Sociodigital futuring methods in edtech industry and investment

Examining the methods edtech industry and investors use to construct futures of education

A side view of people in a lecture theatre. The lighting is dark and dramatic. The seats are tiered and everyone is facing an unseen speaker or screen on the left. People are engaged and many of those in the audience have their hands raised.

Background

Futures of educational technology are often presented by industry and investment actors as predictable and inevitable. Little is known, however, about the specific methods that are used to construct future expectations about edtech.

Our research investigates how edtech industry and investment organizations construct visions of the future through specific methods and associated technologies, in order to better understand how particular futures are being pursued and materialized in technical products.

The project is timely as advances in cloud infrastructures and AI are centred in dominant expectations about the future of education, and practices of teaching, learning and administration may become locked in to technical arrangements that serve industry and investor interests over educational values. 

Futuring methods

We are investigating the futuring methods used by edtech industry and investment organizations. These methods include forecasting and prediction, horizon scanning and expert consultation, and data-driven trend analysis. The research contributes to our understanding of how methods and technologies of speculation are strategically deployed to make claims about the future, and to better understand how futuring methods are used to construct targets for action in the present. 

Discourse and technographic analysis

The research involves detailed documentary analysis of websites, reports, blog posts and other materials produced by edtech industry and investment organizations. We use discourse analysis methods to understand how narrative expectations are constructed by organizations through texts and images, and technographic analysis of the futuring methods, instruments, and data analysis techniques used to construct future visions.

Sociodigital edtech futuring

Futuring methods are themselves sociodigital practices. Social actors across edtech industry and investment utilize particular technologies for specific purposes, and to make powerful claims on the future and what to do about it. In that sense, we are investigating sociodigital futuring practices by examining the organizations, technologies and methods used by social actors to specify how educational futures could be, or should be, and to animate actions in the present so those futures materialize as expected.

Opportunities and outcomes

The project will produce new knowledge about the methodological techniques and practices that are used strategically by edtech industry and investment organizations to speculate on futures of education. It will be of benefit to educators and policy workers as a counter to dominant narratives of technical inevitability surrounding cloud and AI platforms and infrastructures in education. The work also involves identifying alternative sociodigital futuring programs in community, activist and educator-led settings, including those driven by values of reparation, care, sovereignty and democratization, and which offer necessary counter-imaginaries to the dominant claims and interests of the edtech industry and its investors.

Two initial research articles have been produced from this work:

  • Sriprakash, A., Williamson, B., Facer, K., Pykett, J., & Valladares Celis, C. (2024). Sociodigital futures of education: reparations, sovereignty, care, and democratisation. Oxford Review of Education, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2024.2348459
  • Williamson, B., Valladares Celis, C., Sriprakash, A., Pykett, J. & Facer, K. (Under revision).  Algorithmic futuring: predictive infrastructures of valuation and investment in the assetization of edtech. Learning, Media and Technology, special issue on ‘Rents, assets and governance in digitalised education’.

CenSoF investigators: Keri Facer, Jessica Pykett, Arathi Sriprakash, Carolina Valladares Celis, Ben Williamson.

Research highlights

Find out more about other projects within the Centre.

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