Pervasive Monitoring with Educational Technologies

Summary

Education has often involved the monitoring of student attendance and behavior in order to track students’ academic progress, assign grades, administer services, and discipline student conduct. However, this monitoring has become increasingly more granular and pervasive across kindergarten through grade 12 and higher education, including through the use of educational technologies (edtech). Edtech are tools built for the education sector that promise to enhance student learning and instruction. Both high- and low-income nations have turned to edtech in the name of reducing educational inequities and delivering improvements in quality, often through partnerships with corporations, international nongovernmental organizations, and venture philanthropy. Although many of these tools are marketed as a means of supporting student autonomy through self-directed learning or improving instructional quality, scholars from multiple disciplines have identified a range of ethical issues with the ways these tools sort and track both students and teachers. These issues include matters of privacy, discrimination, exploitation, and technological solutionism, meaning the reduction of complex social phenomena to neatly defined problems that can be solved and optimized for using edtech. The surveillance-related implications of edtech have inspired various forms of individual and collective resistance throughout the world, from subtle, everyday forms of non-use to organized opposition, policy interventions, and decolonial approaches to edtech research and design methods.

Although critical edtech research has seen significant growth since the early 2000s, a growing area of concern is explicitly focused on the role of generative artificial intelligence in education technology. New conceptual tools and frameworks are needed for understanding and problematizing edtech’s relationship to surveillance in ways that trouble narratives of inevitability, including through journals, conferences, and community building that bring together researchers across national contexts. At their core, edtech and the pervasive monitoring that many of these tools require are inseparable from debates about what the future of education should look like, including how best to address long-standing structural inequalities in the education sector, funding challenges, worsening educator working conditions, and the power of Big Tech.