Sukhmani Khorana has been appointed to the Federal Ethnic Communities’ Council of Australia’s (FECCA) Media Literacy Program Advisory Group (PAG). She will provide strategic guidance on the design, development and implementation of the Media Literacy Program which will be administered by a network of community-based organisations.
PUBLICATION: Kevin Witzenberger's research on EdTech publishes in leading journal
Kevin Witzenberger’s recent paper “Why EdTech is always right: students, data and machines in pre-emptive configurations” in collaboration with Prof. Kalervo Gulson is published in Taylor & Francis journal. The paper looks at the use of pre-emptive methods within education.
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.
URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2021.1913181
Kevin Witzenberger is a Scientia PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His dissertation investigates forms of automated governance within education. Kevin is interested to understand the shifting power relations as tools of automated governance transform into fully automated technical systems. He also received the HDR Research Output Award for publishing in a Q1 journal from the faculty for this article.
Kevin can be reached at @KevinWtz
Simon Michael Taylor
Selected Member of a year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar at University of Cambridge UK looking at 'Histories of AI: A Genealogy of Power' from May 2020 to July 2021.
Elaine Jing Zhao
Deans Research Award for Best Monograph by an Early Career Researcher in the category of Academic Excellence, in recognition of the book Digital China's Informal Circuits: Platforms, Labour and Governance (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).
Committee Feedback: Digital China’s Informal Circuits is a highly original and intellectually energetic work that treats an understudied topic - the imbrication of informal circuits and formal economic structures in China's digital media economy. Well written, highly engaging, and thought provoking, it tackles a subject of immense importance to the contemporary world, while holding significance well beyond its immediate topic.