This is a complex three-year research project … but we have reached a stage where we are thinking about what we have actually found to date. This 240 character tweet is perhaps our best attempt so far at encapsulating our ‘headline’ findings … let’s see if we can improve on this before the project concludes!
The main promises of data-driven education (real-time feedback, individualised nudges, self-regulated learning) remain *incompatible* with the entrenched bureaucratic & professional logics of mass schooling…at the moment we have ‘schoolified’ data rather than ‘datafied’ schools
Of course, any short statement like this inevitably attracts requests for clarification. Here are a couple of subsequent tweets that we have published in the wake of this initial headline …
It’s not an argument to disrupt schools … but it *is* a warning that some actors are going to take this impasse as justification that schools require ‘disrupting’. It is also a story of how schools are managing (so far) to contain & tame the logics of being ‘data-driven’…
In many ways it’s Larry Cuban’s old observation of ‘Computers Meet Classroom, Classroom Wins’ … but in the case of data-driven education we suspect that these structural incompatibilities are steadily receding (not something we endorse… but the most likely direction of travel)