Introduction: Critical studies of digital education platforms

Education Policy Analysis Archives , 2023

This paper analyzes the extent to which the use of digital education platforms (DEP), which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, has modified educational policies for digital transition in schools in the context of the last Mexican educational reform (2019), teaching-learning processes, and school-family relations. Our main hypothesis is that the digital leap, in the New Mexican School that emerged from the last educational reform, has considerably modified the methods of educational governance, the pedagogical processes in schooling, and the ways of communication between schools and families, with implications for children's rights. The objective is to identify, from the stakeholders' perspectives, the effects of the growing importance of BigTech corporations in Mexico and of the expansion of digital capitalism, which deepened as an effect of school closures due to the pandemic, and to analyze the results from the gender perspective. The research methodology is qualitative based on indepth interviews with policymakers and a survey of 70 school principals, teachers, and families

IAEME PUBLICATION, 2021

Today we are living in a society which suffers through the outbreak of COVID-19. It made a huge impact throughout the world in terms of infection and death rate. Due to this, our whole country (India) is under lockdown from March 24, 2020. It brings new changes in different sectors of our society starting from education, economy, health, transportation etc. Before this pandemic, use of modern technology is very limited in our educational institutions. During this pandemic period, our educational institutions started using different technologies so that students should not miss their education which they are expecting of. In this paper the researcher will discuss about different kinds of digital platforms through which we can help the students in this difficult time.

This essay explains how digital networks and digital media will affect education. The digitally networked environment somewhat frees education from traditional spatial and temporal limitations. In the process, however, new constraints and limitations emerge that were always present in the traditional model but now become newly salient. Digital media enable a "superbroadcasting" model of education, but this model is only appropriate for some kinds of learning. The remaining aspects of education do not scale well and remain labor and time-intensive. We have already seen hybrid models of education that attempt to combine scalable aspects of education with labor-intensive practices. Some of these hybrid models will improve the educational experience for many students and expand educational access for those who would not otherwise afford an education. But hybrid models may also produce winner-take-all effects and disrupt labor markets for new educators. While transcending older limitations, digital education faces new limitations -- because of limited Internet access, language barriers, disputes over standards and interoperability, fights over intellectual property, and, ironically, the very scalability that makes digital education so promising and attractive. The growth of digital educational enterprises will depend on the degree to which they can lower the cost of the labor-intensive elements of education that do not scale well or shift the cost or the responsibility for providing them to other actors. Digital education models threaten both traditional incumbents and professional educational norms. They blur distinctions between education and community service; between professionals and amateurs; between education and entertainment; between teaching and curation; between hierarchical and peer-based methods of learning; and between instructing specific students and speaking to the world at large. Digital networks disaggregate educational practices into multiple tasks that might be performed by many different actors, and, in the process, alter the tasks, norms, and identity of professional educators. Digital networks disrupt the traditional organization of education and make informal education increasingly salient. And just as digital networks challenge professional norms of education, they also challenge professional control over archives, and thus control over cultural memory itself. Digital networks, in short, cause us to rethink what education is, how we perform it, who participates in it, and what we want from it. To appear in Greenhow, C., Sonnevend, J. & Agur, C. (Eds.) Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (forthcoming 2016).

Media Education

This article focuses on the recent acceleration of digital education triggered by the Covid19 pandemic. Protective measures, particularly the social distancing, translated into an institutional shock for the standard form of schooling. By drawing on a summary of current investigations on the topic (Brehm, Unterhalter & Oketch, 2021; Grek & Landri, 2021), the article describes how swift digitalization has reinforced the entanglement of public education into private owned and commercial platforms and paved the way to the emergence of the blended school form. The instabilities of the current process of institutional repair are underlined together with the risk of increasing unbalanced private and public partnership in the education system, and/or returning to the standard form of schooling in the future post-pandemic scenario.

