Thread by @cristobalcobo

New publication:
Commercialisation and privatisation in/of education in the context of Covid-19 Anna Hogan and Ben Williamson @eduint

9 take away ideas ↧
issuu.com/educationinter…

1. While #edtech has long been presented as a powerfully ‘disruptive’ force in education, during the ongoing #coronavirus crisis, new pandemic power networks have begun to coalesce around claims that edtech is not just disruptive, but palliative too.

2. "We need to think critically about how this [COVID] response might shape schooling for years to come. Our intention is to do so without taking a nostalgic view of pre-pandemic public education or a dystopic view of its commercialised future".

3. The rush to embed edtech in education also surfaces issue of data protection, privacy, consent, and the exploitation of student data.

4. While users actively give consent to sharing their data when they enter it into online forms, they are less aware that data is also collected about their interactions on platforms. Making it difficult for users to understand exactly what data is collected & for what purposes

5. Many #dataprivacy statements are purposively ambiguous so that data might be commercialised, either by selling it onto third parties or using it for internal processes of product development, e.g. large scale data mining & analytics to monitor #AI in education

6. Introducing AI into education raises a number of key issues (the narrowing of education goals, privileging certain types of knowledge over others, subjects that can be easily tracked and translated into data; risks framing education through market logics)

7. The commodification of education can come at the expense of teacher autonomy (e.g. what aspects of the curriculum are valued & assessed), work conditions (e.g. work intensification, diminished wellbeing, devaluation of the profession, decreased salary and loss of jobs).

8. The commercial activities documented indicate an emerging tension that will be at the core of any debates about education after the pandemic has passed: a tension over the very purposes of education, and of what knowledge or skills should be taught in schools.

9. There is a growing need to ensure that commercial actors are increasingly accountable for the public that they are servicing – largely on a for profit basis.

(thanks @PauloMoekotte for sharing it: worldsofeducation.org/en/woe_homepag…)