Session Information
23 SES 12 B, To See is to Believe? The Shifting Constitution of Evidence in Educational Research, Policy and Practice
Symposium
Contribution
Education is on the cusp of a profound alteration of its humanist project due to the rise of digital data infrastructures and ontologies. Data infrastructures are the operating systems that underpin data generation and usage. Data ontologies are the categories and objects used to model the worlds that information systems operate within and upon. Together, data infrastructure and ontologies constitute the apparatus that enables ‘datafication’: the translation of qualitative phenomenon into a quantitative data format that is suitable for subsequent processing by computer systems. This datafication is particularly important as education systems and institutions move towards Big Data (BD) analysis and prediction. It is better to talk about Big Information than Big Data. What is often ignored in the enthusiasm for Big Data solutions is that what we generate, communicate and put to work may more accurately be called information not data, if the latter is defined as ‘literally “the things having been given” … via a gift or endowment, it [data] enters into presence. (Galloway, 2011, p. 87). Further, Galloway (2011, p. 88) defines information as a process that ‘stresses less a sense of presence and giving-forth, and more a plastic adoption of shape. Information exists whenever worldly things are “in-formed”, or “put into form”’. Thus, what is often perceived as data that are collected, mined, patterned and used to predict/program flows, is better understood as information. This distinction is crucial because it forces us to see that what is perceived as ‘ontologically raw’ is in fact the opposite, a very human/subjective rendering of the world through those apparatuses that record particular images of a world. Thus, the datafication of education involves each apparatus of capture and coding that gives data form as information. Practically, this paper goes on to consider the likely implications of Big Information in education. We use Felix Guattari’s work to suggest that “the important question is not that of destructive change caused by exponential increases in technical-machinic power, but rather why, given dramatic technological development”, we still see “a reinforcement of previous systems of alienation, an oppressive mass-mediatization, infantilizing consensual politics” (Guattari, 2013, p. 4). Our argument in this paper is the commercialisation of Big Information in education encourages an infantilising consensus regarding the production of learning through information.
References
Galloway, A. (2011). Are some things unrepresentable? Theory, Culture & Society , 28 (7-8), 85-102. Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic Cartographies. London: Bloomsbury.
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