Transformation von Governance in Bildung und Gesellschaft

Schools are increasingly grappling with challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies, exemplified by the omnipresence of chatbots and their repercussions for pedagogical practices. This paper explores the case of how ChatGPT unfolds in, and affects, students’ writing practices and what the implications are thereof. We conceptualise ChatGPT as a "thinking infrastructure" that structures and affects attention, decision-making, and cognition. By researching two schools in Belgium and Germany, we discuss how students engage with ChatGPT when performing school tasks. Our analysis shows how ChatGPT affects students’ writing practices by generating habits, valuating knowledge, cultivating affinity, and prompting thought. This, we argue, illuminates shifts in what it means to be educated today. We suggest the need to further articulate the new conditions of learning emerging through GenAI technologies and propose the need for a pedagogy that fosters infrastructure literacy.

This article contributes to expanding discussions on the rising hybridity of (edtech) events and, in conjunction to that, of ethnographic (edtech) event research. With hybridity, we point to the increasing postdigital condition of contemporary society. Even though such hybridity, and its methodological consequences for ethnographic research, are increasingly discussed, few attention has so far been put on how this hybridity manifests in, and is mediated through, orchestrations of data infrastructures. This article presents hybrid team ethnography as a way to study, and at the same time be intricately interwoven with, such infrastructure-mediated hybridity. Concretely, we report on an ethnography in which we studied an event in the edtech startup sector. Our findings showcase how researchers co-construct and are shaped by events, not just through dynamic interplays between physical presence-absence, but equally through data infrastructures and research(er) presentation. Moreover, they simultaneously showcase how edtech events unfold infrastructurally over space and time.

Over the past years, the potential benefits and risks of educational technologies (EdTech) in schools have been increasingly debated. At the same time, research has only started to develop a more nuanced understanding of the manifold pedagogical effects of these technologies in school and classroom practice. Within the broader context of the dtec.bw project SMASCH (Smart Schools), which aims at supporting schools in their digital transformation, this chapter focuses on concrete manifestations and effects of automated evaluation practices on teachers' work. More specifically, the study analysed the screen recordings of ten digital tests from the moment of their creation to their archiving and is equally based on interviews with teachers about their evaluative practices. The findings of the study indicate different and ambivalent processes that reconfigure the relations between teachers and technology, which we exemplify using two cases – when teachers make digital tests for later automation, and when teachers supervise the machine's actual grading and feedback provision practices. Our findings not only offer important conclusions regarding how automated evaluation can, and should, be more strongly framed in a pedagogical manner, but they can also inform the need for a careful response to the more recent rise of GenAI technologies.

Die vorliegende kumulative Dissertation erkundet aus einer kritischen Perspektive die pädagogischen sowie organisationalen Wirkungsdynamiken von Bildungstechnologienim Kontext Schule. Dabei stellt sie die Frage in den Mittelpunkt, wie solche Wirkungsdynamiken im Rahmen kritisch-partizipativer Designprozesse sicht- sowie reflektierbar gemacht werden können und welche soziotechnischen Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten sich daraus ergeben. Für die vorliegenden vier Studien wurden Designprozesse an Hamburger Schulen begleitet, die im Rahmen des Forschungsprojekts Smarte Schulen (SMASCH) zwischen Schulakteuren, Forschenden, Medienpädagog*innen und Prozessbegleitungen stattfanden. Ein Fokus lag dabei auf der individuellen Gestaltung des Hamburger Lernmanagementsystems (LMS) LMS.lernen.hamburg an vier Schulen. Theoretisch-konzeptionell verortet sich die Arbeit in den Science and Technology Studies (STS). Aus dieser Perspektive werden Bildungstechnologien als soziotechnische Gefüge verstanden, die sich in Abhängigkeit zum Kontext und damit einhergehenden Akteurskonstellationen stetig neuformieren und unterschiedliche Praktiken sowie Relationen hervorbringen. Gleichzeitig wird Design hier nicht als produktorientiertes Unterfangen verstanden, sondern als prozessuale, relationale Praktik, die bestimmte Handlungs-, Denk- und Seinsweisen (un)möglich macht. Um diese relationale Konstitution zwischen Designobjekt und Kontext zu fokussieren, greift die Arbeit methodologisch auf kritische sowie partizipative Designansätze zurück. Diese sehen in Design das Potential, dass Forschende und Praktiker*innen gemeinsam reflektieren, welche soziotechnischen, kontextspezifischen Wirkungsdynamiken mit Technologiegestaltung einhergehen und wie diese adressiert werden können. Durch eine Kombination mit ethnographischen Vorgehensweisen wird die Gestaltung der schulischen Zukunftsszenarien an einer tiefen Auseinandersetzung mit dem lokalen Ist-Status sowie dem fortlaufenden Prozess ausgerichtet. Publikation I setzt die Promotionsarbeit in den Gesamtkontext des SMASCH-Projekts und ordnet es in Bezug auf bisher existierende gestaltungsorientierte Bildungsforschung als kritisch-partizipatives Projekt ein. Publikation II führt die konkreten Ansätze des Critical und Participatory Designs ein und stellt dar, welche Herausforderungen entstehen, wenn diese auf Logiken und Praktiken des Schulalltags treffen. Publikation III und IV fokussieren explizit die Gestaltung von LMS.lernen.hamburg. Publikation III rückt dabei die Grundstruktur des LMS in den Fokus und analysiert, inwiefern es sich an den individuellen Schulkontext anpassen lässt bzw. diesen durch vorbestimmte technische sowie visuelle Strukturen beeinflusst. Publikation IV zeigt, welche Rolle Visualisierungen in der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem LMS im Rahmen der schulischen Designprozesse gespielt haben. Die Publikationen sowie der Manteltext zeigen, wie schulische sowie bildungspolitische Logiken und technische Strukturen im beforschten LMS die schulindividuellen Gestaltungsprozesse und damit zusammenhängende Wirkungsdynamiken erheblich geprägt haben. Gleichzeitig veranschaulichen sie, wie durch die Praktik des kritischen Co-Designs und ethnographische Sensibilitäten pädagogische und organisationale Wirkungsdynamiken von EdTech sichtbar gemacht werden können, die sonst oft unbemerkt bleiben.

