What Is the Future of Data, Technology, and Schools? Some Tensions

• In Event: 63.059 - Emerging Perspectives on Understanding Learning Behaviors in Digital Environments

Abstract

Education has benefitted greatly from the advent of data-driven practices. This essay highlights three emergent tensions that will come to shape the immediate future of data, schools and technologies.

1. Individualization vs. Personalization
The first is the tension between individualization and personalization. Initiatives such as Response to Intervention (RtI) and Positive Behavior Interventions & Supports (PBIS) have proliferated as processes that measure the degree to which students are learning the curriculum. The focus of school-based individualization is to use data to develop a program to fit students into the curriculum offered by the school.

Students and educators live in a data-driven world much wider than the school context. In this world, learners (including students and educators) participate in socio-cultural systems personalized to respond to the interests of the individual. Consumer technologies such as Google, Pinterest and Twitter exist to support interest-driven learning. These interest-driven cultures dominate the world outside of schools, and stand in direct opposition to school-driven data cultures in which the goal is learner compliance with the interests of the curriculum.

2. Optimization and diversification
Data driven system management has also revealed a fundamental tension between optimizing and diversification. Accountability policies have established nation-wide learning standards, consequential standardized assessments, and the widespread use of state and local data systems to track school performance. Situating public schooling within this data context allows educators to develop formative feedback cycles that optimize existing practices for teaching and learning. These optimization efforts, in the preK-12 world, have had the effect of improving learning in terms of established internal system measures (e.g. test scores).

Data technologies are also creating new venues for teaching and learning outside of schooling. MOOCs, citizen science, Pinterest communities and maker spaces have led to vibrant, multi-aged participatory learning cultures around open questions of interest. The growth of diverse learning environments demonstrates that schools do not have a monopoly on learning – and that the same data tools that create optimization strategies also give rise to the diversity of alternative communities of learning.

3. System vs. life-world in education
The third tension is between a systemic ideology of technocratic control and the role that education plays in the local communities – i.e. the life world. The recent history of public education in the U.S. appears as a complete victory of the systemic perspective over the life-world of schools. Education policy is shaped by technocratic efforts to develop programs that “work” at scale, and implementation is measured by the fidelity with which programs are used as designed.

Even though the system perspective appears in the ascendance, there are signs that the interests of the life world are re-emerging. The current debate on the Common Core curriculum, for example, is not as much about the content of the new standards, but about the processes of design and adoption by experts that left local educators out of the process.

The above tensions are currently shaping agendas for how we will build the next generation of schools and learning environments.

Author

• Richard R. Halverson, University of Wisconsin - Madison