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Working with Aula: How teachers navigate privacy uncertainties
Abstract
Aula is a mandatory public school platform in Denmark with more than two million users. The idea behind Aula was to provide a shared space for communication and cooperation around children, both within the school/municipality setting and between teachers and parents, while adhering to the requirements of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. In this article we examine the incorporation of Aula in the daily practices of teachers, especially as they relate to children’s privacy and data protection. Based on qualitative interviews with nine teachers and four experts, and drawing on practice theory, platform theory, and theories on children’s privacy, we find that Aula – despite the intentions behind it – fails to support the complex nature of teachers’ work practices and, therefore, to provide a solid data protection framework for the children. As such, the teachers mainly view the platform as being conducive to their non-sensitive communication with parents and deploy a range of other digital tools to support, for instance, cooperation with colleagues. Consequently, gaps in children’s privacy and data protection arise.
... These developments show the need for public value-oriented offerings gaining the acceptance of numerous actors in an emerging digital education ecosystem (Kerssens & van Dijck, 2021;Knoth et al., 2022;Williamson, 2021). On a national scale, the US platform inBloom (Bulger et al., 2017), Denmark's Aula (Jørgensen et al., 2023), or Australia's Ultranet (Tatnall & Davey, 2018) wanted to provide a distributed teaching and learning environment for schools. However, these initiatives have either failed or gained little relevance and highlight the challenge of creating government-orchestrated education ecosystems. ...
Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, private EdTech companies and emerging digital education ecosystems have significantly reshaped digital governance in education. This shift has pressured governments into rapid digital transformation while also raising concerns about increasing inequalities, fueled by a data-driven approach to teaching and learning. The public education debate increasingly calls for tighter data regulations, alternatives to private sector dominance, and digital education offerings by traditional education actors that create value in the digital realm. Responding to these pressures, the German government develops a national digital education ecosystem (NDEE) to guide this transformation. Using data from 10 semi-structured interviews, a stakeholder survey ( n = 121), and three stakeholder workshops with in total of 80 participants, our mixed-method research contributes to the discourse on digital education governance and the creation of public data ecosystems. We identify 19 orchestration tensions, aggregated into four tension groups, shed light on education stakeholders’ preferences, and identify with the three ecosystem vision models: “Education Interconnectivity Infrastructure,” “Public Education Space,” and the “Public–Private Education Marketplace.” These findings underscore the importance of a coherent ecosystem vision that balances public and private interests, leads the foundation for ecosystem governance, and aligns the ecosystem’s scope with government orchestration capabilities. We offer valuable insights for researchers and policymakers working toward a government-orchestrated national digital education ecosystem.
... Pilot projects in various countries, especially those with limited internet access, have demonstrated the effectiveness of AI in delivering educational content offline. Aula is a communication and collaboration platform for higher education institutions that integrates AI to facilitate personalized learning experiences and engagement (Jørgensen, Valtysson, and Pagh, 2023). Pilot projects in universities have shown improvements in student engagement, communication, and collaboration through the use of AIpowered features. ...
This study analyses artificial intelligence (AI's) impact on education in Africa, focusing on personalized learning, technology integration, and challenges in educational development. This review explores the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in reshaping educational landscapes across Africa. As the continent strives for inclusive and quality education, AI emerges as a potent tool with the potential to address educational challenges, enhance learning outcomes, and bridge existing gaps. The review delves into various applications of AI in education, ranging from personalized learning experiences to adaptive assessment methodologies, and examines their impact on diverse learning environments. It gives an overview of the current state of education in Africa, the review highlights the disparities in access, quality, and infrastructure. It also investigates the innovative ways in which AI technologies are being integrated into educational systems. AI-powered adaptive learning platforms, virtual tutors, and intelligent content delivery systems are analyzed for their effectiveness in catering to the diverse needs of students across the continent. The review also addresses the potential of AI in overcoming language barriers,
... Pilot projects in various countries, especially those with limited internet access, have demonstrated the effectiveness of AI in delivering educational content offline. Aula is a communication and collaboration platform for higher education institutions that integrates AI to facilitate personalized learning experiences and engagement (Jørgensen, Valtysson, and Pagh, 2023). Pilot projects in universities have shown improvements in student engagement, communication, and collaboration through the use of AIpowered features. ...
