Professor Bob Lingard's Quest Lecture: A critical consideration of emergent developments in the datafication and digitalisation of education

Professor Bob Lingard is a Professorial Fellow in The Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education at Australian Catholic University. He is also an Emeritus Professor at The University of Queensland. He has also held the Andrew Bell Chair in Education at the University of Edinburgh (2006-2008) and was Research Professor at Sheffield University (2003-2006).

This paper documents emergent developments in the datafication and digitalisation of education, as well as their implications for education policy and the work of systems, schools and teachers. These developments are based on enhanced computational capacities, with much of the work of schooling systems, schools and teachers now datafied and digitalised, enabling complex analyses of multiple data sets.

The paper also documents the emerging move from the collection of discrete, point-in-time data to the collection of continuous, real-time data, and related moves from small data sets to big data. Consideration is given to the centrality of data infrastructures to these moves, with a focus on datafied bodies and datafied modes of governance. The analysis suggests that Foucault’s disciplinary society functioning through the panopticon is now synchronously overlaid with Deleuze’s control society of continuous assessments. The multiple ways these emergent changes both reflect and express complex imbrications of the global, national and local relations are also documented and analysed.

(This paper is a version of a chapter jointly written with Dr Steven Lewis and Dr Jessica Holloway, which appears in Rizvi, F., Lingard, B. and Rinne, R. (Eds.) (2022). Reimagining Globalization and Education, New York, Routledge, pp.62-78.)