English

Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing that followed have affected all walks of society, also education. In order to keep education running, educational institutions have had to quickly adapt to the situation. This has resulted in an unprecedented push to online learning. Many, including commercial digital learning platform providers, have rushed to provide their support and ‘solutions’, sometimes for free. The Covid-19 pandemic has therefore also created a sellers’ market in ed-tech. This paper employs a critical lens to reflect on the possible problems arising from hasty adoption of commercial digital learning solutions whose design might not always be driven by best pedagogical practices but their business model that leverages user data for profit-making. Moreover, already before Covid-19, there has been increasing critique of how ed-tech is redefining and reducing concepts of teaching and learning. The paper also challenges the narrative that claims, ‘education is broken, and it should and can be fixed with technology’. Such technologization, often seen as neutral, is closely related to educationalization, i.e. imposing growing societal problems for education to resolve. Therefore, this is a critical moment to reflect how the current choices educational institutions are making might affect with Covid-19 education and online learning: Will they reinforce capitalist instrumental view of education or promote holistic human growth? This paper urges educational leaders to think carefully about the decisions they are currently making and if they indeed pave the way to a desirable future of education.

In New York City in 2009, a new kind of public school opened its doors to its inaugural class of middle schoolers. Conceived by a team of game designers and progressive educational reformers and backed by prominent philanthropic foundations, it promised to reinvent the classroom for the digital age. Ethnographer Christo Sims documented the life of the school from its planning stages to the graduation of its first eighth-grade class. Disruptive Fixation is his account of how this “school for digital kids,” heralded as a model of tech-driven educational reform, reverted to a more conventional type of schooling with rote learning, an emphasis on discipline, and traditional hierarchies of authority. Troubling gender and racialized class divisions also emerged.Sims shows how the philanthropic possibilities of new media technologies are repeatedly idealized even though actual interventions routinely fall short of the desired outcomes—often dramatically so. He traces the complex processes by which idealistic tech-reform perennially takes root, unsettles the worlds into which it intervenes, and eventually stabilizes in ways that remake and extend many of the social predicaments reformers hope to fix. Sims offers a nuanced look at the roles that powerful elites, experts, the media, and the intended beneficiaries of reform—in this case, the students and their parents—play in perpetuating the cycle.Disruptive Fixation offers a timely examination of techno-philanthropism and the yearnings and dilemmas it seeks to address, revealing what failed interventions do manage to accomplish—and for whom.

Digital platforms have become central to interaction and participation in contemporary societies. New forms of ‘platformized education’ are rapidly proliferating across education systems, bringing logics of datafication, automation, surveillance, and interoperability into digitally mediated pedagogies. This article presents a conceptual framework and an original analysis of Google Classroom as an infrastructure for pedagogy. Its aim is to establish how Google configures new forms of pedagogic participation according to platform logics, concentrating on the cross-platform interoperability made possible by application programming interfaces (APIs). The analysis focuses on three components of the Google Classroom infrastructure and its configuration of pedagogic dynamics: Google as platform proprietor, setting the ‘rules’ of participation; the API which permits third-party integrations and data interoperability, thereby introducing automation and surveillance into pedagogic practices; and the emergence of new ‘divisions of labour’, as the working practices of school system administrators, teachers and guardians are shaped by the integrated infrastructure, while automated AI processes undertake the ‘reverse pedagogy’ of learning insights from the extraction of digital data. The article concludes with critical legal and practical ramifications of platform operators such as Google participating in education.

Ever since their appearance in the early 1990s, hypertext novels were presented as the pinnacle of digital aesthetics and claimed to represent the revolutionary future of literature. However, as a literary phenomenon, hypertext novels have remained marginal. The article presents some scientifically derived explanations as to why hypertext novels do not have a mass audience and why they are likely to remain a marginal contribution in the history of literature. Three explanatory frameworks are provided: (1) how hypertext relates to our cognitive information processing in general; (2) the empirically derived psychological reasons for how we read and enjoy literature in particular; and (3) the likely evolutionary origins of such a predilection for storytelling and literature. It is shown how hypertext theory, by ignoring such knowledge, has yielded misguided statements and uncorroborated claims guided by ideology rather than by scientifically supported knowledge.