Conference Agenda

Over the last years, the field of Critical EdTech Studies (CETS) has grown exponentially. With ‘critical edtech studies’, we denote studies that do not take educational technologies (‘EdTech’) at face value and/or merely try to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, but that rather aim to probe how they have come to increasingly shape and steer education through encoded and blackboxed logics—norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—invisible to schools and teachers and unaccountable to the professional sector (Macgilchrist, 2021). Prevalent in fields like media studies (e.g., van Dijck et al., 2018), data science (e.g., Daniel, 2019), and philosophy (e.g., Serres, 2014), CETS are widespread and not to be situated in one singular academic niche. However, CETS are especially prevalent and thriving in the field of sociologies of education – a broad academic discipline that has proven to provide especially fertile soil for critically analyzing the roles and impacts of digital technologies in/on the educational field [see, for instance, Castaneda & Williamson (2021), Decuypere et al. (2021), and Nichols & Garcia (2022) for recently published Special Issues on this topic]. Yet, despite this expansion and mainstreaming of CETS as an academic discipline, its highly valuable insights into how edtech invisibly reshapes education are not easily finding their way into concrete classroom practices, and are not easily used ‘to support teachers and other practitioners to rethink the ways that edtech works in their institutions and classrooms’ (Castenada & Williamson, 2021:11). To fill this gap between research and digital education in practice, this symposium addresses the following question: How can knowledge generated by CETS contribute to the conscious, responsible, and educationally valuable, implementation of EdTech by educational practitioners in schools (educators, students, ICT coordinators, data managers) and edtech developers?

To address this question, this symposium invites one discussant and three papers in the field of CETS to present practice-based (research) projects (still under development or already implemented) that are, through different approaches, committed to a shared objective of fostering responsible, conscious and pedagogically valuable adoption of EdTech in specific educational settings. Participants will discuss the design of tools that make the actions and (blackboxed) operations of EdTech platforms and apps legible for teachers and learners, the development of workshop formats in which teachers and students co-design the use of digital technologies in education, and the development of instruments that assess the impact of digital technologies on fundamental public and educational values of schools.

The so-called GAFAM big-tech companies of Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook (Meta), Apple, and Microsoft are well-recognized gatekeepers to critical digital infrastructures in public sectors like education. However, the role they have as pillars within the infrastructure of the internet is commonly invisible to users, not least their “cloud-services” that adopt the so-called “as-a-service” infrastructure model (e.g. STorage-as-a-Service). These cloud-services are highly profitable. For example, in 2021 Amazon Web Services accounted for around 20% of the company's revenue, but nearly 75% of profits (Amazon, n.d.). Thus, the market and social value of these infrastructures motivates the big-tech presence (Birch et al., 2021) and as an increasingly data-intensive sector, public education is an attractive customer. Considering the incentives for expanding cloud-services and the already large infrastructurally installed bases (Star & Ruhleder, 1996) GAFAMcompanies have in schools, we set out to empirically unpack the ongoing infrastructuring that governs education (Ratner & Gad, 2019; Selwyn, 2015). For this purpose, we have developed a web-based tool, InfraReveal(infrareveal.net), for visualizing the cloud-services underlying educational platforms using techniques that reveal data-packet traffic as users access internet. The tool has been used in sessions with schoolteachers in Sweden with the purpose of enhancing their critical digital infrastructural understandings (part of the RED project focused on global digital education inequalities, edu-digitalinequality.org). While earlier critical studies have considered the influence that GAFAM have on public education through user-facing businesses and through analysis of marketing-technical documentation (Williamson et al., 2022), we set out to demonstrate and engage with schoolteachers in critical discussions on infrastructuring. Our work builds on the tradition of infrastructure studies focusing on critical infrastructural features such as “ubiquity, reliability, invisibility, gateways, and breakdown” (Plantin et al., 2018: 294), combined with computational methods. The results draw on the real-time visualisations produced by InfraReveal to unpack how and where GAFAMcompanies are involved in controlling key digital infrastructures for education and achieve market provision dominance. They illustrate the how and where of an increasing dependence on GAFAM that can be argued to be a risk as market logics supersede public sector values (van Dijck et al., 2018), an issue targeted in emerging policy regulations on digital services and markets (European Commission, 2022). Taking the visualizations produced by InfraReveal as a starting point, issues like the role of GAFAM in critical education infrastructures, global infrastructural inequalities affecting education, and the lack of public debate on Sweden’s marketized cloud-service school infrastructure are discussed.

Amazon. (n.d.). Quarterly results. Amazon.com, Inc. Retrieved Jan 17 2023, from https://ir.aboutamazon.com/quarterly-results/default.aspx Birch, K., Cochrane, D., & Ward, C. (2021). Data as Asset? The Measurement, Governance, and Valuation of Digital Personal Data by Big Tech. Big Data & Society, 8(1). European Commission (2022). Regulation on Digital Services Act. http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj Plantin, J. C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293–310. Ratner, H., & Gad, C. (2019). Data Warehousing Organization: Infrastructural Experimentation with Educational Governance. Organization 26(4), 537–552. Selwyn, N. (2015). Data Entry: Towards the Critical Study of Digital Data and Education. Learning, Media and Technology 40(1), 64–82. Star, S.L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces. Information Systems Research 7, 111–134. van Dijck, J., Poell, T., & de Waal, M. (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford University Press. Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the New Global Connective Architectures of Education Governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 231–256.

