Education International
Mapping Organisations and Activities In this main substantive section we map private and commercial sector responses to the pandemic in HE, focusing especially on educational technology (edtech). We have been purposively selective in this exercise. It is not possible to capture the entirety of the edtech response to COVID-19. Instead, we have selected examples, discourses and issues that allow us to draw out key dynamics of HE marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation that have been reproduced or exacerbated by processes of increasing digitalisation and datafication. Throughout these cases we clearly evidence a growing demand for edtech solutions in HE to the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
1. Animating imaginaries Important aspects of any intended technology-based transformation are the initial acts of imagination that set out the rationale and desired effects. Social theorists refer to ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ as the visions of a future society, social life and social order that inspire and animate technical development (Jasanoff, 2015). Though sociotechnical imaginaries can originate from a single charismatic individual or organisation, their power to influence the direction of technical design, or the uptake of particular kinds of available technologies, comes when they become collectively held, institutionally stabilised and publicly performed as shared visions and objectives. At the present time, dominant imaginaries of digital, data-intensive futures circulating in the technology sector, the media, governments and popular culture alike are already becoming stabilised and normalised.34 They transmit the values and ambitions of certain individuals and groups to others, attract coalitions of consensus, produce conviction that such visions are attainable, desirable and should be pursued, and animate actual technical development and digital practice - though of course not without considerable contestation from individuals and groups with alternative values and visions (Broussard, 2018).
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Ruppert, E. 2018. Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Different Data Futures. Erasmus University Rotterdam: http://research.gold.ac.uk/23570/1/Ruppert%202018.pdf
