Big data for monitoring educational systems

This report considers “how advances in big data are likely to transform the context and methodology of monitoring educational systems within a long-term perspective (10-30 years) and impact the evidence based policy development in the sector”, big data are “large amounts of different types of data produced with high velocity from a high number of various types of sources.” Five independent experts were commissioned by Ecorys, responding to themes of: students' privacy, educational equity and efficiency, student tracking, assessment and skills. The experts were asked to consider the “macro perspective on governance on educational systems at all levels from primary, secondary education and tertiary – the latter covering all aspects of tertiary from further, to higher, and to VET”, prioritising primary and secondary levels of education

Democracy, democratization and climate change : complex relationships

Relationships between democracy and more particularly democratization on the one side and climate change and responses to that on the other are underexplored in the two literatures on democratization and climate change. A complex web exists, characterised by interdependence and reciprocal effects. These must be plotted in as systematic and comprehensive a way as possible. Only then can we establish whether democratization really matters for climate change and for responding adequately to the challenges it poses. And only then can we assess the consequences that a changing climate might have for democracy and democratization. Implications follow for international efforts to support the spread of democracy around the world and for climate governance. This collection of theoretically-informed and empirically rooted studies combines insights from academics and more policy-oriented writers. A major objective is to facilitate dialogue among not just analysts of democracy, democratization and climate change but with actors in two fields: international democracy support and climate action

Will the Legal Singularity Hollow Out Law\u27s Normative Core?

This Article undertakes a critical examination of the unintended consequences for the legal system if we arrive at the futurist dream of a legal singularity—the moment when predictive, mass-data technologies evolve to create a perfectly predictable, algorithmically-expressed legal system bereft of all legal uncertainty. It argues that although the singularity would surely enhance the efficiency of the legal system in a narrow sense, it would also undermine the rule of law, a bedrock institution of any liberal legal order and a key source of the legal system’s legitimacy. It would do so by dissolving the normative content of the two core pillars of the rule of law: the predictability principle and the universality principle, each of which has traditionally been conceived as a bulwark against arbitrary government power. The futurists heralding the legal singularity privilege a weak-form predictability principle that emphasizes providing notice to legal subjects about the content of laws over a strong-form variant that also emphasizes the prevention of arbitrary governmental action. Hence, an inattentive and hurried embrace of predictive technologies in service of the (only weak-form) predictability principle will likely attenuate the rule of law’s connection to the deeper (strong-form) predictability principle. The legal singularity will also destabilize law’s universality principle, by reconceiving of legal subjects as aggregations of data points rather than as individual members of a polity. In so doing, it will undermine the universality principle’s premise that the differences among legal subjects are outweighed by what we—or, better still, “We the People” who are, as Blackstone put it, the “community in general”—have in common. A cautionary directive emerges from this analysis: that lawyers should avoid an uncritical embrace of predictive technologies in pursuit of a shrunken ideal of predictability that might ultimately require them to throw aside much of the normative ballast that has kept the liberal legal order stable and afloat

Monitored

This book explores a central contradiction of 21st century economy and society: the more morally and politically unaccountable capitalism and capitalists are, the more accountable the mass majority of its subjects must become. The technocratic ideology and surveillance culture of our modern marketized societies hides a deeper reality of a free market that is unmanageable and a corporate elite whose actions cannot be traced let alone regulated. This work highlights the paradoxical way an often disjointed and unjustifiable modern neoliberalism persists through subjecting individuals and communities to a wide range of technical and ethical 'accounting' in all areas of contemporary life. These pervasive practices of monitoring and codifying everything and everyone mask how at its heart this system and its elites remain socially uncontrollable and ethically out of control

