Yesterday (22.09.2020) Juliane Jarke from SP2 and Vtio Dabisch (SP1) jointly presented first results of the two subprojects at this year’s congress of the German Sociological Association. Her presentation was the first of four papers presented by an ad hoc group on the digitization of education. Vito Dabisch’s presentation focused on the increasing production and usage of data for school management by school supervision. He noted that there is an increasing expansion and compression of data and data practices. In this context, the simultaneous data criticism and data orientation of the interviewed actors was striking: School councils are partly (very) skeptical about how helpful data-based control is, but on the other hand more and more data is used in institutionalized discussions. Schools are encouraged to “see” themselves through “their” data and to work with this data.Juliane Jarke’s presentation concentrated on how school as an organization is changing through digitization and datafication and how this change can be researched.She presented various research artifacts from TP2 that allow to analyze data flows and show how schools (re)position …

Data session! This sounds like “Jam session” and to a certain extent it is. Together we look at our research data, interpret and consider whether a (dys)harmonic “picture” emerges. In mid-September, the four DATAFIED subprojects met for a joint data evaluation and discussed possible evaluation intersections with regard to the interview excerpts collected in the research field. The data session is the prelude to a series of reconstructive to qualitatively interpretive evaluation sessions, which will result in a book by the end of next year, where we will present the DATAFIED results for public discussion. Picture from: Business vector created by katemangostar – www.freepik.com

From August 18 to 21, the joint conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology and the international Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) took place. Due to the Corona Pandemic, the conference was moved from the Czech capital Prague to “virPrague” and was held digitally. Whether the “vir” stands for “virus” or “virtual” was left open by the organizers. Despite the restrictions due to the pandemic, the organizers quickly created a digital infrastructure combining the classical lectures with the possibilities of digital communication and giving the participants a feeling of community. The theme of the conference – “Locating and Timing Matters: Significance and agency of STS in emerigng worlds” – focused on the situated nature of the actions of different human and more-than-human actors in the datafied world. In numerous panel discussions, the impact of the corona pandemic on social practices and the role of data, algorithms and information systems in this process were also critically discussed. As part of TP2 at ifib, Irina Zakharova and Juliane Jarke presented …

A return to normality is not yet foreseeable in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so the second joint meeting this year was again realized virtually via the conference platform Zoom instead of a meeting in Hamburg. It took place from June 29th to July 1st and was characterized by a good and target-oriented exchange between the participating scientists.On the first day, previous results were summarised and the first results of analyses and ideas for publications were shared via video conference. The good exchange produced further ideas for synergies between the subprojects, which are now being pursued further. On the second day various possibilities for the distribution of results were discussed. In addition to the scientific community, the practical partners should also learn what DATAFIED has found out. It is a special concern of ours to “give something back”. In the second part of the second day the participants concentrated on the consequences of the corona crisis on the DATAFIED project. In all four federal states investigated, schools were closed for several weeks, making it …

What will school look like in 2040? Which socio-technical assemblages will be shaped? How will learners be addressed as subjects? Prof. Dr. Felicitas Macgilchrist poses these questions in her paper “Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories‘ of education and technology“, which she wrote together with Heidrun Allert and Anne Bruch and which she reported on in the seminar “Transmissions in Motion” at the University of Utrecht. In their “Social Science Fiction” paper the authors formulate three different versions of the future.   In the first, learners become so-called “smooth users” who optimize themselves in the pursuit of frictionless efficiency within a post-democratic framework created by large corporations. Because the 2020s had to respond to digitisation and its challenges, education was “smoothed” by technological support, entrepreneurs and tech companies became government advisors, decisions were made behind closed doors, and schools became dependent on companies. Educational software was designed to be particularly user-friendly, smooth and groundbreaking, making students less independent, especially in non-cognitive learning dimensions, and their self-optimization became the key process.   The second vision …

As already announced, the presentation of the DATAFIED project took place on 05.05.2020 in the context of the online lecture series “BILDUNGSDIALOG.DIGITAL: Inside Bildungsforschung”. On behalf of the scientists involved in the joint project, Prof. Dr. Andreas Breiter reported on the background, the current status and the objectives of the project. A total of 20 participants received detailed insights into the multifaceted research work during the half-hour presentation.  The presentation was followed by a lively discussion. The focus was on questions concerning the change in the digitization of schools – especially against the background of the current COVID-19 pandemic. 

