The COVID pandemic highlighted the increasing deployment of digital technologies in educational institutions, defined as 'edtech'. The most visible edtech was video conferencing software, but a swathe of edtech startups have sought to roll out their products and services to educational institutions. We focus specifically on the deployment of…

Amid the increasing reliance on digital tools and services in education, this article examines the datafication and commodification of student life in Denmark. We analyse the web and app (iOS and Android) versions of 45 tools and services that teachers in Danish public primary schools use as part of their teaching, the types of data generated by…

As a result of the growing commercial marketplace for teachers' digital data, a new organization that includes educational data brokers has evolved. Educational data brokerage is relatively intangible due to the ease of de-identified data being collected and sold via educational technology. There is an urgent need to expose how the brokerage of…

This paper adds an algorithmic epistemology perspective to previous works that examine the datafication of subjective social and emotional characteristics, perceptions, and behaviours. The paper employs a comparative epistemological approach to explore two behavioural educational platforms: RedCritter Teacher and Panorama Education. We unpack…

A socio-legal analysis of the UK governance regime for data collected from children at school for teaching and learning contrasts the government-mandated data collection by schools to inform educational policy and planning with data processed and shared with third parties by commercial EdTech providers. We find the former is effectively governed…

Whilst technology may have been the 'saviour' of HE from the immediate challenges of the pandemic, the opportunistic dialogue emerging in response is imbued with notions of the pandemic as a catalyst for change. Empowered by the apparent success of technology's deliverance, the door has been opened to unprecedented investment into a pervasive and…

We draw upon Appadurai's 'scapes' and Latour's Actor Network Theory (ANT) to interrogate historical and spatial flows in relation to specific testing technologies. We reveal how testing systems, conceptualised as actor-networks, rearticulate colonial legacies of inequality which are intensified by new and emerging technologies. ANT helps trace…

The pressure towards digital education is felt everywhere including in places with extreme digital divides. Resource-constrained educational environments are particularly threatened by datification manifest in the dominant business models of surveillance capitalism as there is less room in such contexts to refuse the 'free' offerings from big tech…

This article analyses the smartphone application TeacherTapp that is used to collect and disseminate information on teachers' views on education and their classroom practices. The research takes as its object of analysis the use of TeacherTapp in England and Flanders. We analyze what TeacherTapp is, how it relates to a given localized community in…

This article explores the history of digital testing technology. Using an organisation that pioneered the use of international large-scale assessments -- the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) -- I discuss the role of computers, punched cards, answer cards and scanning machines as an example of…

The purpose of this essay is to conceptualize accessibility in digital education for school children through a minimal computing perspective. This perspective prioritizes the contextual, social, and relational as part of the ethic of minimal computing mantra to consider "What." "We." "Need." To achieve our goals, we…