A pedagogy of objects: How platforms recode educational cultures

• In Event: The platformisation of education

Proposal

This paper will examine new data infrastructures being implemented in school systems to collect, manage and utilise data for organisational purposes. Specifically, the paper will examine the pedagogical function of these platforms. Alan Kay, one of the pioneers of object-oriented programming, argued that, [w]hile object orientation opens the capacity for computation to become a medium capable of encompassing virtually every aspect of contemporary lived reality, it can do so only by reordering culture according to its own specific logic and enforcing this logic upon anyone wishing to access it’. Platforms are primarily a ‘medium of information’; a software ‘operating system’ that functions as ‘an updating platform unfolding in time’ (Easterling, 2014, p.14). These platforms include software interfaces that create conditions for software objects to affect one another, opening up a perspective on the autonomy of relations within the medium of infrastructure (Alt 2006). Much has been written about how the circulation of data in educational contexts shapes the subjectivities and practices of teachers and students, particularly through user interfaces such as data visualisations, but the shaping of educational purposes and practices by the logic of programming upon which platforms are built has not received attention.
The paper draws on literature from software studies and philosophy of technology to examine how the implementation and usage of Student Information Systems and cloud platforms to support data analytics is changing educational cultures. Research interviews were conducted with software developers, data scientists, managers and policymakers, as part of an international comparative study of data infrastructures in school systems in Australia, Canada, the US and Japan, and these provide the empirical basis for the analysis. Technical documentation and specifications will also be analysed. The analysis draws attention to the inhuman dimensions of contemporary educational cultures and the subtle recoding of the noncomputational world according to an ethology and pedagogy of objects. From the perspective of object orientation, computer programmers and the software they produce may now be some of the most important, and under-analysed, pedagogues in highly mediatised societies.
Alt, C. (2011). Objects of our affection: How object orientation made computers a medium. In E. Huhtamo & J. Parrika (Eds.), Media Archeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications (pp. 278-301). Berkley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press.
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: the power of infrastructure space. Verso Books.
Kay, A. (1996). The early history of Smalltalk. In T.J. Bergin, Jr. & R.G. Gibson, Jr. (Eds.), History of Programming Languages II (pp. 511-578). New York: ACM Press.

Author

• Sam Sellar, Manchester Metropolitan University