Webinars
Fall 2019
October 14/15th:
Reflections on the upcoming CIES theme: Education Beyond the Human
Reflections on the upcoming CIES theme: Education Beyond the Human
Panelists:
- Stephen Carney, Roskilde University (panelist)
- Chris Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison (host)
- Iveta Silova, Arizona State University (panelist)
- Weili Zhao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (panelist)
- William Brehm, Waseda University (moderator)
Spring 2018
The Datafication of Comparative Education
Update (5/29/18): FreshEd has cut a podcast version of the webinar and it is available for download or streaming on its website.
On May 16th, 2018, the Post-Foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education SIG hosted its second webinar. The aim of this 60-minute webinar was to explore how algorithmic governance/datafication of governance is transforming what we mean by both “comparative” and “education.” Specifically, the conversation attended to how data and algorithms are reshaping ways of thinking, seeing, acting, and feeling in educational research, policy, and practice. The webinar was organized in collaboration with Will Brehm (FreshEd), who hosted the webinar and moderated a conversation with Nelli Piattoeva (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), Ezekiel Dixon-Román (University of Pennsylvania), and Noah W. Sobe, (Loyola University Chicago). These scholars offered substantive and theoretically grounded commentary on thinking with and through “data” and the ethical dimensions of today’s imperative to be “data-driven.”
The conversation was inspired by Orit Halpern's Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. (Duke University Press, 2015).
While Will’s role was to moderate the live conversation between the participants. Chris Kirchgasler (University of Kansas) monitored the online conversation and filtered up audience members' questions to Will to include in the conversation as appropriate. The complete listing of questions submitted are as follows.
Update (5/29/18): FreshEd has cut a podcast version of the webinar and it is available for download or streaming on its website.
On May 16th, 2018, the Post-Foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education SIG hosted its second webinar. The aim of this 60-minute webinar was to explore how algorithmic governance/datafication of governance is transforming what we mean by both “comparative” and “education.” Specifically, the conversation attended to how data and algorithms are reshaping ways of thinking, seeing, acting, and feeling in educational research, policy, and practice. The webinar was organized in collaboration with Will Brehm (FreshEd), who hosted the webinar and moderated a conversation with Nelli Piattoeva (Humboldt-Universität Berlin), Ezekiel Dixon-Román (University of Pennsylvania), and Noah W. Sobe, (Loyola University Chicago). These scholars offered substantive and theoretically grounded commentary on thinking with and through “data” and the ethical dimensions of today’s imperative to be “data-driven.”
The conversation was inspired by Orit Halpern's Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. (Duke University Press, 2015).
While Will’s role was to moderate the live conversation between the participants. Chris Kirchgasler (University of Kansas) monitored the online conversation and filtered up audience members' questions to Will to include in the conversation as appropriate. The complete listing of questions submitted are as follows.
- I would like to hear panelists comment on datafication in relation to falsification/fabrication of data, culture of auditing, and most importantly, how datafication may look different across cultures. In other words, data is not only a means of algorithmic governing, but is lived social reality that renders data various changing meanings across space and time.
- Does datafication make actors in schools see each other as data? Are schools, teachers, students increasingly viewed as data points, and do they view each other as data? How might this be problematic for education? It seems relevant in both schools and universities.
- In thinking about how data is captured and what it does, I would be interested in hearing the panelists talk about privacy and whose data is being used to drive decision-making in education. Secondly, if the data we capture, especially through algorithms, tells us what people do rather than what people would do given greater choices, how does this impact decision-making in education.
- I'm wondering if the panel might say something about how they see different historical traces, if at all, between data, information, and systems theory 'kinds' (e.g., closed/open, apoeitic/self-referential, emergent/complexity) and ways of 'seeing" and 'thinking' about 'making up people' or other issues related to the larger conversation (e.g., algorithmic governance, privacy, geographies, citizenship, etc.).
- What governs the ethical use of data in comparative education? Big Ed Data companies like Pearson and Elsevier gather paradata and do so in ways that are undetectable but certainly commercially valuable. What do panelists think are the most important ways to regulate and expose these companies and the potentially larger looming issues around surveillance and privacy?
- Can the panelists talk some more about the assumed separation between humans and technology? What, to speak with Haraway, if we accept the idea that we are all cyborgs, humans would never be outside data even as it is now produced.
- In regards to Noah's comments, the way he talks about data mining reminds me of "letting land lay bare" for profit making... Does data have to be "used" to perform its function?
- Can you explain more about the role of researcher in the era of big data? How can we know it’s big data that produces knowledge or generate problems (i.e., that data talks) and that researchers is talking through big data?
Fall 2017
On September 29, 2017 the Post-foundational Approaches to Comparative and International Education SIG held its first webinar Discussing Comics and Notions of the Human. Elizabeth de Freitas (Manchester Metropolitan University), Daniel Friedrich (Teachers College, Columbia University), and Jinting Wu (State University of New York at Buffalo). The panelists shared their readings of and critically interrogated the comic The Vision Vol. 1 and Vol.2.
