Conference Agenda

This symposium brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from the launch of two large projects funded by the UK ESRC, and one German BMBF research project to critically enhance understandings of ICT as of political, ethical and sociological import not only in the UK and Germany but internationally. Treating of these issues at the level of information theory and data justice, implications and examples are drawn upon from Scotland, England and Germany, but the conceptual and digital aspects relate to patterns common to educational technologies globally.

We would particularly welcome a joint event between the ICT and Philosophy of Education SIGs.

Research questions:

How do the ways digital technology in schools is thought about, promoted and designed reinforce and reconfigure existing educational and social inequities?

How can data justice help to frame the challenges of polarization, datafication and autonomy which arise in relation to young people’s digital lives?

How can teachers exercise ethical agency in relation to civic and moral education for digital citizenship?

Theoretical & methodological framework:

Treating of the conference values of inclusion and diversity as methodological issues, we are interested in initiating a conversation that brings together voices that are commonly not heard in dialogue and exchange in order to furnish a workable moral education for the digital age. We are also seeking to create a conversation between experts and interests that do not routinely communicate on these questions (Tse et al. 2015).

Research papers proceed from a number of intersecting philosophical perspectives. Data justice articulates crucial issues of bias, discrimination, amplifying marginalisation and misrecognition which place some young people at liability in their access to the digital purely as a result of the digital representation of their identities (Eubanks 2018; Dencik et al. 2018) – as such, data justice foregrounds political engagement rather than the engineering of technical solutions. Relational pedagogy highlights the risks which accrue from applying metrics and models derived from an information-theoretic conception of learning as call-and-response to measure learning in diverse human subjects (Lundie 2016). It is in the intersection of the political with corporate data systems that data collection, processing and aggregation harms (Van den Hoven 1999) can manifest in reinscribing educational projects (Hartong 2016).

An opening between James Conroy and Robert Davis frames the purposes and challenges which motivated the identification of digital citizenship as a field for normative research, the responses of international educational paradigms to ‘Industrial Revolution 4.0’, and the extent to which traditional epistemic and moral capacities are sufficient to these challenges.

Three presentations from Jeremy Knox, Sigrid Hartong and John Gordon follow, addressing respectively, the insights of data justice on the interaction of education policy with technology, the role of technological mediators in reinscribing policy priorities across Europe, and spaces for ethical agency in teaching for digital citizenship.

Summarizing these normative considerations, David Lundie will open the discussion, inviting convergence and application from practitioners and researchers in the ICT education field.

Intended purpose:

This event brings normative resources to bear to refurbish a workable,coherent moral education for the challenges of digital citizenship. The discussion aims to introduce major funded projects of European relevance, make participants aware of the normative resources associated with these projects and highlight empirical dimensions to follow in 2024-25. These issues have an urgency and relevance that has not been widely addressed in the ICT education field. The aim of our discussion is to enrich the dialogue between ICT educators, the philosophy of education and leading research in digital and data ethics. A key aim of the discussion is to furnish a vocabulary for interrogating the ethical challenges of teaching for digital citizenship.