Brave new platforms: a possible platform future for highly decentralised schooling

Abstract

Sweden has one of the most marketised and decentralised school systems in the world while also ranking amongst countries with the highest levels of access to technology in classrooms. Considering the increasingly central role that digital platforms play in the practices of schooling, this article speculates on what might happen during the 2020s in highly decentralised school systems like Sweden's. Based on current trends in education, directions indicated by platformisation in other contexts and taking a critical speculative approach, it offers a discussion of what could happen to the practices of schooling and the public mission of education. This discussion is intended to raise important questions for researchers, educators and policy makers to consider as the platformisation of schooling unfolds.

“Back to the future”: Socio-technical imaginaries in 50 years of school digitalization curriculum reforms

“…This shift in power struggles over curricula makes it important to include new, more ephemeral empirical material from private sector actors and 'actants' like infrastructures and platforms. The education system and the schools may need to develop knowledge on these new forms of curricular changes and an approach to safeguard the interests of the public education sector and the values at stake, such as issues of equality, openness, personal integrity, and the utilization of schools' digital work on platforms (Williamson, 2017;Hillman et al, 2020).…”

“…More seldom questioned is how this "infrastructuralization" and data currency growing out of platform markets is changing power relations. The global platforms and school data practices instantiated and operating via private-public networks could now extract, assess, and compare local, national, or international performances (Hillman, Bergviken Rensfeldt & Ivarsson, 2020), working as part of a new global monopolization and centralized power (Englund, 2018).…”

Debates About EdTech in a Time of Pandemics Should Include Youth’s Voices

“…Digitising education has garnered concerns -from academia (Andrejevic and Selwyn 2019), to human rights and privacy advocates (Persson 2020), to the general public (Strauss 2020;Fleming 2021). While much ink is spilled by education technology critics (Williamson 2017;Selwyn 2014) and academics generally (Yu and Couldry 2020) with best interest for students facing a datafied (Van Dijck 2014) and platformised (Hillman et al 2020) education at heart, youth's direct voice is rarely present. In a time when advancing digital technologies are pushing the collective imagination of what 'postdigital' world should mean beyond its perception of a 'messy and paradoxical condition' (Andersen et al 2014;5 in Jandrić et al 2018: 893), youths' voices and perspectives should be heard and acknowledged when it comes to the messy and paradoxical condition of a postdigital education ecosystem.…”

Creative-digital diagnostics and reflexive development of school students in the course of studying Natural Sciences

“…At the same time, high emphasis is placed on validation and increasing the reliability of diagnostic measurements based on tasks with content related to academic disciplines as well as their correlation with the results of widely recognized creativity tests. Such "separation" creates difficulties, in the first place for practicing teachers, when based on such diagnostics they are trying to choose the most helpful ways of psycho-pedagogical correction or further development of aptitudes possessed by modern school students [3] using training activities related to the content of certain academic disciplines, especially when it has to be done in the context of digitalization of education [4,5] and an increase of the share of distance learning [6,7]. In Russian science, there have already been a few attempts at overcoming this "psychodidactic gap".…”