The discussion was hosted by Susanne Ress (Humboldt-Universität Berlin).
The discussion was hosted by Susanne Ress (Humboldt-Universität Berlin).
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Questions and Comments from the Audience
I am interested in the term "vision" itself described in this comic book. "Vision" is not only ocular sense like observation but also has the temporal like mission as vision. How the panelists think about the ocular and temporal sense of vision?
I really appreciated the discussion of Virginia as suburban housewife. what do the panelists make of her killing of the Grim Reaper but then claiming he fled? Does this help us think about human and. Nonhuman death?
For this comic aiming for teenage readers, I felt like it was asking "Is this normal? Are you Normal? With today's issue with Racism uprising again. Evolution has always had a problem to progress due to human interference, thinking we are at the peak already. Reminds me with the issue the X-Men had during the 60’s-70’s. Like Doctor Jinting Wu said, “So far” when it comes to evolution.
The Vision seems to be teaching to his family (he created them, right?) how to be human. At times his advice seems to be stereotyped, and his wife seems not entirely convinced of what he says because stereotypes are conflicting with her personal experience He is the originator of his family, but his children (his wife included) seem to know life better than he does, in their empiricist perspective. Isn't this a sort of criticism of patriarchal education? Of "tradition" from an empiricist perspective?
How is the notion to be interpreted in the context of Vision's statement that to "assert as truth that which has no meaning is the core mission of humanity" related to the notion of lying? Also, synthezoids are supposed to have purpose, where human supposedly do not. Why do they want to be normalised, i.e. fit in to suburban America and send the kids to school, it seems the feel they need to learn to have a meaningless existence?
Isn't "lying" is a "resistant" aspect of computerized, coded, algorimatized non-human android, which could be seen as a humanity aspect?? To the discussion of existence, being, and purpose: I would suggest that the Visions’ quest to be human seems to require an exoticizing of what it means to be human.
It is an attempt to break existence or being into its constitutive elements (represented in both disturbing and comic ways in the story). I was reminded of celebrities in Hollywood who seek to become Buddhists by particular appropriations of style, ritual, declarations, and so on. Not that these celebrities are or are not “real” Buddhists. That’s not my point. Rather, the very quest to “become” Buddhist presumes a making Other (the “real” Buddhist who models for the Hollywood Buddhist a new existence to emulate). What it means to be Buddhist must be broken down and selectively mimicked in order to achieve a different but desirable quality of “being.” Could the Visions’ quest, by analogy, be read as a similar quest—to become Other to oneself (with all the contradictions this entails)? And is this a “human” quest, if not a paradoxical one?
I am interested in the term "vision" itself described in this comic book. "Vision" is not only ocular sense like observation but also has the temporal like mission as vision. How the panelists think about the ocular and temporal sense of vision?
I really appreciated the discussion of Virginia as suburban housewife. what do the panelists make of her killing of the Grim Reaper but then claiming he fled? Does this help us think about human and. Nonhuman death?
For this comic aiming for teenage readers, I felt like it was asking "Is this normal? Are you Normal? With today's issue with Racism uprising again. Evolution has always had a problem to progress due to human interference, thinking we are at the peak already. Reminds me with the issue the X-Men had during the 60’s-70’s. Like Doctor Jinting Wu said, “So far” when it comes to evolution.
The Vision seems to be teaching to his family (he created them, right?) how to be human. At times his advice seems to be stereotyped, and his wife seems not entirely convinced of what he says because stereotypes are conflicting with her personal experience He is the originator of his family, but his children (his wife included) seem to know life better than he does, in their empiricist perspective. Isn't this a sort of criticism of patriarchal education? Of "tradition" from an empiricist perspective?
How is the notion to be interpreted in the context of Vision's statement that to "assert as truth that which has no meaning is the core mission of humanity" related to the notion of lying? Also, synthezoids are supposed to have purpose, where human supposedly do not. Why do they want to be normalised, i.e. fit in to suburban America and send the kids to school, it seems the feel they need to learn to have a meaningless existence?
Isn't "lying" is a "resistant" aspect of computerized, coded, algorimatized non-human android, which could be seen as a humanity aspect?? To the discussion of existence, being, and purpose: I would suggest that the Visions’ quest to be human seems to require an exoticizing of what it means to be human.
It is an attempt to break existence or being into its constitutive elements (represented in both disturbing and comic ways in the story). I was reminded of celebrities in Hollywood who seek to become Buddhists by particular appropriations of style, ritual, declarations, and so on. Not that these celebrities are or are not “real” Buddhists. That’s not my point. Rather, the very quest to “become” Buddhist presumes a making Other (the “real” Buddhist who models for the Hollywood Buddhist a new existence to emulate). What it means to be Buddhist must be broken down and selectively mimicked in order to achieve a different but desirable quality of “being.” Could the Visions’ quest, by analogy, be read as a similar quest—to become Other to oneself (with all the contradictions this entails)? And is this a “human” quest, if not a paradoxical one?
We thank everyone for participating in and contributing to the discussion!
Please stay tuned for future sessions.
Please stay tuned for future sessions.