This paper discusses and develops rhythmanalysis as a methodological approach to dis­entangle the temporalities of digital and predictive governance; that is, how governance evolves through temporal ordering effects produced with, and through, digital technologies. Whilst rhythmanalysis, as it has become broadly used in the social sciences over the past decades, primarily focuses on ‘lived’ (rhythmic) practices of people, we argue that rhythmanalysis can also be developed as a framework to investigate the temporalities of digital governance environments. Using the field of education and, more specifically, the case of Early Warning Systems in US schooling as a worked example, we show how such a framework allows one to approach temporalities through, first, identifying chronorhythms (defined by chrono­logical time), kairorhythms (defined by identifying and intervening in ‘right’ moments in time) and algorhythms (defined by the design of a technology). The second dimension is to analyze relations between those rhythms; more notably, synchronization (i.e., the coordination of rhythms in time), sychorization (i.e., the coordination of rhythms in space) and disruption (i.e., the altering or coming to a stop of particular rhythms). Finally, the framework includes visualization as a third dimension of rhythmic analysis, specifically through practices of selecting, drawing and world-making. Overall, this framework can inspire scholars interested in empirically disentangling temporal and predictive governance, within and beyond the field of education.

The platformization of education is incrementally redefining the roles of teachers in schools by (re-)structuring professional practices. While most research has focused on how this occurs in the context of proprietary platforms, this article investigates how professionality is configured through open-source platforms, offering increased possibilities for platform customizability. Despite its claims for openness, this paper elaborates how Moodle imagines specific types of ‘open teachers’ and how professionality can be conceptualized as active navigations through its platform environments. By analyzing teachers’ practices in Moodle environments in two Belgian schools, we identify three enactments of professionality, grounded in different navigational logics: proceduralizing, patchworking, and co-evolving. This article concludes by arguing how professionality ultimately emerges at the crossroads of platforms’ habituation (i.e., accustoming teachers to open-source models) and teachers’ habitation (i.e., attempts to balance requirements of platform environments with one's pedagogical desires), and what this implies for the cultivation of platform literacies.

Digitale Bildungstechnologien (EdTech) wecken hohe Erwartungen und sind Bestandteil diverser Versprechen in puncto Individualisierung, Entlastung oder selbstgesteuertes Lernen. Doch was steckt wirklich in diesen Technologien und welche Folgen ergeben sich hieraus für die Pädagogik? Ausgehend vom Ziel einer reflektierten Gestaltung schulischer Digitalisierung bringt der Sammelband in dieser Form erstmalig Forschung und Praxisansätze aus Deutschland zusammen, welche typische Versprechen von EdTech kritisch hinterfragen. Statt pauschaler Euphorie oder Ablehnung plädieren die Beiträge des Bandes für ein differenziertes Bild – und liefern damit Inspiration für alle, die konkrete Ansätze für einen bewussten Einsatz von EdTech suchen.

With the rising prevalence of digital data, infrastructures and platforms in education, the challenge of conceptualizing and investigating ‘intermediaries’ has substantially increased. This not only refers to various new types of actors that have been materializing around practices of data infrastructuring (e.g., data management), but equally to the rising empowerment of data infrastructures themselves as intermediaries of policy and governance. The aim of this article is to sharpen our conceptual understanding of this interrelation between intermediaries and data infrastructuring. More specifically, the article suggests to approach intermediaries through a lens on performative contexting, thus shifting the focus towards how ‘intermediary contexting’ is used, by whom and where exactly, rather than seeking to map intermediaries as an object ‘from the outside’. Data infrastructuring, then, can be regarded both as part, and as a result, of such contexting efforts. Using Estonia as a case study, it is shown what we see (differently) when applying such a lens to the digital transformation of education. The findings hereby indicate a gradual emergence of what could be described as ‘governance by intermediarization’: a process in which more and more actors are shifted into the (self)contexting as infrastructural stewards, while the politics of digital transformation become centered – i.e., seemingly depoliticized – around asserting continuous change through digital connection.