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Session Submission Summary

The platformisation of education

Thu, April 18, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Atrium (Level 2), Waterfront B

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

The digitalisation of society has become a highly topical issue with major implications for education and the production of academic knowledge. The panel interrelates sociological accounts of education with critical media studies, as well as sociology of knowledge and technology in order to explore changes in four different areas of education and science: School, higher education, further education and academic publishing. In line with critical media studies, we examine the digitalisation in terms of the infrastructure, the platforms and the digital services it enables (Srnicek, 2016, Helmond, 2015). The infrastructure is transnational in scope and underpins new linkages between different entities, human as well as nonhuman, as Bruno Latour underlines in his actor-network analysis (Latour, 2007). The critical media scholar John Durham Peters prefers the term infrastructuring over infrastructure in order to underline how dynamic and volatile the interconnectivity is (Peters, 2017: 33). A technology that interrelates millions of users across the world may become obsolete and replaced by a new technology with its own social and material effects within a few years. The digital infrastructure differs in many respects from traditional ones like roads. It constantly monitors its users and the data they produce. Feedbacks, using algorithms and artificial intelligence to automate reading and responses, make the infrastructure and its platforms more reactive, malleable and context-sensitive. The speed of these reactions as well as the quantity of the information processed simply surpass what (even a large team of) human analysts could possibly manage. Smart cities or internet of things are important examples of big-data driven governance. The panel will explore how schools, universities, further education and academic publishing have become platformised, building on a digital infrastructure where centralised, specialised and decentralised modes of information collection and processing co-exist. The four case studies, using different qualitative methods, will examine in particular the consequences for the production and dissemination of knowledge. Following a Foucaultian perspective, we relate the changing types of knowledge to a play of power that is supported but also constraint by different types of knowledge (Foucault, 1977: 196). The digitalisation makes it possible for new providers to come in and to assemble knowledge in ways that compete with existing modes of knowledge production. The digital devices also allow for new ways of copying and modifying information that undermine existing modes of verification and authentication. The empirical findings of the case studies provide interesting insights into the consequences of the diversification and multiplication of knowledge for the technologies of authorising expertise that turn some knowledge into expertise while devaluing other types of knowledge. This hierarchisation of knowledge has major consequences for how we understand and address sustainability.

References
FOUCAULT, MICHEL. (1977) The Confession of the Flesh ( interview). In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, pp. 194-98. New York: Pantheon Books:194-98.
HELMOND, ANNE. (2015) The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready Social Media +Society 1.
LATOUR, BRUNO. (2007) Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PETERS, JOHN DURHAM. (2017) The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SRNICEK, NICK. (2016) Platform Capitalism. Oxford: Polity Press.

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