This study analyses artificial intelligence (AI's) impact on education in Africa, focusing on personalized learning, technology integration, and challenges in educational development. This review explores the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in reshaping educational landscapes across Africa. As the continent strives for inclusive and quality education, AI emerges as a potent tool with the potential to address educational challenges, enhance learning outcomes, and bridge existing gaps. The review delves into various applications of AI in education, ranging from personalized learning experiences to adaptive assessment methodologies, and examines their impact on diverse learning environments. It gives an overview of the current state of education in Africa, the review highlights the disparities in access, quality, and infrastructure. It also investigates the innovative ways in which AI technologies are being integrated into educational systems. AI-powered adaptive learning platforms, virtual tutors, and intelligent content delivery systems are analyzed for their effectiveness in catering to the diverse needs of students across the continent. The review also addresses the potential of AI in overcoming language barriers, promoting literacy, and fostering digital skills development. Moreover, it explores the role of AI in facilitating teacher support, professional development, and administrative tasks, thereby contributing to the overall improvement of the education ecosystem. Ethical considerations, privacy concerns, and the digital divide are critically examined to ensure that the integration of AI in education aligns with ethical standards and promotes equitable access. Case studies and pilot projects from various African countries are presented to illustrate successful implementations, challenges faced, and lessons learned. Furthermore, the review discusses the importance of collaborative efforts involving governments, educational institutions, technology developers, and the private sector. Policy recommendations and strategic initiatives are explored to guide the responsible and sustainable integration of AI in education across the diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts prevalent in Africa. In conclusion, the review synthesizes the current state of AI in education in Africa, offering insights into its potential to revolutionize learning environments. The transformative power of AI in addressing educational challenges and fostering a culture of continuous improvement is underscored, paving the way for a more inclusive, accessible, and innovative education landscape in the African context. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Education, Transform Learning, Environments, Africa.
In addition to learning effectively and effectively in online learning communities (OLCs), students must be in a secure environment and privacy must be respected. The study aimed to identify privacy violations that university students encounter in OLCs, and identify recommendations and some strategies to implement to ensure privacy at the OLC. A qualitative research method was applied in the study. First, focus group interviews were conducted with a total of 108 students who participated actively in the OLC. After analysing the interview data, a privacy violations report (RPV‐OLC) was prepared at the OLC. According to the RPV‐OLC, a problem description for the Delphi technique was designed and 17 experts were identified for the interview. Delphi panels with experts were completed in 5 months. The content analysis process was used for the data obtained. Students said they encountered information sharing and access, access to information, system/course settings, resistance to negotiations, communication problems and lack of knowledge. On the other hand, experts suggest that different suggestions and strategies could be implemented to ensure privacy in the OLC, such as partial privacy, mutual trust, contextual privacy agreements, role‐based or anonymous identity use, and privacy education. The study focused on defining the concept of privacy and student privacy violations in online learning environments and providing solutions for educators, students and system administrators.
Practitioner notes
What is already known about this topic
Digital learning environments pose a threat to the privacy of students.
The fact that privacy violations in the OLC can trigger concerns among students has a negative impact on learning processes.
There is high interest at the moment in how to plan the most effective teaching in online learning environments—but privacy is being neglected.
What this paper adds
This article explains the privacy violations university students encounter at the OLC.
This document contains guidelines on how to mitigate and prevent privacy violations in OLC.
The results of the study also provide suggestions for privacy protection at the OLC.
Implications for practice and/or policy
It is important that the instructors who participate in the OLC are informed about the necessary measures, rules, principles, activities and follow‐up measures to protect their personal privacy.
If we can overcome students' concerns about privacy violations at the OLC, we can create more comfortable learning spaces.
