Abstract

Paolo Monella, The global GAFAMification of digital education infrastructures

Video recording of part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf4yjymg-Zs Video recording of part II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6paSvt2Ck2w (my own presentation starts at 1h 02' in the video of part II) Panel presentation: In the panel "Platform university and algorithmic governmentality" we will discuss how the recent "digital pandemic turn" is transforming our educational system and how to elaborate both theoretical and practical strategies to resist the EdTech assault to our institutions. The panel is organized in two parts. In the first part, coordinated by Valeria Pinto (University of Naples Federico II), Teresa Numerico (University of Roma Tre), and Paola Ricaurte (Tecnológico de Monterrey) will summarize the theoretical debate on the idea of "governamentality", and how this concept is related to the production, extraction and representation of digital knowledge and data. In the second part, coordinated by Domenico Fiormonte (University of Roma Tre), Paolo Monella (University of Roma La Sapienza), Javier Blanco (UNC, Argentina) and Gabriel Uam (Brasil) will discuss a number of case studies and experiences from different countries and institutions. Source: https://join.wsf2021.net/activities/3790 Abstract of my talk: During the COVID-19 pandemic, schools and colleges almost exclusively used proprietary platforms such as Google's G-Suite for Education and Microsoft Teams for Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). This raises student data protection issues, largely understated in public debate. In countries such as France, the Ministry of Education provided public infrastructures for ERT, based on Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). The scientific community must reflect on what has happened during the emergency and must propose possible alternatives for the specific situation of the second year of the pandemic and for the future. It is crucial that bad practices facilitated by the emergency do not become stable and systematic. On the other hand, national and local public educational institutions such as Ministries, Universities, school networks take responsibility for building digital infrastructures for remote teaching that be public, open and FLOSS-based.

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