Tag: education

Posted on

Psychodata: Disassembling social-emotional learning, edutech and policy

Ben Williamson, University of Edinburgh

Thursday, November 6, 4pm – 5.30pm

Room 351, Education Building, University of Sydney

RSVP via Eventbrite

An event cosponsored by the SSESW Education Policy Research Network and the Socio-Tech Futures (STuF) Lab.

Psychology and economics are powerful sources of contemporary governance, and are increasingly influential in education policy and practice. In this context, social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming an educational priority in many parts of the world. Based on the measurement and assessment of students’ ‘noncognitive’ skills, SEL consists of a ‘psycho-economic’ combination of psychometrics with economic analysis, and is producing novel forms of statistical ‘psychodata’ about students. This presentation examines how psychological and economics experts are producing policy-relevant scientific knowledge and statistical psychodata to influence the direction of SEL policies, by following the development of SEL as it has travelled transnationally through the advocacy of psychologists, economists, and behavioural scientists, with support from think tank coalitions, philanthropies, edtech companies (e.g. ClassDojo), investment schemes, and international organizations (e.g. OECD). These emerging efforts to measure SEL instantiate ‘psycho-econometric governance’ within education, part of a political rationality in which society is measured effectively through scientific fact-finding and subjects are managed affectively through psychological intervention.

Ben Williamson is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. He maintains the research blog Code Acts in Education, tweets @BenPatrickWill, and wrote Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice (Sage, 2017). 

Posted on

What can the playful voice teach us about media literacy? – Jacqueline Vickery

Friday 18 October, 3.00pm – 4.30pm

MECO Seminar Room, S226, John Woolley Building A20, University of Sydney

RSVP via Eventbrite

Media education is often built upon democratic ideals of empowering young people to creatively express themselves and “find their voice.” However, youth do not always share these same values, or rather, they may not express them in the same ways as adults. Drawing from experiences leading media workshops for teens in foster care, this talk explores assumptions that both adults and youth make about the value of youth-produced media. At a time when young people are just as likely to learn media codes and conventions from professionally-produced commercial media as they are from memes and amateur digital culture, how does their playful resistance and appropriation of media challenge frameworks of media literacy?

Dr. Jacqueline Ryan Vickery is Associate Professor of Media Arts at the University of North Texas and Director of Research for the Youth Media Lab, a unique collaboration between media researchers and media creators that helps young people use media to create more inclusive and just communities. Drawing from qualitative, feminist, and ethnographic methods, she researches the media practices and representations of marginalized youth, with a particular focus on informal learning, equity, and media literacy. She is the author of “Worried About the Wrong Things: Youth, Risk, and Opportunity in the Digital World” and co-author of “The Digital Edge: How Black and Latino Youth Navigate Digital Inequality.” In the summers she facilitates a storytelling and media workshop for teens in foster care.

Posted on

Digital Knowledge Resources in the Caribbean and Pacific

Friday, 3 May, 2019, 3.00pm – 4.30pm

MECO Seminar Room, S226, John Woolley Building A20, University of Sydney

RSVP via Eventbrite

From YouTube to Talanoa: Digital Knowledge Resources in the Caribbean and Pacific

Theories of learning in and through digital media have largely drawn upon research in Western contexts such as the US and UK. Yet, as sociocultural learning theory has demonstrated, context often requires a re-thinking of the spaces and practices of learning. This seminar examines digital media and learning practices among tertiary sector educators and students at national and regional universities in Fiji and Trinidad. Comparing the use of knowledge resources in each context, we highlight the ways in which learning practices are situated in wider, everyday practices and social relationships and how technology landscapes and infrastructures work together to shape practices of collaboration and peer-to-peer learning.

Heather Horst is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses upon understanding how digital media, technology and other forms of material culture mediate relationships, communication, learning, mobility and our sense of being human. Her books examining these themes include The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, Berg, 2006),Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with Digital Media (Ito, et al. 2010, MIT Press), Digital Anthropology (Horst and Miller, Eds., 2012, Berg), Digital Ethnography (Pink, Horst, et al. 2016, Sage) and The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Perspectives (Foster and Horst, 2018, ANU Press).

Jolynna Sinanan is Research Fellow in Digital Media and Ethnography at the University of Sydney. Her research focusses upon uses of digital media in different cultural contexts in relation to family relationships, gender and migration. Her books include Social Media in Trinidad (UCL Press, 2017), Visualising Facebook(Miller and Sinanan, UCL Press, 2017), Webcam (Miller and Sinanan, Polity, 2014) and How the World Changed Social Media(Miller et. al. 2016, UCL Press).

Fulori Manoa is a researcher from the University of the South Pacific. Her research interests include online and mobile learning in the Pacific Islands, Pacific Islands regionalism and diplomacy.

Sheba Mohammid has over 10 years experience in digital media policy. Her research focuses on how learning is practiced in formal and informal landscapes in a variegated knowledge society, and how people enact learning in their everyday lives through a variety of literacies and fluencies. Dr Mohammid’s applied work has included leadership roles in managing national development projects and serving as ICT policy specialist for the Government of Trinidad and Tobago and a director on the Global Social Media Impact Study. Her academic and applied interests have intersected as she has strategised and delivered e-learning to participants from over 50 countries.

Posted on

This changes everything! What “the digital” means for the purposes and practices of education

This changes everything! What “the digital” means for the purposes and practices of education

Friday September 21, 3pm – 4.30

John Woolley Common Room, N480, John Woolley Building, A20

University of Sydney

RSVP via Eventbrite

Schools and education systems are caught in the headlights of the digital era. Just as John Dewey formulated the principles of education for democracy in the context of violent industrialisation, rapid urbanisation and unprecedented social change in a new and emerging nation, so the global effects of computerisation and the digital are going to transform the wider purposes of education in both liberal democratic and authoritarian societies. This talk will open up debates around: the changing function and practices of school itself; the wider purposes of digital literacy; changing nature of civic participation in an increasingly digitalised and datafied society; and the limits of the discipline of Education as principles and practices buckle and strain in an increasingly competitive and unfair world.

Bio: Julian Sefton-Green is Professor of New Media Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He has worked as an independent scholar and has held positions at the Department of Media & Communication, London School of Economics & Political Science and at the University of Oslo working on projects exploring learning and learner identity across formal and informal domains. He has been an Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Nottingham, UK and the Institute of Education, Hong Kong and he is now a Visiting Professor at The Playful Learning Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland.

He has been the Head of Media Arts and Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media College – a centre for informal training and education – where he directed a range of digital media activities for young people and co-ordinated training for media artists and teachers. Prior to that he worked as Media Studies teacher in an inner city comprehensive London; and in higher education teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses, leading teacher training degrees in media education.

He has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, new technologies, creativity, digital cultures and informal learning and has authored, co-authored or edited 14 books. Recent volumes include The Class: living and learning in the digital age (New York University Press, 2016), Learning Identities, Education and Community: young lives in the cosmopolitan city (Cambridge University Press 2016) and Learning beyond the School: international perspectives on the schooled society (Routledge, 2018). He has directed research projects for the Arts Council of England, the British Film Institute, the London Development Agency, Creative Partnerships and Nominet Trust and has spoken at over 40 conferences in 20 countries.