The aim of learning should not only be to peak performance; the most important responsibility of educators or system administrators is to preserve each student's private space, while at the same time achieving the best performance.
Digital tools facilitating everything from health to education have been introduced at a rapid pace to replace physical meetings and allow for social distancing measures as the Covid-19 pandemic has sped up the drive to large-scale digitalisation. This rapid digitalisation enhances the already ongoing process of datafication, namely turning ever-increasing aspects of our identities, practices, and societal structures into data. Through an analysis of empirical examples of datafication in three important areas of the welfare state – employment services, public service media, and the corrections sector – we draw attention to some of the inherent problems of datafication in the Nordic welfare states. The analysis throws critical light on automated decision-making processes and illustrates how the ideology of dataism has become increasingly entangled with welfare provision. We end the article with a call to develop specific measures and policies to enable the development of the data welfare state, with media and communication scholars playing a crucial role.
This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms-software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies-it develops a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformisation is defined as the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms. Using app stores as an example, we show how this definition can be employed in research.
Network sampling emerged as a set of methods for drawing statistically valid samples of hard-to-reach populations. The first form of network sampling, multiplicity sampling, involved asking respondents about events affecting those in their personal networks; it was subsequently applied to studies of homicide, HIV, and other topics, but its usefulness is limited to public events. Link-tracing designs employ a different approach to study hard-to-reach populations, using a set of respondents that expands in waves as each round of respondents recruit their peers. Link-tracing as applied to hidden populations, often described as snowball sampling, was initially considered a form of convenience sampling. This changed with the development of respondent-driven sampling (RDS), a widely used network sampling method in which the link-tracing design is adapted to provide the basis for statistical inference. The literature on RDS is large and rapidly expanding, involving contributions by numerous independent research groups employing data from dozens of different countries. Within this literature, many important research questions remain unresolved, including how best to choose among alternative RDS estimators, how to refine existing estimators to make them less dependent on assumptions that are sometimes counterfactual, and perhaps the greatest unresolved issue, how best to calculate the variability of the estimates. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 43 is July 30, 2017. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices that generate detailed data about them, and critical data researchers and privacy advocates are only just beginning to direct attention to these practices. In this article, we provide an overview and critique of these varied forms of datafication and dataveillance of children, from in utero through to the school years. Our approach is informed by recent calls for research on children’s rights in the digital age that examines the conditions that give rise to children’s needs and guide provision of resources necessary for development to their full potential, the array of specific harms they may encounter and the significance of and particular opportunities to participate in matters that affect their wellbeing and enable them to play an active part in society. There remains little evidence that specific instruments to safeguard children’s rights in relation to dataveillance have been developed or implemented, and further attention needs to be paid to these issues.
Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpinning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass media logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles—programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication—and argue that these principles become increasingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance existing mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relatively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between platforms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them.
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure studies provides a valuable approach to the evolution of shared, widely accessible systems and services of the type often provided or regulated by governments in the public interest. On the other hand, platform studies captures how communication and expression are both enabled and constrained by new digital systems and new media. In these environments, platform-based services acquire characteristics of infrastructure, while both new and existing infrastructures are built or reorganized on the logic of platforms. We conclude by underlining the potential of this combined framework for future case studies.
While much attention is given to young people’s online privacy practices on sites like Facebook, current theories of privacy fail to account for the ways in which social media alter practices of information-sharing and visibility. Traditional models of privacy are individualistic, but the realities of privacy reflect the location of individuals in contexts and networks. The affordances of social technologies, which enable people to share information about others, further preclude individual control over privacy. Despite this, social media technologies primarily follow technical models of privacy that presume individual information control. We argue that the dynamics of sites like Facebook have forced teens to alter their conceptions of privacy to account for the networked nature of social media. Drawing on their practices and experiences, we offer a model of networked privacy to explain how privacy is achieved in networked publics.
