The first special issue of Learning, Media and Technology of 2020, entitled 'Education and technology into the 2020s: speculative futures', presented a series of papers looking to the future of critical research on educational technologies. As we write, just a few months later, with the coronavirus pandemic sweeping around the world, the future appears more uncertain than ever. Global infection and illness, population lockdowns, and mass closures of educational institutions have engulfed countries across the planet in the short time between issues of this journal.The global pandemic is of course not only a serious public health emergency, but a political, economic and social emergency too. Scholarship across myriad disciplines in years to come will examine the medical, political, economic and social factors defining our present moment. Many of these issues will be of interest to readers of Learning, Media and Technology. They include political manoeuvring in relation to the pandemic, from misinformation and economic measures to policies of social distancing, quarantining and isolation; the use and misuse of large-scale data, statistics and visualizations; new forms of digitally mediated work, culture and personal life; surveillance systems for 'contact tracing'; the use of predictive epidemiological modelling; the development of techniques for better public understanding of science; and the political use of behavioural economics as a public pedagogy of population management. Future papers in this journal will be written in the context of changes currently being experienced at planetary scale, and potentially dramatic shifts in the relationships between science, technology and society.In one key area we feel Learning, Media and Technology can and should make a more direct contribution to knowledge and practice during the COVID-19 pandemic: the switch to online and digital education formats and the rise of 'remote' forms of teaching and learning as a consequence of mass closures of schools, colleges and universities. In this moment of pandemic politics, where contests are being fought at multiple scales and levels over the ways to handle and resolve the crisis, distance education has become a widespread matter of concern for political authorities, education businesses, charities, teachers, parents and students alike. Education has become an emergency matter, and along with it, educational technologies have been positioned as a frontline emergency service. In recent years Learning, Media and Technology has become a key publication for critical studies of education and technology. Other outlets have responded to the rapid switch to online education with useful guidance, advice, and references to extant research from promising studies that might support educators to make the best of this new educational emergency. But the need remains for critical reflection on the planetary pivot to digitally mediated remote and distance education.We have no wish to denigrate or criticize online distance education, but rather, the ai...

No abstract

The emergence of analytics Compared to sciences such as physics, biology, and climate science, the learning sciences are relatively late in using analytics. For example, the first journal devoted primarily to analytics in the biological sciences, Computers in Biology and Medicine, began publication in 1970. By contrast, the first journal targeted towards analytics in the learning sciences, the Journal of Educational Data Mining, began publication in 2009, although it was preceded by a conference series (commencing in 2008), a workshop series (commencing in 2005), and earlier workshops in 2000 and 2004. There are now several venues that promote and publish research in this area-currently including the Journal of Educational Data Mining, the Journal of Learning Analytics, the International Conference on Educational Data Mining, the Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (referred to below as "LAK"), as well as a growing emphasis on research in this area at conferences such as the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, ACM Knowledge Discovery in Databases, the International Conference of the Learning Sciences, and the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices that generate detailed data about them, and critical data researchers and privacy advocates are only just beginning to direct attention to these practices. In this article we provide an overview and critique of these varied forms of datafication and dataveillance of children, from in utero through to the school years. Our approach is informed by recent calls for research on children's rights in the digital age that examines the conditions that give rise to children's needs and guide provision of resources necessary for development to their full potential; the array of specific harms they may encounter; and the significance of and particular opportunities to participate in matters that affect their wellbeing and enable them to play an active part in society. There remains little evidence that specific instruments to safeguard children's rights in relation to dataveillance have been developed or implemented, and further attention needs to be paid to these issues.

Universities are increasingly organized and managed through digital data. The collection, processing and dissemination of Higher Education data is enabled by complex new data infrastructures that include both human and nonhuman actors, all framed by political, economic and social contingencies. HE data infrastructures need to be seen not just as technical programs but as practical relays of political objectives to reform the sector. This article focuses on a major active data infrastructure project in Higher Education in the United Kingdom. It examines the sociotechnical networks of organizations, software programs, standards, dashboards and visual analytics technologies that constitute the infrastructure, and how these technologies are fused to governmental imperatives of market reform. The analysis foregrounds how HE is being reimagined through the utopian ideal of the 'smarter university' while simultaneously being reformed through the political project of marketization.