Smarter learning software: Education and the big data imaginary

Abstract

Big data and smarter learning software systems are beginning to impact on education, particularly within the schools sector. This paper traces the emergence of a ‘big data imaginary,’ a vision of a desirable future of education that its advocates believe is attainable through the application of big data technologies and practices. Firstly, it identifies a ‘first wave of big data’ in nineteenth-century education exhibitions and its continuities with the visualization of large-scale educational data today. Secondly, it details the emergence of ‘educational data science’ as an exemplar of how ‘second wave big data’ has entered the imagination of many actors within education. Thirdly, it then demonstrates how education is being reimagined in relation to ‘smart cities’ that depend on big data for their functioning, before fourthly detailing the recent appearance of ‘startup schools’ that are being established by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to run as testbeds of smarter learning software systems. A concluding section discusses how the future of education may be governed by the production and circulation of the ‘data and algorithms of the powerful.’