Automated education governance: The potential implications of AI in education policy
Kevin Witzenberger, School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney
3-4pm, 5th February, Paterson's Land, room 1.27
The last decade’s surge of digitalization and datafication in education, and advances in computing machinery, have set the scene for automated decisions in education. Automation within education can take many forms. It arrives through the application of narrow forms of artificial intelligence (AI), and ranges from smart mood sensing classrooms, to student surveillance technology, academic integrity systems, personalised learning applications, and governmental budget predictions.
This presentation is an overview of an ongoing PhD thesis that researches the value of educational policy conclusions that are based on AI methods and processes. The work builds on a series of empirical and conceptual case studies that aim to understand: 1) the sociotechnical imaginaries that are mobilised by advocates of AI and how these imaginaries, and the values they represent, contribute to education policy. 2) The desire for automated decisions within administration and management of educational institutions. 3) And how the voices and opinions of students are represented in automated policy conclusions, by following the transformation of students into users, data subjects, materialized objects (highly regularized objects represented in rows and columns), and finally, into automated decisions.
Biography
Kevin Witzenberger is a PhD student in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His work is broadly situated along the intersections of media theory, education policy and science, technology and society studies (STS).