Journal
LEARNING MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
Volume 46, Issue 4, Pages 420-434Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2021.1913181
Keywords
Education technology; pre-emption; configuration; automation; governance
Categories
Funding
- Australian Research Council [FT180100280]
- UNSW Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and Faculty Funding for Higher Degree Researchers
- Australian Research Council [FT180100280] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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Pre-emption in EdTech refers to an automated system that guides the present towards a desired future by utilizing knowledge from the past. This paper explores how students and EdTech work together to make pre-emption a normalized governance instrument. Despite excluding students and configuring them as absent, pre-emptive EdTech interventions have significant material consequences.
Pre-emption describes a system of automated knowledge creation and intervention that steers the present towards a desirable future, by building on knowledge derived from the past. Folding together temporalities makes it impossible to disprove pre-emption. It is increasingly featured within EdTech, introducing new forms of automated governance into education. This paper examines how students and EdTech come together to make pre-emption possible, not as a single event but as a normalised governance instrument. For this, we introduce Lucy Suchman's idea of configuration to examine pre-emptive EdTech. The paper presents three openings into the configuration of students and pre-emptive EdTech. These include observations from an EdTech trade show; interviews with insiders of technology companies; and analysis of accepted papers to a learning analytics conference. We conclude the data used at the heart of pre-emptive EdTech seeks to exclude students and configures them as absent. Yet, its interventions have material consequences.
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