EdTech vendors, but equally policy actors (e.g., the European Digital Education Action Plan) worldwide, commonly attribute deep structural transformations to the digitization of education, ranging from ‘truly’ personalized or fully ‘delocalized’ learning, to a remaking of schools into networked learning organizations. At the same time, a growing number of critical edtech studies have argued for an urgent need to ‘demystify’ such revolutionary visions, pointing to various implementations of digital technologies in schools that reproduce traditional structures of formal education (inequality, assessment-oriented input learning, etc.) rather than ‘disrupting’ them (e.g., Reich, 2020; Mertala, 2020). As this literature shows, at least part of the reasons for this lie in the complex interplay between the contextual needs of schools on the one hand, and the standardized (and scalable) design of many edtech products on the other hand (ibid.). Moreover, critical edtech studies show the huge need of schools to experiment, in their local context, with various edtech products, in order to obtain a good understanding of their working operations, their pedagogical intentions and design (e.g., Brandau & Alirezabeigi, 2022). Moreover, such findings show the urgent need of bringing critical edtech research (insights) into schools, rather than chiefly circulating these insights into academic circles alone (cf. Holloway et al., 2022). In this contribution, we will present the German-Belgian SMASCH (“Smart Schools”, www.smasch.eu) research project (2021-2024); a collaboration between KU Leuven and HSU Hamburg, with 13 sample schools in both countries, around ‘pedagogically meaningful’ digitization. Drawing on insights from critical edtech research as shortly outlined above, the project aims to move beyond an instrumental understanding of digitization as technologically-induced change(s), rather working towards a systematic development of a ‘critical, research-oriented attitude’ in schools that aims to foster a nuanced (yet practical) understanding of the promises, potentials and risks of EdTech adoption in concrete school practices. In doing so, SMASCH aims to work and think together with schools with regards to how such pedagogically meaningful digitization can look like, depending on the very specific context in which each school is situated. Thus far, in the context of SMASCH, we have brought insights of critical edtech studies into schools by means of practices of critical co-design; participatory workshops with schools; the creation of study materials for teachers and/students; and the bringing together of schools over the national boundaries of the two countries present in the project – all of which will be extensively discussed during our presentation.

Brandau, N., & Alirezabeigi, S. (2022). Critical and participatory design in-between the tensions of daily schooling: working towards sustainable and reflective digital school development. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13. Holloway, J., Lewis, S., & Langman, S. (2022). Technical agonism: embracing democratic dissensus in the datafication of education. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-13. Mertala, P. (2020). Paradoxes of participation in the digitalization of education: A narrative account. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(2), 179-192. Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can't transform education. Harvard University Press.

The platformization of classrooms stands out as a significant transformational force in K12 education. Big Tech (cloud) infrastructures and educational technology (‘EdTech’) platforms are increasingly penetrating daily classroom practices (Veale, 2022), affecting the autonomy of schools (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2022) and shaping student learning and teachers’ professional practices (Perrotta et al., 2020). This “reinstitutionalization” of K12 education around private platforms (Davies et al., 2022) fundamentally affects the public environment of schooling (Apps et al., 2022). Critical analysis of Big tech and EdTech platforms have addressed key questions around conflictual interests of for-profit platform companies and the values associated with the public or educative good (Kerssens and Van Dijck 2021; Williamson et al., 2022). Driven by economic values and corporate interests, commercial platforms in education establish new modes of value production through platform mechanisms of datafication and personalization (Van Dijck, Poell, and de Waal, 2018), which affects schools and teachers capacities to shape classroom education on their own organizational and professional values (Kerssens and Van Dijck, 2021). Yet, despite a recent upsurge of critical scholarship expressing concern about Big tech and EdTech reshaping classroom education, schools and teachers in the Netherlands have been offered little actionable guidance on how to embed these technologies responsibly, in accordance with public and educational values. To aid schools and educators in selecting and employing technologies thoughtfully in their classrooms, a consortium of critical edtech scholars from Utrecht University, Kennisnet (a public network organization for education and ICT), Teacher Education Institutions and primary schools, started collaborating on the research and development of an ‘Impact Assessment Public Values and Educational Technology’ (IAPVET). This presentation will discuss a pilot of IAPVET, its development, and first results of early implementations at Dutch schools. The aim of IAPVET is to provide a methodology supporting primary schools in the responsible implementation of digital technologies, helping them aligning the digital education environment of the school with their value-based pedagogical vision. Therefore, IAPVET intends to intertwine four procedures: Mapping (How is the digital education environment arranged?); Vision development (What are we shaping digital education for?); Assessment (What impact does digitization have on teachers and children and the core values of the school?); Professional development (How can we better equip our school and employees to responsibly use digital technologies?)