2019

Tanner Mirrlees and Shahid Alvi This book advances a critical political economy approach to EdTech and analyses the economic, political and ideological structures and social power relations that shape the EdTech industries and drive EdTech’s development and diffusion. Particular attention is paid to the integration of EdTech with some of the most contentious developments of our time, including platformization and data-veillance, the automation of work and labor, and globalization-imperialism. By using a political economy of communication approach, this book will be of value to anyone interested in a neo-Marxist analysis of the current transformations of capitalism, the State, higher education, and online learning in the digital age. Table of Contents Preface 1. For a Political Economy of EdTech 2. Higher Education in a Digital Age: Capitalism, Neoliberalism, and the University, Inc. 3. Profiting on Higher Education: Platform Capitalism is the Classroom 4. Automating Higher Education: Taylorism and the Teaching Machines 5. Globalizing Higher Education: Platform Imperialism 6. Conclusion - A Pedagogy for Technological Citizenship, a Pedagogy for the Precariat Working Class Reviews "The progressive application of digital technologies have played a central role in redefining teaching and learning. Based on a very clear political economy of communications framework, the authors of this book demonstrate in detail how innovations have served the wider neo-liberal reorganisation of contemporary capitalism. Anyone concerned with the construction of the future needs to read it and respond." – Graham Murdock, Loughborough University and Vice President of the International Association of Communication and Media Research (IAMCR) "This book offers a unique and timely study of the interrelationships between digital platform industries and higher education. It breaks new ground by providing a critical analysis of the latest information-communication technological trends in higher education from a political economy approach" -- Marko Ampuja, Tampere University and University of Helsinki

The transformation from the Industrial to the Knowledge Society has created a new work order and a new world order. The paradigm of Fordist mass production has been abandoned and a new type of capitalism emerged, often referred to as ‘postFordism’ or fast capitalism (Agger, 1989, The New London Group, 1996). Flying on the wings of new technologies fast capitalism has reengineered space and time and resulted in dramatic global changes affecting our work, public and private lives. In this ‘flat world’ (Friedman, 2005) cultures and discourses have been reconstructed, calling for new understandings and interpretations of our shared reality. The traditional hierarchic and controlling workplace structures have been replaced with new social practices that are based on the premises of collaboration, teamwork, and lifelong learning (The New London Group, 1996). These changes have generated a new workplace culture and created a need for a flexible and multiskilled workforce, who can effectively cope with the demands and uncertainties of the digital world. Cite as: Dakich, Eva (2008) Towards The Social Practice of Digital Pedagogies. In: Rethinking Education with ICT. Yelland, Nicola and Neal, Greg and Dakich, Eva, eds. Sense Publishers, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 13-30. ISBN 9789087902797 https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/authors/auth-eva-dakich/

2014

Traditional forms of schooling remain resistant to change because of the fit with their current ecologies. However, new forms of schooling that depend on communication technologies have emerged, including virtual schools and classes networked across collaborating schools (Davis, Eickelmann & Zaka, 2013). The purpose of this research had been to identify how technologies have resulted in the restructuring of many schools and what implications this has for teachers, local and national policy makers. Questions to be discussed in the round table session concerning the restructuring of schooling with digital technologies As to new forms of schooling, two essential questions are addressed and might serve as the shared base for the discussion: Question 1: To what extent and how does recent developments of education and digital technologies challenge and change systems of schooling? Question 2: How can research inform us about the potential of new forms of schooling with digital technologies?

ICDE World Conference on Online Learning, 2019

This ‘think piece’ focusses upon the conference theme of ‘Transforming Lives and Societies’, giving especial attention to ‘Better Futures’ and to ‘Transforming Online Pedagogies’ (although the redundancy of adjectives such as ‘Online’, ‘Distance’, ‘E-’ and ‘Lifelong’ is explained in an historical postscript). Whereas Carl Jung talked of the mythical ‘collective unconscious’, the Digital Age creates the ‘universal consciousness’ embodying the tangible/digital duality that characterises these petrifyingly exciting times. Digitisation involves a pivotal leap in human potential as profound as the wheel in terms of development, as significant as the book in relation to information, and as iconoclastic as anything dreamed up by the deepest analyst/therapist in terms of the human psyche. Piecemeal ICT applications have failed to rise to the challenge and, consequently, the last three decades of computers in learning have been characterised by disappointment, disillusionment and frustration. What is called for now is an understanding of the global, synergistic integration of technologies and learning experiences, seamlessly uniting digital and tangible learning. Accordingly, this paper explores the implications of the contemporary mental condition in the context of evolving digital technology and universal connectivity and describes how education, inexorably occurring from infancy through to senility and/or mortality, should and inevitably will be fundamentally transformed into what may be referred to as the ‘Global School’ (as dealt with in depth in the present authors’ recent publications). It makes clear that curriculum should be learner driven (rather than designed externally from and directed at the learners) and it justifies the need for a convivial learning-supporting pedagogy. These and other psychological, pedagogical, social and associated implications of this ground-breaking ‘Education embodying Digitisation’ reality are explored and welcomed.

Emerald, 2023

2013