Postdigital Dialogue

This article is a multi-authored experimental postdigital dialogue about postdigital dialogue. Fourteen authors were invited to produce their sections, followed by two author-reviewers who examined the article as a whole. Authors were invited to reflect on Petar Jandric’s book Learning in the age of digital reason (2017) or to produce completely new insights. The article also contains a summary of book symposium on Learning in the age of digital reason held at the 2017 American Educational Research Conference (AERA). The authors are tentatively confident that this article produces more knowledge than the arithmetic sum of its constituent parts. However, they are also very aware of its limits and insist that their conclusions are not consensual or homogenous. As traditional forms of research increasingly fail to describe our current reality, they present this article as an experiment and a possible starting point for developing new dialogical research approaches fit for our postdigital reality

Law in the present future : approaching the legal imaginary of smart cities with science (and) fiction

This doctoral research concerns smart cities, describing digital solutions and social issues related to their innovative technologies, adopted models, and major projects around the world. The many perspectives mentioned in it were identified by online tools used for the textual analysis of two databases that were built from relevant publications on the main subject by authors coming from media and academia. Expected legal elements emerged from the applied process, such as privacy, security, transparency, participation, accountability, and governance. A general review was produced on the information available about the public policies of Big Data in the two municipal cases of Rio de Janeiro and Montréal, and their regulation in the Brazilian and Canadian contexts. The combined approaches from science and literature were explored to reflect on the normative concerns represented by the global challenges and local risks brought by urban surveillance, climate change, and other neoliberal conditions. Cyberpunk Science Fiction reveals itself useful for engaging with the shared problems that need to be faced in the present time, all involving democracy. The results achieved reveal that this work was, in fact, about the complex network of practices and senses between (post)modern law and the imaginary of the future.Cette recherche doctorale centrée sur les villes intelligentes met en évidence les solutions numériques et les questionnements sociétaux qui ont trait aux technologies innovantes, ainsi qu’aux principaux modèles et projets développés autour d’elles à travers le monde. Des perspectives multiples en lien avec ces développements ont été identifiées à l’aide d’outils en ligne qui ont permis l’analyse textuelle de deux bases de données comprenant des publications scientifiques et des écrits médiatiques. De ce processus analytique ont émergé des éléments juridiques relatifs aux questions de vie privée, de sécurité, de transparence, de participation, d’imputabilité et de gouvernance. De plus, à partir de ces informations a été réalisée une revue des politiques publiques relatives aux mégadonnées dans les villes de Rio de Janeiro et de Montréal, ainsi que des réglementations nationales du Canada et du Brésil en lien avec ce sujet. Finalement, à travers l’exploration d’écrits scientifiques et fictionnels de la littérature, les principaux enjeux normatifs soulevés localement et mondialement par la surveillance urbaine, les changements climatiques et les politiques néolibérales ont pu être mis à jour. Le courant cyberpunk de la science-fiction s’est avéré particulièrement utile pour révéler les principaux problèmes politiques, en lien avec la préservation de la démocratie, auxquelles sont confrontées nos sociétés présentement. Les résultats de la recherche démontrent finalement la présence d’un réseau de pratiques et de significations entre le droit (post)moderne et les représentations imaginaires du futur

The Rhetoric of Big Data: Collecting, Interpreting, and Representing in the Age of Datafication

Rhetorical studies of science, technology, and medicine (RSTM) have provided critical understanding of how argument and argument norms within a field shape what we mean by “data.” Work has also examined how questions that shape data collection are asked, how data is interpreted, and even how data is shared. Understood as a form of argument, data reveals important insights into rhetorical situations, the motives of rhetorical actors, and the broader appeals that shape everything from the kinds of technologies built, to their inclusion in our daily lives, to the infrastructures of cities, the medical practices and policies concerning public health, etc. Big data merits continued attention from RSTM scholars as our understanding of its pervasive use and its ethos grows, but its arguments remain elusive (Salvo, 2012). To unpack the elusivity of big data, we explore one particularly illustrative case of big data and political, democratic influence: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. To understand the case, we turn to social studies of data to explore the range of ethical issues raised by big data, and to examine the rhetorical strategies that entail big data