Apps, T., Beckman, K., & Howard, S. K. (2022). Valuable data? Using walkthrough methods to understand the impact of digital reading platforms in Australian primary schools. Learning, Media and Technology, 1-16. Dijck, J. v., Poell, T., & Waal, M. d. (2018). The platform society: public values in a connective world. New York: Oxford University Press. Kerssens, N., & Dijck, J. v. (2021). The platformization of primary education in The Netherlands. Learning, Media and Technology, 46(3), 250-263. Kerssens, N., & Van Dijck, J. (2022). Governed by Edtech? Valuing Pedagogical Autonomy in a Platform Society. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 284-303. Perrotta, C., Gulson, K. N., Williamson, B., & Witzenberger, K. (2020). Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom. Critical Studies in Education, 1-17. Veale, M. (2022). Schools must resist big EdTech – but it won’t be easy. In Education Data Futures: Critical, Regulatory and Practical Reflections. Retrieved from https://educationdatafutures.digitalfuturescommission.org.uk/ Williamson, B., Gulson, K. N., Perrotta, C., & Witzenberger, K. (2022). Amazon and the new global connective architectures of education governance. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2)

Educational media are often viewed as 'objects' or 'tools'. Practice focusses e.g. on features of tablets, their usability and their capabilities to reach the given learning objectives (e.g. Stoltenhoff 2019). Research regularly focuses on how media can support the learning processes of students (e.g. Bernard et. al., 2018). From a media studies point of view, those perspectives are problematic, since they usually leave out e.g. the medial preconditions of knowledge production, cultural practices, or power relations and the constitution of subjects (e.g. McLuhan 1964; Winkler 2004) that are also important for education / ‘Bildung’ (Allert/Richter 2018). Moreover, those perspectives reproduce the ‘invisibility of media’ that media theory problematizes and aims to overcome (Krämer 1998, Winkler 2004). Instead, our approach assumes that medial preconditions are crucial for a critical research and practice of EdTech, and that they can be heuristically analysed as 'media constellations' (Weich 2020). This implies to understand media as a mutual interplay and production of materialities, knowledge/practices, subject positions and contents, and that reflection should begin with the analysis of this interplay. Based on this understanding, one can e.g. pose questions that probe how adaptive learning systems address students and teachers as objects and subjects of (self-)optimization and (self-)surveillance; how the learning content is constituted by technological and conceptual preconditions; what power relations, discourses and practices are inscribed in the system (Weich/Deny/Priedigkeit/Troeger 2021); and how students and teachers appropriate them in classroom practices. In various workshops with schools, we use the media constellation analysis (MCA) to analyse and reflect on educational media together with teachers. Teachers name challenges or planned undertakings concerning educational media. After the group decides which of the challenges/undertakings should be worked on first, subsequently a brainstorming is conducted about elements that are crucial for the given media constellation and try to map their interplay. Based on the question which of these elements and entanglements are beneficial or problematic, the workshop finally collects and discusses possible modifications that might change the media constellation for the better. The presentation will first outline the MCA. It proceeds by some examples from our research (e.g., on the adaptive math program bettermarks. In the last step, concepts of media reflection workshops with teachers, and some of their experiences based on MCA are shown. By sharing insight into our continuous re-modelling of workshop concepts, we will also discuss recurring problems and possible pathways for adapting this concept for teacher workshops.

Allert, H., Asmussen, M., & Richter C. (2018). Formen von Subjektivierung und Unbestimmtheit im Umgang mit datengetriebenen Lerntechnologien – eine praxis-theoretische Position. In: Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft, 21: 142–158. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-017-0778-7 Bernard, R.M., Borokhovski, E., Schmid, R.F., Tamim, R.M. (2018). Gauging the Effectiveness of Educational Technology Integration in Education: What the Best-Quality Meta-Analyses Tell Us. In: Spector, M., Lockee, B., Childress, M. (ed.) Learning, Design, and Technology. Springer, Cham. 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_109-2 Krämer, S. (1998). Das Medium als Spur und Apparat. In: Krämer, S. (ed.): Medien, Computer, Realität. Wirklichkeitsvorstellungen und Neue Medien. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 73–94. McLuhan, M. (1964): Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Stoltenhoff, A. (2019). Medienbildung im kompetenzorientierten Schulsystem. Diskurs- und hegemonietheoretische Analyse des Wissensfeldes ›schulische Medienbildung‹. Tübingen: Universitätsbibliothek, dx.doi.org/10.15496/publikation-34828. Weich, A. (2020). Digitale Medien und Methoden: Andreas Weich über die Medienkonstellationsanalyse. In: Open-Media-Studies-Blog, 16.06.2020. Weich, A., Deny, P., Priedeigkeit, M. & Troeger, J. (2021). Adaptive Lernsysteme zwischen Optimierung und Kritik. Eine Analyse der Medienkonstellationen bettermarks aus informatischer und medienwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. In: Datengetriebene Schule. Themenheft der Zeitschrift Medienpädagogik, 22-51. Winkler, Hartmut. (2004). Mediendefinition. In: Medienwissenschaft – Rezensionen, Reviews, 1/04: 9–27.