This article examines the work of predictive analytics in shaping the social worlds in which they thrive, and in particular the world of the first year of Great State University's student success initiative. Specifically, this article investigates the following research paradox: predictive analytics, as driven by a logic premised on predicting the…

Learning analytics offer centralization of a particular understanding of learning, teaching, and student support alongside data-informed insight and foresight. As such, student-related data in higher education can be imagined and enacted as a 'data frontier' in which the data gaze is expanding, intensifying, and performing new meanings and…

Emerging scholarship has brought critical attention to the increasing influence of digital platform architectures on learning across disciplines and contexts. Allied with such scholarship, this study examines how the logics of social media platforms create the conditions for new formations of literacy to emerge at the intersection of digital…

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…

This paper examines the enactment of feedback in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), focusing on analytics dashboards. Building on scholarship that recognizes data practices as entangled and 'messy', the paper problematizes the model of the feedback loop that assumes that analytics dashboards 'feed back' data to instructors and/or learners…

The need for a comprehensive education data governance -- the regulation of who collects what data, how it is used and why -- continues to grow. Technologically, data can be collected by third parties, rendering schools unable to control their use. Legal frameworks partially achieve data governance as businesses continue to exploit existing…