Session Information
28 SES 02 B, Critical EdTech Studies
Symposium
Contribution
The platformization of classrooms stands out as a significant transformational force in K12 education. Big Tech (cloud) infrastructures and educational technology (‘EdTech’) platforms are increasingly penetrating daily classroom practices (Veale, 2022), affecting the autonomy of schools (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2022) and shaping student learning and teachers’ professional practices (Perrotta et al., 2020). This “reinstitutionalization” of K12 education around private platforms (Davies et al., 2022) fundamentally affects the public environment of schooling (Apps et al., 2022). Critical analysis of Big tech and EdTech platforms have addressed key questions around conflictual interests of for-profit platform companies and the values associated with the public or educative good (Kerssens and Van Dijck 2021; Williamson et al., 2022). Driven by economic values and corporate interests, commercial platforms in education establish new modes of value production through platform mechanisms of datafication and personalization (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018), which affects schools and teachers capacities to shape classroom education on their own organizational and professional values (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2021). Yet, despite a recent upsurge of critical scholarship expressing concern about Big tech and EdTech reshaping classroom education, schools and teachers in the Netherlands have been offered little actionable guidance on how to embed these technologies responsibly, in accordance with public and educational values. To aid schools and educators in selecting and employing technologies thoughtfully in their classrooms, a consortium of critical edtech scholars from Utrecht University, Kennisnet (a public network organization for education and ICT), Teacher Education Institutions and primary schools, started collaborating on the research and development of an ‘Impact Assessment Public Values and Educational Technology’ (IAPVET). This presentation will discuss a pilot of IAPVET, its development, and first results of early implementations at Dutch schools. The aim of IAPVET is to provide a methodology supporting primary schools in the responsible implementation of digital technologies, helping them aligning the digital education environment of the school with their value-based pedagogical vision. Therefore, IAPVET intends to intertwine four procedures: Mapping (How is the digital education environment arranged?); Vision development (What are we shaping digital education for?); Assessment (What impact does digitization have on teachers and children and the core values of the school?); Professional development (How can we better equip our school and employees to responsibly use digital technologies?)
References
Apps, T., Beckman, K., & Howard, S. K. (2022). Valuable data? Using walkthrough methods to understand the impact of digital reading platforms in Australian primary schools. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-16. Dijck, J. v., Poell, T., & Waal, M. d. (2018). The platform society: public values in a connective world. New York: Oxford University Press. Kerssens, N., & Dijck, J. v. (2021). The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 250-263. Kerssens, N., & Van Dijck, J. (2022). Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 284-303. Perrotta, C., Gulson, K. N., Williamson, B., & Witzenberger, K. (2020). Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom. Critical Studies in Education, 1-17. Veale, M. (2022). Schools must resist big EdTech – but it won’t be easy. In Education Data Futures: Critical, Regulatory and Practical Reflections. Retrieved from https://educationdatafutures.digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/ Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perrotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the new global connective architectures of education governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2)
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