Introduction: Critical studies of digital education platforms

Abstract

All over the world, education is undergoing substantial changes in the wake of rapid technological developments. As our world is becoming ever more digitized, the educational sector is increasingly infused with digital games, apps, websites, social media, and learning environments. The Covid-19 pandemic, and associated measures of social distancing and school closures all over the world, have accelerated this digitization, triggering an urgent need for critical, up-close scrutiny of how this digitization is reshaping the worlds of education. The focus of this Special Issue is especially on digital education platforms. Over the last years, such platforms have become progressively prevalent, and both global and local technology companies have become omnipresent providers of such platforms, in private as well as in in public education (Van Dijck et al., 2018). From platforms tailored to primary and secondary schools to platforms specifically constructed for the field of higher education; from digital environments designed to manage pupils' learning to environments focused on the monitoring of their behavior; and from digital spaces bundling a variety of functionalities to interfaces with a more singular function: no matter the focus, there seems to exist a corresponding digital platform used within (and often especially made for) the educational field (Hillman et al., 2020; Robertson, 2019; Williamson, 2019). Furthermore, the worldwide growth and ubiquity of digital education platforms has greatly accelerated since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated newly emerging 'emergency pedagogies' that needed to be devised, often with help of both existing and newly developed digital education platforms (Williamson et al., 2020). In that sense, and in line with related scholarship on how education is taking-and changing-dedicated shapes, we advance the general thesis here that, under the influence of digital platforms, educational practices are gradually changing form (e.g., Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020; Lewis, 2020b). Despite the steady rise and ubiquity of digital education platforms, however, educational research that adopts a critical gaze vis-à-vis such platforms is still surprisingly limited (

Theories of Postdigital Heterogeneity: Implications for Research on Education and Datafication

“…These theories do not, I should add, suggest that the world was previously made of separate spheres that have become interwoven, but that there were never ontologically separate spheres in the first place (see also Coeckelbergh 2020). But given that the datafication and platformisation of education are interesting precisely because they seem like global phenomena (see Decuypere et al 2021;Jarke and Breiter 2019), theories of heterogeneity may offer one way to follow up on Milan and Treré's (2019) important injunction to 'mov[e] past the "universalism" associated with our interpretation of datafication'.…”

Refocusing Zuboff’s ‘division of learning’ on Education

“…In answer to the first question, given the increasing prevalence of data-driven platforms in education (Decuypere et al 2021), the 'division of learning' may provide a useful conceptual framework through which to examine the impact on educational activity. In this sense, research from outside of education, and specifically that concerning the relationships between technology, capitalism, and society, can strengthen the ways we might develop understanding about the changing structures, pedagogies, and subjectivities of increasingly datafied institutions and classrooms.…”

“…This deployment usually occurs through the establishment of a software 'platform', designed with functions to supposedly facilitate teaching and learning activities, as well as a range of administrative functions. The concept of 'platformisation' (van Dijck et al 2018;Poell et al 2019) -which concerns the processes through which platform software and its associated practices become involved in the transformation of markets, institutions, governance, and cultural practices -is therefore now highly relevant to the study of education (Decuypere et al (2021). Writing before the COVID-19 pandemic, Selwyn et al predict a movement towards 'classrooms on platforms rather than platforms in classrooms' (2020, p2), which appears now to be a prescient encapsulation of the 'the expansion and embedding of digital technologies and media in education systems, institutions and practices across the world' (Williamson et al 2020, p107) as a consequence of school, college, and university closures in some countries.…”

Innovación Tecno-Educativa “Google”. Plataformas Digitales, Datos y Formación Docente

“…Las plataformas digitales en educación están generando los avances más significativos en la innovación educativa global (Decuypere et al, 2021;Perrotta et al, 2021). Su irrupción en educación es una parte fundamental de cambios sociales más amplios de la "plataformización" de la sociedad (Van Dijck et al, 2019).…”