In this article, I seek to extend the geographies of education, youth and young people by offering an account of the significant shifts taking place in contemporary English state education around the production and use of data. I present material from pupils, for whom the changes are putatively made, whose voices are absent in existing educational and sociological literature on data in schools. I do this through an exploration of one specific feature of school datascapes: the use of data to create and maintain a sense of ‘progress’. This is not progress solely as developmental fact, logic, ideology or discourse but as felt. This article draws attention to profound changes to cultures of education that are evinced in relation to contemporary proliferations of data, contributes to theorisations of affective atmospheres in geography and how they come to be known (as a question of both experience and method), and it advances a novel theorisation of progress ‘after the affective turn’.
Gamification combines the playful design and feedback mechanisms from games with users' social profiles (e.g. Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn) in non-game applications. Successful gamification practices are reliant on encouraging playful subjectivities so that users voluntarily expose their personal information, which is then used to drive behavioural change (e.g. weight loss, workplace productivity, educational advancement, consumer loyalty, etc.). The pleasures of play, the promise of a 'game', and the desire to level up and win are used to inculcate desirable skill sets and behaviours. Gamification is rooted in surveillance; providing real-time feedback about users' actions by amassing large quantities of data and then simplifying this data into modes that easily understandable, such as progress bars, graphs and charts. This article provides an introduction to gamification for surveillance scholars. I first provide brief definitions of gamification, games and play, linking the effectiveness of gamification to the quantification of everyday life. I then explain how the quantification in gamification is different from the quantification in both analog spaces and digital non-game spaces. Next, I draw from governmentality studies to show how quantification is leveraged in terms of surveillance. I employ three examples to demonstrate the social effects and impacts of gamified behaviour. These examples range from using self-surveillance to gamify everyday life, to the participatory surveillance evoked by social networking services, to the hierarchical surveillance of the gamified call-centre. Importantly, the call-centre example becomes a limit case, emphasizing the inability to gamify all spaces, especially those framed by work and not play. This leads to my conclusion, arguing that without knowing first what games and play are, we cannot accurately respond to and critique the playful surveillant technologies leveraged by gamification.
This article examines the function of documents as a data source in qualitative research and discusses document analysis procedure in the context of actual research experiences. Targeted to research novices, the article takes a nuts-and-bolts approach to document analysis. It describes the nature and forms of documents, outlines the advantages and limitations of document analysis, and offers specific examples of the use of documents in the research process. The application of document analysis to a grounded theory study is illustrated.
Spanning parent-communication and administration to content delivery and student monitoring, platforms have become an integral part of contemporary schooling. Building on two ethnographic episodes occurring in a Danish primary school in January 2020, this article engages in an analysis and discussion of how the ongoing platformization of schools affects the day-to-day relations of teachers and students in a 2nd and 9th grade class. The article draws on a posthuman theoretical framework to give an account of how two common education platforms used in the Danish primary school system – the MathFessor platform for mathematics, and the Gyldendal portal for Danish language lessons – become problematically constitutive of what and who matters in classroom interactions. By emphasizing and theorizing the relational embeddedness of education platforms, the episodes serve as invitations for a greater attentiveness to what bodies in schools can and cannot do in classroom-based platform practices. An attentiveness which, it is argued, extends well beyond the instrumental discourses of personalization, innovation, and efficiency surrounding the implementation and use of platforms in schools.
This paper examines how the logic of surveillance capitalism manifests itself within the public sector with a specific interest in how the government’s use of data about its citizens may reconfigure rights and power. In Denmark, for example, the public administration relies heavily on the processing of vast quantities of data about the individual and increasingly uses predictive analytics to identify specific areas of intervention, such as fraud or vulnerability, as part of its decision-making processes. Methodologically, the paper uses Denmark as an example of the digital welfare state, including two public sector cases of automated decision support, namely Gladsaxe municipality and the central processing of welfare benefits (Udbetaling Danmark). It further investigates Danish digitalisation strategies, particularly the governments AI strategy from 2019. The case is examined with a view to understand how technology (and automated decision support in particular) is deployed by state actors, which interests it serves, and how it may benefit or disadvantage the individual. Theoretically, the paper leans towards theories of surveillance capitalism, governance in the digital era, and data politics and rights. The paper argues that unless a more critical and human-centric approach to ‘smart governance’ is taken, the digital welfare state will advance a digital technocracy that treats its citizens as data points suited for calculation and prediction rather than as individuals with agency and rights.
Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.
Privacy is both a protective and an enabling right. This article identifies the available research on how children understand, value and negotiate their personal data and privacy online. The results are interpreted according to a framework that distinguishes different privacy contexts (interpersonal, institutional and commercial) and data types (given, traces and inferred). Our systematic evidence mapping of research published by multiple disciplines in the English language from 2007 to 2019 reveals substantial gaps in current knowledge. First, even though children now use the internet from infancy onwards, very few studies include younger children, impeding regulatory or educational policy and practice tailored to socio-developmental differences among children. Second, the majority of research concerns privacy in interpersonal contexts, with less attention paid to commercial or institutional contexts. Relatedly, most research conceives of data that is deliberately and knowingly provided, with fewer studies recognising that data traces and inferred (or metadata) also matter for children’s privacy. Finally, most empirical studies concern children’s behaviours and practices but much less common are studies of children’s media literacy, especially relating to their capacity to consent to data protection practices. Notwithstanding rising concern over the datafication of childhood, few researchers have investigated the possible harms associated with infringements of children’s privacy online, or the value of any social support children receive. We conclude by calling for a more comprehensive and policy-relevant approach to researching children’s practices and understanding of their online data and the privacy implications of engaging in today’s increasingly commercial digital environment.
What it means when media moves from the new to the habitual—when our bodies become archives of supposedly obsolescent media, streaming, updating, sharing, saving.
New media—we are told—exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same. Meanwhile, analytic, creative, and commercial efforts focus exclusively on the next big thing: figuring out what will spread and who will spread it the fastest. But what do we miss in this constant push to the future? In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun suggests another approach, arguing that our media matter most when they seem not to matter at all—when they have moved from “new” to habitual. Smart phones, for example, no longer amaze, but they increasingly structure and monitor our lives. Through habits, Chun says, new media become embedded in our lives—indeed, we become our machines: we stream, update, capture, upload, link, save, trash, and troll.
Chun links habits to the rise of networks as the defining concept of our era. Networks have been central to the emergence of neoliberalism, replacing “society” with groupings of individuals and connectable “YOUS.” (For isn't “new media” actually “NYOU media”?) Habit is central to the inversion of privacy and publicity that drives neoliberalism and networks. Why do we view our networked devices as “personal” when they are so chatty and promiscuous? What would happen, Chun asks, if, rather than pushing for privacy that is no privacy, we demanded public rights—the right to be exposed, to take risks and to be in public and not be attacked?
Focus groups conducted with Canadian teenagers examining their perceptions and experiences with cyber risk, center on various privacy strategies geared for impression management across popular social network sites (SNS). We highlight privacy concerns as a primary reason for a gravitation away from Facebook toward newer, more popular sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, as well as debates about the permeability of privacy on Snapchat in particular. The privacy paradox identifies a disjuncture between what is said about privacy and what is done in practice. It refers to declarations from youth that they are highly concerned for privacy, yet frequently disregard privacy online through “oversharing” and neglecting privacy management. However, our participants, especially older teens, invoked a different mindset: that they have “nothing to hide” online and therefore do not consider privacy relevant for them. Despite this mindset, the strategies we highlight suggest a new permutation of the privacy paradox, rooted in a pragmatic adaptation to the technological affordances of SNS, and wider societal acquiescence to the debasement of privacy online. © 2019 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie
As research on children and the internet grows, this article debates the intellectual and political choices researchers make when they frame their work in terms of effects (often risk-focused) or rights (drawing on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child). I contrast these frameworks in their guiding assumptions, methodology, conception of children and of media, and stance towards evidence-based policy. The case for media effects research, as well as its critique, is well known among researchers of children and media, but the case for a rights-based approach—and its accompanying critique—appears less familiar and so I examine it here in more depth. I conclude with an endorsement of research on—but not necessarily advocacy for—children’s rights in the digital age in a way that encompasses the insights both of effects research and of qualitative and participatory research with children.
