–256. Ruppert, E., Law, J., & Savage, M. (2013). Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4), 22–46. Selwyn, N. (2011). ‘It’s all about standardisation’ – Exploring the digital (re)configuration of school management and administration. Cambridge Journal of Education, 41(4), 473–488. Star, S. L., & Lampland, M. (2009). Reconing with Standards. In M. Lampland & S. L. Star (Eds.), How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life (pp. 3–34). London: Cornell University Press. Williamson, B. (2018). The hidden architecture of higher education: building a big data infrastructure for the ‘smarter university.’ International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15(1), 12. Yang, J., & Kinshuk. (2017). Survey and Reflection of Open Education Policies (pp. 23–37). Zawacki-Richter, O., Conrad, D., Bozkurt, A., Aydin, C. H., Bedenlier, S., Jung, I., … Xiao, J. (2020). Elements of Open Education: An Invitation to Future Research. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 21(3), 319–334.