Propädeutik für Studierende der Kommunikationswissenschaft

Die Propädeutik führt die Studierenden in das Studium der Kommunikationswissenschaft ein. Im ersten Teil befasst sie sich mit dem Wissenschaftsbegriff im allgemeinen sowie mit der Kommunikationswissenschaft, ihrer Geschichte und ihrem spezifischen Forschungsinteresse. Im zweiten Teil unterweist sie die Studierenden in die wichtigsten wissenschaftlichen Arbeitstechniken und Hilfsmittel: von der Unterscheidung wissenschaftlicher Textarten und ihrer Recherche über das Bibliografieren und Zitieren, den Aufbau und die typografische Gestaltung schriftlicher Arbeiten bis hin zum Referat. Checklisten, Aufgaben und Lösungen unterstützen dabei den Lernprozess

The Hyperdodge: How Users Resist Algorithmic Objects in Everyday Life

International audienceThis paper asks what we can learn if we research algorithms via a bottom-up methodology from a users" perspective to see how everyday users can resist algorithmic objectives. In doing this, this paper theorizes the framework of agency in which users can shape and reshape algorithmic outcomes. The argument draws on theoretical knowledge grounded in empirical data produced in 10 in-depth interviews, Heidegger"s phenomenology of experience, and De Certeau"s notion of practices in everyday life. It explains how the phenomenology of experience can render algorithms visible for users by asking not what algorithms are, but by reflecting upon their meaning and how these reflections can transform into practices of everyday resistance. Finally, this article speculates about the potential implications of (meta-)data on machine learning that is purposely being manipulated by users, creating the possibility of what I am labelling a "hyperdodge"

Automating Education: Investigating the emergence of Artificial Intelligence in education governance

Personalized pedagogies, efficient organisational management, or precision policy develop-ment: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressively becoming involved in supplementing, sup-porting, or substituting decision-making processes in education. In the wake of this intensify-ing uptake, this thesis seeks to understand how AI is making a difference in how education comes to be understood, lived, and governed. To make sense of and follow the involvement of AI in educational decision-making processes, it is described across this thesis as automated education governance. In its extended meaning, this form of governance refers to a socio-material practice which comes to be understood through the notion of ‘method assemblage’ – a theoretical framework describing how methods – such as AI – and notions of reality rein-force and sustain one another through the crafting of presence. Across the method assemblage of automated education governance crafting of presence with AI becomes a pursuit of closure that enacts reality as being definite and singular. The thesis opens with three contextualising chapters: Governing locates the major themes of AI, education policy, automation, and digital education governance. Assembling positions AI as part of a wider method assemblage that shapes understandings of students, institutions, learning and education. The thesis then follows a diffractive metaphor outlined in chapter three and offers five cuts that expose the transformative impacts of AI: Automating investi-gates the convergence of notions of learning between humans and machines; Configuring is a multi-sited event ethnography that seeks to understand how students, machines and data are figured together for AI to work; Imagining explores socio-technical imaginaries of automation at a large Australian university; Translating is grounded in interviews and problematises how educational data exists in multiplicity but becomes enacted in singularity; and Intervening is an exercise in speculative computation that automates learning by building a device that can write and grade its own assignments. Reading across these investigations reveals that AI makes a difference in governing education because its hinterland affords certainty and therefore the possibility to make every educational event knowable and manageable prior to its emergence. Certainty, however, is not achieved through advances in computing machinery, but rather wider socio-material practices of the method assemblage working to redefine education into a series of step-by-step procedures and computational categories

PRESSURE CONTROLS: DATA FORCES CREEPING THROUGH FINGERTIP COMMANDS

AI methods and ubiquitous data sensors have enabled a new algorithmic quantification of affect with the possibility to detect or verify users’ identities, characteristics, emotional states, and physical traits. By scrutinizing how transient datasets are produced by user applied pressure on touch-screens (via fingertip commands) this paper showcases how sensory technology creeps into users’ everyday life with potential implementations connected to a series of emerging data issues engineered by a black-box design: one which obfuscates data production and precludes user consent under the disguise of “non-intrusive” features. Thereby, this paper explores the limits of user-based interrogation of black-boxes by researching tactile modes of operation, as a subset of behavioural biometrics, and sensors that register force in touch analysis and haptic technologies. Presenting a citation analysis of biometric techniques around the proposed usage of pressure; the authors offer a case-study examination of zinc-based force-sensing materials that are cost-effective and scalable to ubiquitous-computing and a prototype developed using ‘each pixel as a sensor’. By combining these approaches, this paper argues that such developments constitute a phenomenological shift away from users’ perception to data infrastructures working as assemblages of hidden technical sensations, and there is a need to expose these complex networks to afford some grasp, if not direct agency, over their micro temporal operation. This work aims not simply to theorise, but to help reveal ways users may revise, embrace, resist, subvert or even live data practices that operate unlike conventional data harvesting techniques. &nbsp

Repackaging the Future: Artificial Intelligence, automated governance and education trade shows

Artificial Intelligence is increasingly posited as a key aspect of new education governance, built into everything from business intelligence platforms to real-time online testing. In this paper we are interested in the work an education trade show does to legitimate and support the use of AI in education governance, or more precisely, automated education governance. Automated education governance covers policy practices that are exercised by automated decision-making machines, and instances in which software has a governing role within education, mainly through the application of narrow forms of Artificial Intelligence. We aim to investigate the education technology trade show not only as a set of relations, and to see what work a trade show does it do in incorporating, legitimating, and propping up AI use in education. We propose that an education technology show helps to constitute an automated education governance assemblage, and creates and legitimises certain forms of educational governing practices around data generation, analysis and use that includes AI. We outline this argument using examples of off the shelf solutions, partnerships between Australian education technology companies providing student information system products and major global companies, and as part of start-up pitches for venture capital support. We conclude the paper by examining the limits of automated governance and identifying how AI is part of power and desire in education governance

Repackaging authority: artificial intelligence, automated governance and education trade shows

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to be an important part of education governance. It is already being built into everything from business intelligence platforms to real-time online testing. In this paper, we aim to understand how AI becomes, and forms, a legitimate part of authority in contemporary education governance in what we call the automated education governance assemblage, that incorporates technology companies and AI-supported products used in education. We focus on EduTech Australia–an education technology trade show in Sydney–as a way to look at: (i) how the different aspects of automated governance are connected at EduTech, including the relations between different participants, companies and products; and (ii) how the automated governance assemblage works to legitimise and constitute EduTech as a policy space and site of new authorities in education governance.</p

Why EdTech is always right: students, data and machines in pre-emptive configurations

Pre-emption describes a system of automated knowledge creation and intervention that steers the present towards a desirable future, by building on knowledge derived from the past. Folding together temporalities makes it impossible to disprove pre-emption. It is increasingly featured within EdTech, introducing new forms of automated governance into education. This paper examines how students and EdTech come together to make pre-emption possible, not as a single event but as a normalised governance instrument. For this, we introduce Lucy Suchman’s idea of configuration to examine pre-emptive EdTech. The paper presents three openings into the configuration of students and pre-emptive EdTech. These include observations from an EdTech trade show; interviews with insiders of technology companies; and analysis of accepted papers to a learning analytics conference. We conclude the data used at the heart of pre-emptive EdTech seeks to exclude students and configures them as absent. Yet, its interventions have material consequences.</p