Personalization in Australian K-12 classrooms: how might digital teaching and learning tools produce intangible consequences for teachers’ workplace conditions?

Abstract

Recent negotiations of ‘data’ in schools place focus on student assessment and NAPLAN. However, with the rise in artificial intelligence (AI) underpinning educational technology, there is a need to shift focus towards the value of teachers’ digital data. By doing so, the broader debate surrounding the implications of these technologies and rights within the classroom as a workplace becomes more apparent to practitioners and educational researchers. Drawing on the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Human Rights and Technology final report, this conceptual paper focusses on teachers’ rights alongside emerging technologies that use or provide predictive analytics or artificial intelligence, also called ‘personalisation’. The lens of Postdigital positionality guides the discussion. Three potential consequences are presented as provocations: (1) What might happen if emerging technology uses teachers’ digital data that represent current societal inequality? (2) What might happen if insights provided by such technology are inaccurate, insufficient, or unrepresentative of our teachers? (3) What might happen if the design of the AI system itself is discriminatory? This conceptual paper argues for increased discourse about technologies that use or provide predictive analytics complemented by considering potential consequences associated with algorithmic bias.

New corporate players and educational policy: How might the Australian competition and consumer commission help us to understand AI’s associations with educational policy?

“…I focus primarily on K-12 educational systems and the teachers employed to work within them, as commercial apps and platforms in K-12 educational settings across Australia have dramatically grown in recent years. Arantes (2022) states, “Many schools across Australia are now either ‘Google schools’ or ‘Microsoft Schools’ used in and around the classroom, in addition to multitudes of other commercial apps and platforms as digital teaching tools.” As such, K-12 teachers are constantly trialling edtech platforms, leaving cookies and other tracking devices on the teachers’ personal devices, providing data for advertising purposes. A cookie is a text file that collects data from websites such as personal information and de-identified data collected from the teacher (Arantes, 2020).…”