Keynote for 'Critical Call': the international EuroCALL conference

1. What do we want from digital education?
Siân Bayne, The University of Edinburgh, @sbayne

3. Digital Education research group
digital cultures in education
digital education policy
learning analytics
children and technology

4. the promises and threats of digital education
the human-technology divide and beyond
applying the thinking
from ‘what works?’ to ‘what do we want?’

5. Digital education: promises and threats
efficiency
scale and reach
relevance
effectiveness
measurability
co-presence
embodiment
community
surveillance
de-professionalisation
Essentialism:
“technology drives social practice and
change...humans must adapt to technical
demands, while technology, like a Newtonian
god, watches unaffected as the drama
unfolds.”
Instrumentalism:
“technologies are seen as neutral means
employed for ends determined independently
by their users.”
(Hamilton and Friesen 2013)
“pedagogy should drive technology”
“using technology to enhance learning”
“developing toolkits for innovative teaching”
“harnessing the power of technology”
“technology is transforming education”
“course design for digital natives”

6. Humans and non-humans are engaged in a history that should render
their separation impossible.
(Latour 2003)
The point is that material things are performative and not inert... They
act together with other types of things and forces to exclude, invite and
regulate particular forms of participation in enactments, some of which
we term education.
(Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuck 2011)

7. “One does not have to fix ones
gaze on a material world from
which all traces of humanity
have been expunged; or on a
social world from which the
material world has been
magically whisked away by
linguistic conjuring tricks. The
world itself does not impose
this division upon us.
...
Though none of the traditional
disciplines does this, one can
trying seeing double: seeing the
human and the nonhuman at
once, without trying to strip
either away.”
(Pickering 2005)

8. ‘Seeing double’ in digital education
Introna and Hayes: plagiarism detection
Introna, L. D. and Hayes, N. (2011) ‘On sociomaterial imbrications: what
plagiarism detection systems reveal and why it matters’. Information and
Organization, 21: 107-122.
Knox: active algorithms
Knox, J. K. (2014). ‘Active algorithms: sociomaterial spaces in the E-
learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.’ Campus Virtuales, 3(1): 42-55.
Bayne: teacherbot
Bayne, S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching.
Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4): 455-467.

9. Culturally specific ways of knowing
A new ‘regime of knowledge’
Normalisation of Turnitin and the ‘winnowing’ algorithm

10. The delegation of plagiarism detection to a technical actor
produces a particular set of agencies and intentionalities (a
politics one might say) which unintentionally and
unexpectedly conspires to constitute some students as
plagiarists (who are not) and others as not (who are).
(Introna and Hayes 2011)

11. Aggregating blog posts on a MOOC (E-learning and Digital Cultures)

12. 1,340 posts displayed during the first instance of the course
931 RSS feed URLs added to the Google spreadsheet
visited 1,430 times by 997 unique visitors over course period

13. 1. A Google spreadsheet behind a web form which allowed
participants to submit the RSS feed to their blog
2. 48 individual Yahoo Pipes
each fetching 20 feeds from the Google spreadsheet
filtering posts according to publishing time and the presence of the
course hashtag
sorting posts according to date
3. A WordPress instance using the FeedWordPress plugin to
display aggregated posts

14. — Pipes limits posts to those published within 72 hours of each
‘collection’
— Wordpress aggregates posts in pages, 100 per page
— Viewers only tended to view/engage with the first page of
EDCMOOC news
— FeedWordpress more likely to ‘fetch’ posts made in the same
time zone (GMT)
— Global spread of participants

15. The EDCMOOC News front page is thus a complex performance
of human contribution, algorithmic process, and spatial
ordering… It is determined by a number of interrelated and co-
constitutive factors that are human and non-human, social and
algorithmic.
(Knox 2014)

16. An intervention in teacher automation

17. “One can predict that in a
few more years millions of
school children will have
access to what Philip of
Macedon’s son Alexander
enjoyed as a royal
prerogative: the personal
services of a tutor as well-
informed and responsive as
Aristotle.”
(Suppes, 1966)
“Productivity: Improved quantity or quality of
learner achievement per unit of teacher time,
and/or learner time.”
(Laurillard 2011)

19. The goal [of corporate strategists and
‘futurologists’] is to replace (at least for the
masses) face-to-face teaching by professional
faculty with an industrial product, infinitely
reproducible at decreasing unit cost.
(Feenberg 2003)

20. The critical pedagogy
approach re-focuses attention
away from the functionality of
e-learning environments back
to the core relations between
students and teachers and the
conditions in which they find
themselves.
(Clegg 2003)
“Mobilization in defense of the human touch.”
(Feenberg 2003)
....the ideological shaping of
educational technology
along individualistic, neo-
liberal and new capitalist
lines.
(Selwyn 2014)

21. E-learning and digital cultures MOOC
c.12,000 enrolments from 158 countries
4,000+ in the student Facebook group
9,000+ in the student G+ group
4000+ tweets to #edcmooc over course run
1,900 posts in Coursera forums
c.50% with postgraduate degrees
c.50% working in Education

