Showing papers by "Ben Williamson published in 2015"

Algorithmic skin: health-tracking technologies, personal analytics and the biopedagogies of digitized health and physical education

Abstract: The emergence of digitized health and physical education, or ‘eHPE’, embeds software algorithms in the organization of health and physical education pedagogies. Particularly with the emergence of wearable and mobile activity trackers, biosensors and personal analytics apps, algorithmic processes have an increasingly powerful part to play in how people learn about their own bodies and health. This article specifically considers the ways in which algorithms are converging with eHPE through the emergence of new health-tracking and biophysical data technologies designed for use in educational settings. The first half of the article provides a conceptual account of how algorithms ‘do things’ in the social world, and considers how algorithms are interwoven with practices of health tracking. In the second half, three key issues are articulated for further exploration: (1) health tracking as a ‘biopedagogy’ of bodily optimization based on data-led and algorithmically mediated understandings of the body; (2) healt...

Governing software: networks, databases and algorithmic power in the digital governance of public education

Abstract: This article examines the emergence of ‘digital governance’ in public education in England. Drawing on and combining concepts from software studies, policy and political studies, it identifies some specific approaches to digital governance facilitated by network-based communications and database-driven information processing software that are being discursively promoted in education by cross-sectoral intermediary organizations. Such intermediaries, including National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, Demos, the Innovation Unit, the Education Foundation and the Nominet Trust, are increasingly seeking to participate in new digitally mediated forms of educational governance. Through their promotion of network-based pedagogies and database-driven analytics software, these organizations are seeking to delegate educational decision-making to socio-algorithmic forms of power that have the capacity to predict, govern and activate learners' capacities and subjectivities.

Governing Methods: Policy Innovation Labs, Design and Data Science in the Digital Governance of Education.

Abstract: Policy innovation labs are emerging knowledge actors and technical experts in the governing of education. The article offers a historical and conceptual account of the organisational form of the policy innovation lab. Policy innovation labs are characterised by specific methods and techniques of design, data science, and digitisation in public services such as education. The second half of the article details how labs promote the use of digital data analysis, evidence-based evaluation and ‘design-for-policy’ techniques as methods for the governing of education. In particular, they promote the ‘computational thinking’ associated with computer programming as a capacity required by a ‘reluctant state’ that is increasingly concerned to delegate its responsibilities to digitally enabled citizens with the ‘designerly’ capacities and technical expertise to ‘code’ solutions to public and social problems. Policy innovation labs are experimental laboratories trialling new methods within education for administering ...

Educating the smart city: Schooling smart citizens through computational urbanism

Abstract: Coupled with the ‘smart city’, the idea of the ‘smart school’ is emerging in imaginings of the future of education. Various commercial, governmental and civil society organizations now envisage edu...

Testing governance: the laboratory lives and methods of policy innovation labs

Abstract: Public and social innovation labs have proliferated globally. By combining resources and practices from politics, data analysis, media, design, and digital innovation, labs act as experimental R&D labs and practical ideas organizations for solving social and public problems, located in the borderlands between sectors, fields and disciplinary methodologies. Labs are making methods such as data analytics, design thinking and experimentation into a powerful set of governing resources. This working paper analyses the key methods and messages of the labs field, in particular by investigating the documentary history of Futurelab, a prototypical lab for education research and innovation that operated in Bristol, UK, between 2002 and 2010, and tracing methodological continuities through the current wave of lab development. Centrally, the working paper explores Futurelab’s contribution to the production and stabilization of a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ of the future of education specifically, and to the future of public services more generally, and analyses how such an imaginary was embedded in its ‘laboratory life,’ established through its organizational networks, and operationalized in its methods of research and development as well as its modes of communication. By taking a historical and genealogical perspective to the study of labs, it becomes clear how their current concerns, ideas and methods have been formed over time in concrete organizational sites and inter-organizational networks. The purpose of the working paper is not to evaluate labs’ methods, but to explore the longer continuities of thinking that animate them, their inter-organizational and ideational connections, and in particular to examine the imaginaries or visions of the future of public and social services that they share. Innovation labs are proposing to introduce more experimental methods into strategies of contemporary governance, and testing out new practical ideas and techniques for managing relations between the state and its citizens. Conducting detailed genealogical case studies and situated ethnographic research of the laboratory life within specific labs, as well as documentary analyses of their products and resources, are necessary next steps in social scientific and policy studies of innovation labs.

Developing alternative resources of rare earth elements in Europe - EURARE and the red mud challenge

Abstract: Rare earth elements (REE) are considered to be highly “critical” by the European Commission [1], owing to the concentration of global supply [2] and their use in a wide range of emerging technologies (e.g. smart phones, electric cars and wind turbines). The main source of REE is the mineral bastnäsite, which is primarily extracted from carbonatites. Alternative resources of REE have been identified in a variety of other environments such as alluvial placers, bauxites and ore tailings. The EURARE project (www.eurare.eu), funded by the European Commission, aims to improve understanding of potential REE resources in Europe with the overall objective of establishing the basis for a European REE industry. As a part of this project, alternative sources of rare earth elements in Europe are being considered.