No. 11 - Andreas Breiter and Juliane Jarke: Datafying education: How digital assessment practices reconfigure the organisation of learning

In the past decade, an ever increasing trend to capture (social) life in numbers became a prominent instantiation of the so-called ‘audit society’ (Power 1999). With this turn, almost all aspects of social life have become measured and quantified. This datafication of social life raises expectations concerning increased transparency, accountability and civic participation but also associated fears with respect to surveillance, privacy issues, a data literacy divide and control (Kitchin 2014; Borgman 2015; Gitelman 2013). Datafication as a trend of a changing media environment affects many social domains significantly, and one of the most noticeable of these are organisations of education (Piety 2013). It relates for example to schools’ performances and student achievements which are compared on a national and international scale; it may affect salaries of teachers and school managers which are adjusted according to test scores as well as decision-making of parents for school choice or communication and control of teachers.

Assessments have always been decisive features of learning and are pervasive within education: School exams evaluate pupils; achievement tests measure and select students for higher education, school performance studies such as PISA measure and compare whole educational systems. With the ever growing use of information and communication technologies to support the organisation of learning and teaching new devices for monitoring, evaluating, and ranking the performance of individual learners and of educational institutions/systems have become available. They range from computer-based tests to learning analytics on large-scale data in complex information systems. They allow the ‘recording, storage, manipulation and distribution of data in digital form’ (Selwyn 2015: 64). Digital data are distinct from pre-digital forms as they may be exhaustive in scope, highly detailed and can be combined in a flexible manner and at different aggregation levels, bringing together ‘datasets of different times, from different places or gathered at different times’ (Parks 2014: 356). Such possibilities have always existed on a small scale, but new data infrastructures for accountability (Anagnostopoulos et al. 2013) and algorithmic capabilities allow for analytics on an ‘unprecedented complexity and scope’ (Parks 2014: 356). Within the educational context, more data and more heterogeneous data are being
generated—deliberately—for monitoring, surveillance or evaluation purposes but also—
automatically—through routine operations of digital devices and systems (Selwyn 2015:
65).

About the authors

Andreas Breiter
Since July 2008, Dr. Andreas Breiter is full professor for Informatics in the Department for Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Bremen. He is scientific director of the Institute for Information Management Bremen GmbH, a not-for-profit research center at the University of Bremen (www.ifib.de). He is co-chair of the interdisciplinary Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research of the University of Bremen . From 2004 to 2008 he worked as Assistant Professor (Juniorprofessor) at the University of Bremen. During his PhD in Applied Informatics in 1997 to 2000, he joined he Telecommunications Research Group where he worked as a senior research associate (2000-2004). 2002 he was Visiting Scholar at Columbia University (New York City) and at the Center for Children and Technology. Andreas Breiter studied Sociology, Informatics und Law at the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main und at the University of Southampton (UK). For two years (1995-1997) he joined the Fraunhofer-Institute for Systems and Innovation Research in Karlsruhe.

Juliane Jarke
Dr. Juliane Jarke is a researcher at the Institute for Information Management Bremen GmbH (ifib)
and at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen since September 2014. Prior to Bremen, she worked as a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Technology and Organisation at Lancaster University (2013-2014). Juliane Jarke holds a PhD in Organisation, Work and Technology, an MSc in Information Technology, Management and Organisational Change (both from Lancaster University) as well as an MA in Philosophy and a BSc in Informatics (both from the University of Hamburg). Juliane Jarke’s research intersects the boundaries of Organisation Studies and Information Systems Research. Conceptually she draws on Science and Technology Studies (STS), and in particular Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Her main research interests focus on the ways socio-technical systems work and are made to work by looking at the interactions of people, technologies, organisation and practice. Currently Dr. Jarke is leading a workpackage on Participatory Design in Civic Technology and Open Data in the EU-funded research and innovation action MobileAge.