This book studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century, up until 2012. It provides both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of networking services in the context of a changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how the intricate constellation of platforms profoundly affects our experience of online sociality. In a short period of time, services like Facebook, YouTube and many others have come to deeply penetrate our daily habits of communication and creative production. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Offering a dual analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of social media, the author dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecosystem of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, filtering content, governance and business models rely on shared ideological principles. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become "social."
First published in 1980, Street-Level Bureaucracy received critical acclaim for its insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs. Three decades later, the need to bolster the availability and effectiveness of healthcare, social services, education, and law enforcement is as urgent as ever. In this thirtieth anniversary expanded edition, Michael Lipsky revisits the territory he mapped out in the first edition to reflect on significant policy developments over the last several decades. Despite the difficulties of managing these front-line workers, he shows how street-level bureaucracies can be and regularly are brought into line with public purposes. Street-level bureaucrats-from teachers and police officers to social workers and legal-aid lawyers-interact directly with the public and so represent the frontlines of government policy. In Street-Level Bureaucracy, Lipsky argues that these relatively low-level public service employees labor under huge caseloads, ambiguous agency goals, and inadequate resources. When combined with substantial discretionary authority and the requirement to interpret policy on a case-by-case basis, the difference between government policy in theory and policy in practice can be substantial and troubling. The core dilemma of street-level bureaucrats is that they are supposed to help people or make decisions about them on the basis of individual cases, yet the structure of their jobs makes this impossible. Instead, they are forced to adopt practices such as rationing resources, screening applicants for qualities their organizations favor, "rubberstamping" applications, and routinizing client interactions by imposing the uniformities of mass processing on situations requiring human responsiveness. Occasionally, such strategies work out in favor of the client. But the cumulative effect of street-level decisions made on the basis of routines and simplifications about clients can reroute the intended direction of policy, undermining citizens' expectations of evenhanded treatment. This seminal, award-winning study tells a cautionary tale of how decisions made by overburdened workers translate into ad-hoc policy adaptations that impact peoples' lives and life opportunities. Lipsky maintains, however, that these problems are not insurmountable. Over the years, public managers have developed ways to bring street-level performance more in line with agency goals. This expanded edition of Street-Level Bureaucracy underscores that, despite its challenging nature, street-level work can be made to conform to higher expectations of public service.
This book addresses key topics in social theory such as the basic structures of social life, the character of human activity, and the nature of individuality. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, the author develops an account of social existence that argues that social practices are the fundamental phenomenon in social life. This approach offers insight into the social formation of individuals, surpassing and critiquing the existing practice theories of Bourdieu, Giddens, Lyotard and Oakeshott. In bringing Wittgenstein's work to bear on issues of social theory the book shows the relevance of his work to a body of thought to which it has never been applied. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers of the social sciences, a wide range of social theorists in political science and sociology, as well as some literary theorists.
Recently, learning analytics (LA) has drawn the attention of academics, researchers, and administrators. This interest is motivated by the need to better understand teaching, learning, “intelligent content,” and personalization and adaptation. While still in the early stages of research and implementation, several organizations (Society for Learning Analytics Research and the International Educational Data Mining Society) have formed to foster a research community around the role of data analytics in education. This article considers the research fields that have contributed technologies and methodologies to the development of learning analytics, analytics models, the importance of increasing analytics capabilities in organizations, and models for deploying analytics in educational settings. The challenges facing LA as a field are also reviewed, particularly regarding the need to increase the scope of data capture so that the complexity of the learning process can be more accurately reflected in analysis. Privacy and data ownership will become increasingly important for all participants in analytics projects. The current legal system is immature in relation to privacy and ethics concerns in analytics. The article concludes by arguing that LA has sufficiently developed, through conferences, journals, summer institutes, and research labs, to be considered an emerging research field.
