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Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

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

Ben Williamson
- 02 Jan 2015 - 
- Vol. 20, Iss: 1, pp 133-151
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TLDR
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 are considered.
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...

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Tracing the feedback loop: a Foucauldian and actor-network-theory examination of heart rate monitors in a physical education classroom

TL;DR: It is argued that the authors need to move beyond the techno-utopian/techno-dystopian dualism that often frames examinations of technology in PE by considering the material-semiotic networks that variously form or fail to form alliances through the feedback loop of heart rate monitoring.
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Applying the New Teaching Methodologies in Youth Football Players: Toward a Healthier Sport.

TL;DR: Data show that the use of a learning methodology based on Nonlinear Pedagogy has an impact on levels of physical activity in accordance with the recommended parameters.
References
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Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

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