MORPHOGENESIS · EdTech and the birth of platform education: An ethnographic account of a start-up in the age of global education
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-10-01 → 2024-09-30
- EU contribution
- €269,003
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
EdTech and the birth of platform education: An ethnographic account of a start-up in the age of global education
In its current action plan on digital education, the European Union underlines the ambition of ensuring that all citizens are prepared to live and work in the digital age. The past COVID-19 pandemic, with its widespread closure of schools and universities, has thrown into sharp relief how the introduction of digital technology fundamentally reshapes the organisation of education. Within a few months, it became evident that schooling without school or studying without campus prompts the influx of a new class of actors on an unprecedented scale. This project has focused on such digital reorganisation of education. What role does digital technology play in reshaping the classroom? How do apps and platforms reconfigure the role of teachers? What kind of processes, mechanisms, and objects do digital tools rely on to establish something as worth learning? Who are the engineers behind the machines and what do they claim to know? By addressing these questions, the aim of this research has been twofold: 1) to develop an extended case ethnography of the start-up scene in New York, where this so-called EdTech is currently being imagined, coded and executed into the platforms, and of the classrooms where such digital tools eventually end up; (2) to build a framework that formulates an ensemble of concepts in order to analyse how, through such digital platforms, the reorganization and the differentiation of education go hand in hand, creating new patterns of teaching and learning. These objectives were successfully met through various work packages.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
In its latest action plan on digital education, the European Union underlined the ambition of ensuring that all citizens are prepared to live and work in the digital age. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic, with its widespread closure of schools and universities, has thrown into sharp relief how the introduction of digital technology fundamentally reshapes the organisation of education. Within a few months, it became evident that schooling without school or studying without campus prompts the influx of new, private actors on an unprecedented scale. This project focuses on such digital reorganisation of education, cut off from the classroom. In particular, I propose to investigate how the conversion towards digital learning platforms participates in a worldwide disruption of pedagogical valuation processes. While existing research has so far favoured questions of power and inequalities, the disruptive capacity of these learning platforms to radically redefine what education values as worth learning has hardly been studied. To fill this gap, MORPHOGENESIS proposes (1) to build a framework that formulates an ensemble of concepts with theoretical insights from three related (sub)disciplines (sociology of education, organisation studies and the study of regionalisation and globalisation processes). With the help of Luhmannian systems theory, the coherent formulation of such framework will make it possible to analyse how, through such digital platforms, the reorganisation and the differentiation of global education go hand in hand; (2) to develop an extended case ethnography of the start-up scene in New York, where this so-called EdTech is currently being imagined, coded and executed into the platforms that explicitly aspire to disrupt contemporary education. Together, the conceptual framework and methodology will enable a better grasp of the metamorphosis that education is currently undergoing and the unprecedented role that online learning platforms play within it.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI MODENA E REGGIO EMILIA · ModenaCoordinatorItaly
- TEACHERS COLLEGE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY · New YorkUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union