This article works out the main characteristics of `practice theory', a type of social theory which has been sketched by such authors as Bourdieu, Giddens, Taylor, late Foucault and others. Practice theory is presented as a conceptual alternative to other forms of social and cultural theory, above all to culturalist mentalism, textualism and intersubjectivism. The article shows how practice theory and the three other cultural-theoretical vocabularies differ in their localization of the social and in their conceptualization of the body, mind, things, knowledge, discourse, structure/process and the agent.
This article considers the potential of a revival of interest in theories of practice for the study of consumption. It presents an abridged account of the basic precepts of a theory of practice and extracts some broad principles for its application to the analysis of final consumption. The basic assumption is that consumption occurs as items are appropriated in the course of engaging in particular practices and that being a competent practitioner requires appropriation of the requisite services, possession of appropriate tools, and devotion of a suitable level of attention to the conduct of the practice. Such a view stresses the routine, collective and conventional nature of much consumption but also emphasizes that practices are internally differentiated and dynamic. Distinctive features of the account include its understanding of the way wants emanate from practices, of the processes whereby practices emerge, develop and change, of the consequences of extensive personal involvements in many practices, and of the manner of recruitment to practices. The article concludes with discussion of some theoretical, substantive and methodological implications.
"This is a book that any fan of Foucault, Deleuze, or Bourdieu, or for that matter Giddens, and anyone interested in the problem of the relevance of Heidegger to social theory, will find challenging--and essential. Schatzki makes an impressive case for a social ontology centered on practices, and in the course of it rethinks and convincingly critiques the thought of many of the contributors to 'practice theory' while showing its centrality to twentieth-century thought. But this book is not merely a book about books: Schatzki deals with real human material in a novel way."--Stephen Turner, University of South Florida Inspired by Heidegger's concept of the clearing of being and by Wittgenstein's ideas on human practice, Theodore Schatzki offers a novel approach to understanding the constitution and transformation of social life. Key to the account he develops here is the context in which social life unfolds--the "site of the social"--as a contingent and constantly metamorphosing mesh of practices and material orders. Schatzki's analysis reveals the advantages of this site ontology over the traditional individualist, wholistic, and structuralist accounts that have dominated social theory since the mid-nineteenth century. A special feature of the book is its development of the theoretical argument by sustained reference to two historical examples: the medicinal herb business of a Shaker village in the 1850s and contemporary day trading on the Nasdaq market. First focusing on the relative simplicity of Shaker life to illuminate basic ontological characteristics of the social site, Schatzki then uses the sharp contrast with the complex and dynamic practice of day trading to reveal what makes this approach useful as a general account of social existence. Along the way he provides new insights into many major issues in social theory, including the nature of social order, the significance of agency, the distinction between society and nature, the forms of social change, and how the social present affects its future. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Theodore R. Schatzki is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. Among his previous books is Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (1996).
Kritik: Aula indeholder alvorlig sikkerhedsbrist (Critique: Aula contains serious security breaches
- N Dandanell
Kommunerne har haft 165 datalæk i Aula (Municipalities have had 165 data leakage in Aula)
- A B Riise
Aulas bagmand efter ny kritik: Der er da bøvl og bump på vejen men Aula er klar i uge 43 (Creators of Aula after new critique: There are challenges on the way but Aula will be ready in week 43)
- K K Sørensen
Social research methods
- A Bryman
- Bryman A.
Born digital? Presence, privacy, and intimate surveillance
- T Leaver
- Leaver T.
The tip of the iceberg: Immaterial labor, technoskepticism and the teaching profession
- E Adams
- E Wurzburg
- S Kerr
- Adams E.
Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor
- V Eubanks
- Eubanks V.
Technology and history: “Kranzberg’s laws”
- M Kranzberg
Liquid surveillance: A conversation
- D Lyon
- Z Bauman
- Lyon D.
Qualitative research and evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice. London: SAGE
- M Q Patton
Qualitative research and evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice
- M Q Patton
- Patton M. Q.