Schools at the End of the World? Data, Salvage, and Online Learning

• In Event: Digital Data Collection and Migration Studies

Abstract

Although hotly debated, when many schools shifted to remote learning in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rationale was clear – to keep people safe while maintaining their access to education and employment. Without such a clear and present danger, many scholars and policy-makers harshly criticized pre-existing virtual schools as predatory vehicles to advance educational segregation for profit (e.g. Rooks 2017, Schneider and Berkshire 2020). Without debating the veracity of these allegations towards the developers of virtual schools, I argue that these organizations also make an appealing offer to prospective students, families, and teachers. Following the discussion of “interpretive resistance” by Crooks (2019), the performativity of digital data can create opportunities to contest centralized control, shifting the site of surveillance from the conditions of production to narrow outputs. By embracing datafication, then, virtual schools promise a measure of freedom that is particularly attractive to those who, for various reasons, chafe against rigid structures of standardization and will not, or cannot, conform. Online learning platforms translate the diverse labors of these teachers and students into commensurable units of data that they can then exchange for wages and credentials.

Placing data from qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations around virtual schools in conversation with Tsing’s (2015) concept of “salvage” – “the freeing of inventory from production” – this paper analyzes how processes of data production can grant some forms of protection to data subjects, the costs associated with these practices, and their sustainability amidst the rapid expansion of digitization.

Author

• Anne Elizabeth Jonas, UC Berkeley School of Information