22. twitterbots
“Twitter bots are, essentially, computer
programs that tweet of their own
accord... it’s a code-to-code connection,
made possible by Twitter’s wide-open
application programming interface,
or A.P.I.”
(Dubbin 2013)
“8.5% of all active users used third party
applications that may have automatically
contacted our servers for regular updates
without any discernable additional user-
initiated action.”
(Twitter 2014)

23. made by Amit Agarwal made by Bill Snitzer

25. made by Felix Jung

26. At a time when even our most glancing online
activities are processed into marketing by for-
profit bots in the shadows, Twitter bots
foreground the influence of automation on
modern life, and they demystify it somewhat in
the process.
(Dubbin 2013)

27. Teacherbot
#edcmooc

33. “While I was trying to figure out what the hell
‘post-humanism’ means, the teacher bot led
me on a merry chase looking up quotes and
obscure academic references, which had the
interesting side effect of ‘ambush teaching’
me. I will happily admit, that I do not feel like I
have been to a class. I do not feel like I have
been taught, either. I do, however, think I have
learned something. I’ve certainly been
prompted to think. Isn’t this what every good
teacher/trainer strives for?”
Giddens 2013

34. deficit  excess
what works?  what do we want?
supercession  entanglement
embrace/resistance  play

35. Instead of falling back
on the sedimented
habits of thought that
the humanist past has
institutionalised, the
posthuman predicament
encourages us to
undertake a leap
forward into the
complexities and
paradoxes of our times.
(Braidotti 2013)

36. @sbayne
sian.bayne@ed.ac.uk
Thank you

37. Bayne, S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education,
20(4): 455-467.
Clarke, A. C. (1980). Electronic Tutors. Omni Magazine. June 1980.
Clegg, S., Hudson, A. and Steel, J. (2003) The Emperor's New Clothes: Globalisation and Elearning
in Higher Education, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(1): 39-53.
Fenwick, Tara, Richard Edwards and Peter Sawchuk. 2011. Emerging approaches to educational
research: tracing the sociomaterial. London: Routledge.
Giddens, Seth (2013) Chatting to Teacherbot. Why Posthuman Teachers Can Never Happen In My
Lifetime. http://www.digitalang.com/2014/11/chatting-to-teacherbot-why-posthumanism-
can-never-happen-in-my-lifetime/comment-page-1/#comment-47433
Hamilton, Edward C. and Norm Friesen. 2013. Online Education: A Science and Technology
Studies Perspective. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. 39 (2).
Introna, L. D. and Hayes, N. (2011) ‘On sociomaterial imbrications: what plagiarism detection
systems reveal and why it matters’. Information and Organization 21: 107-122.
Knox, J. K. (2014). ‘Active algorithms: sociomaterial spaces in the E-learning and Digital Cultures
MOOC.’ Campus Virtuales, 3(1): 42-55.
Laurillard, D. (2011) Productivity:Achieving higher quality and more effective learning in
affordable and acceptable ways. http://www.tlrp.org/docs/ProdBeta.pdf
Pickering, A. (2005). Asian eels and global warming: a posthumanist perspective on society and
the environment. Ethics and the Environment, 10(2), 29-43.
Selwyn, N. (2014) Distrusting Educational Technology Critical Questions for Changing Times.
London: Routledge.
Suppes, P. (1966). The uses of computers in education. Scientific American, 215(2): 206-20.

38. Images
slide 1: L'Adolessencefrom Le Livre de la Sante by Joseph Handler (Monte Carlo: Andre Sauret, 1968), volume
13: Adolescence, Hygienes, Viellissement. http://50watts.com/L-Adolessence
slide 4: 1) Milton Glaser, illustration for story by Apollinaire. http://50watts.com/Milton-Glaser-and-World-
Literature; 2) Photochromosomes 2, http://50watts.com/Photochromosomes-2
slide 6: Riding an Ostrich, Cawston Ostrich Farm, South Pasadena, California http://50watts.com/Riding-an-
Ostrich
slide 8: Marchioness of Waterford - The Writing Lesson. http://www.myartprints.co.uk/a/waterford-
marchioness-of/the-writing-lesson-1.html
slide 13: Dedicated to you but you weren’t glistening. http://50watts.com/Dedicated-to-you-but-you-weren-t-
glistening
slide 17: clips from OMNI magazine (1980). https://archive.org/details/omni-magazine
slide 18: 25 Vintage Cosmetics Ads from Japan, http://50watts.com/25-Vintage-Cosmetics-Ads-from-Japan
slide 19: 2014 robot calendar, July. Sophia A Zhou on Deviant Art. http://sophiaazhou.deviantart.com/art/2014-
Robot-Calendar-July-421230808
slide 26: E-learning and digital cultures MOOC sociogram, courtesy of Peter Evans
slide 29: Ukranian space invaders, http://50watts.com/Ukrainian-Space-Invaders