The global spread of COVID-19 and the related regulatory measures pose great challenges for researchers in science. But even in times of contact blocks and home offices, it is important to counteract the standstill of scientific work. For this reason, the fifth joint meeting of the DATAFIED project took place on 27 and 28 April as an online event. On two exciting days, many content and organisational issues were addressed and discussed during the first quarterly meeting in 2020. On the first day, the individual sub-projects presented their previous findings via video conference, which served as a basis for informative and fruitful discussions. In addition, further synergies and sub-project overlapping topics were identified, which will further intensify the work between the individual research groups and offer exciting cooperation opportunities. But also the handling of the challenges arising from the rampant corona epidemic and the resulting changes in the school education sector were discussed. Schools in all German states are currently affected by closures and the corona crisis requires a responsible approach to the situation. All …

Even in times of crisis, scientific exchange does not stand still. In the context of the online lecture series “BILDUNGSDIALOG.DIGITAL: Inside Bildungsforschung”, which will be held weekly from 28th April 2020, various funded projects will be presented to discuss current issues in the context of education and digitisation.  The sessions, which take place on a total of 12 dates, consist of 15 to 30 minutes of input from a project with a subsequent discussion with the participants.  Besides many interesting projects, the DATAFIED project will also be part of this valuable exchange. Represented by Prof. Dr. Andreas Breiter the joint project will be presented on 05th May 2020. We cordially invite you to participate in the lecture including the subsequent discussion.   Access to the lecture series can be found here:  Dates: Weekly from 28th April 2020 Time: 15:00 – 16:00 Place: https://onca.adobeconnect.com/insidebildungsforschung/

Very enjoyable discussions on data, software, discourse, power and knowledge were had at the Data in Discourse Analysis conference at the TU Darmstadt on Wednesday 18 February. Drawing partly on analysis with Juliane Jarke on predictive analytics within the DATAFIED project, Felicitas Macgilchrist reflected on how discourse studies’ „object of analysis“ is changing as education is increasingly datafied.  She observes changes to the discourse “about” education, the discourse “in” education, and alerts us to the need to analyse the discourse “encoded into” education. Here’s the updated abstract for the paper: Datafication, the increased transformation of information about education into digitally manipulable data, is a process occurring in educational practice and in (critical) discourse analytical research on education. In part one of this paper, I explore three ways in which ‘digital data’ have changed the way educational discourse studies perceives its object of analysis. First, ‘data about education’ flow abundantly. Schools are producing more numeric data about their students than ever before. Critical discourse studies have analysed, e.g., PISA, ICILS and other international assessments, the media reports about these assessments, …

On Thursday, 30 January 2020, a methodology workshop on software studies took place at the premises of the Institute for Information Management Bremen (ifib). Participants were representatives of all participating subprojects as well as Mathias Decuypere, who is an assistant professor at the KU Leuven and researches and teaches in the field of educational science methodology. The workshop was opened with a presentation of Decuypere’s work on the topic “How to investigate the new normal? In search of inventive methods for inquiring the datafication of education”. The workshop was followed by a fruitful exchange of ideas between the participants. Various approaches from Decuypere’s presentation were taken up and further developed. Many valuable references to interesting literature sources and other projects were exchanged. In the course of this, the influence of the order of the methods used on the results was discussed, among other things. After a short break, Jasmin Troeger and Irina Zakharova presented the current status of the methods used in subprojects 2 and 3, as well as considerations for further work. A lively …