Datafication of education

Abstract

This chapter offers a critical introduction to the ‘datafication’ of education to encourage better understanding and debate about data in relation to pedagogy and curriculum, in particular by drawing attention to the history, epistemology, social consequences, cultural contexts, politics and ethics of datafication. Thinking epistemologically about datafication means thinking about what we can know from data. Datafication rests on the assumption that patterns and relationships contained within datasets inherently produce meaningful, objective and insightful knowledge about complex phenomena. The new actors undertaking datafication are invested with a certain form of data power. Education businesses, venture capital firms, and philanthropies are putting large financial, material, and human resources into technologies of datafication, and are seeking both to make it commercially profitable and also attractive to policymakers as a source of intelligence into learning processes. Finally, there are legal, ethical, and regulatory mechanisms shaping datafication.