The Datafication of Education

Book excerpt: This book attends to the transformation of processes and practices in education, relating to its increasing digitisation and datafication. The introduction of new means to measure, capture, describe and represent social life in numbers has not only transformed the ways in which teaching and learning are organised, but also the ways in which future generations (will) construct reality with and through data. Contributions consider data practices that span across different countries, educational fields and governance levels, ranging from early childhood education, to schools, universities, educational technology providers, to educational policy making and governance. The book demonstrates how digital data not only support decision making, but also fundamentally change the organisation of learning and teaching, and how these transformation processes can have partly ambivalent consequences, such as new possibilities for participation, but also the monitoring and emergence/manifestation of inequalities. Focusing on how data can drive decision making in education and learning, this book will be of interest to those studying both educational technology and educational policy making. The chapters in this book were originally published in Learning, Media and Technology. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.