Learning Analytics as Racializing Assemblages

• In Event: Futuring Assessment in Education: After the Critiques

Abstract

What are the ways in which cybernetic systems of communication and control are reconfiguring social relations in the transactions of teaching and learning? Since World War II, societies have been shifting from systems of institutional enclosures disciplining the ways of being of citizens to systems of infinite and continuous modulating mechanisms, generatively controlling access and human behavior. In control societies of cybernetic sociotechnical systems “…perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 4). These technological advances for teaching, learning, and assessment need to be understood alongside their potential sociopolitical implications for education and society. Thus, focused inquiry on the implications of new media technologies of learning analytics are needed in order to better understand what the potential sociopolitical implications may be of these platforms and how we might develop necessary mechanisms and practices to further the aims of educational equity.

Author

• ezekiel dixon-roman, university of pennsylvania