Big Data, learning analytics, and posthumanism

I’ve now read a few articles assessing the pros and cons of learning analytics and, regardless of the methodologies employed, there are patterns and themes in what is being found. The benefits include institutional efficiency and institutional performance around financial planning and recruitment; for students, the benefits correspond to insights into learning and informed decision-making. These are balanced against the cons: self-fulfilling prophecies concerning at-risk students, the dangers of student profiling, risks to student privacy and questions around data ownership (Roberts et al., 2016; Lawson et al., 2016). This is often contextualised by socio-critical understandings which converge on notions of power and surveillance; some of the methodologies explicitly attempt to counter presumptions made as a result of this, for example, by bringing in the student voice (Roberts et al., 2016).

In reading these articles and studies, I was particularly interested in ideas around student profiling and student labelling, and how this is perceived (or sometimes spun) as a benefit for students. Arguments against student profiling focus on the oversimplification of student learning, students being labelled on past decisions, student identity being in a necessary state of flux (Mayer-Schoenberger, 2011). One of the things, though, that’s missing in all of this, the absence of which I am feeling keenly, is causation. It strikes me that big data and learning analytics can tell us what is, but not always why.

A similar observation leads Chandler to assert that Big Data is the kind of Bildungsroman of posthumanism (2015). He argues that Big Data is an epistemological revolution:

“displacing the modernist methodological hegemony of causal analysis and theory displacement” (2015, p. 833).

Chandler is not interested in the pros and cons of Big Data so much as the way in which it changes how knowledge is produced, and how we think about knowledge production. This is an extension of ideas espoused by Anderson, in which he argues that theoretical models are becoming redundant in a world of Big Data (2008). Similar, Cukier and Schoenberger argue that Big Data:

“represents a move away from trying to understand the deeper reasons behind how the world works to simply learning about an association among phenomena, and using that to get that done” (2013, p. 32).

Big Data aims not at instrumental knowledge, nor causal reasoning, but the revealing of feedback loops. It’s reflexive. And for Chandler, this represents an entirely new epistemological approach for making sense of the world, gaining insights which are ‘born from the data’, rather than planned in advance.

Chandler is interested in the ways in which Big Data can intersect with ideas in international relations and political governance, and many of his ideas are extremely translatable and relevant to higher education institutions. For example, Chandler argues that Big Data reflects political reality (i.e. what is) but it also transforms it through enabling community self-awareness. It allows reflexive problem-solving on the basis of this self-awareness. Similarly, it may be seen that learning analytics allows students to gain understanding of their learning and their progress, possibly in comparison with their peers.

This sounds great, but Chandler contends that it is necessarily accompanied by a warning: it isn’t particularly empowering for those who need social change:

Big Data can assist with the management of what exists […] but it cannot provide more than technical assistance based upon knowing more about what exists in the here and now. The problem is that without causal assumptions it is not possible to formulate effective strategies and responses to problems of social, economic and environmental threats. Big Data does not empower people to change their circumstances but merely to be more aware of them in order to adapt to them (p. 841-2).

The problem of lack of understanding of causation is raised in consideration of ‘at risk’ students – a student being judged on a series of data without any (potentially necessary) contextualisation. The focus is on reflexivity and relationality rather than how or why a situation has come about, and what the impact of it might be. Roberts et al. found that students were concerned about this, that learning analytics might drive inequality through advantaging only some students (2016).The demotivating nature of the EASI system for ‘at risk’ students is also raised by Lawson et al. (2016, p. 961). Too little consideration is given to the causality of ‘at risk’, and perhaps too much to essentialism.

His considerations of Big Data and international relations leads Chandler to assert cogently that:

Big Data articulates a properly posthuman ontology of self-governing, autopoietic assemblages of the technological and the social (2015, p. 845).

No one here is necessarily excluded, and all those on the periphery are brought in. Rather paradoxically, this appears to be both the culmination of the socio-material project, as well as an indicator of its necessity. Adopting a posthumanist approach to learning analytics may be a helpful critical standpoint, and is definitely something worth exploring further.

References

Anderson, C. (2008). The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete. Retrieved 19 March 2017, from https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/
Chandler, D. (2015). A World without Causation: Big Data and the Coming of Age of Posthumanism. Millennium, 43(3), 833–851. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829815576817
Cukier, K., & Mayer-Schoenberger, V. (2013). The Rise of Big Data: How It’s Changing the Way We Think About the World. Foreign Affairs, 92(3), 28–40.
Lawson, C., Beer, C., Rossi, D., Moore, T., & Fleming, J. (2016). Identification of ‘at risk’ students using learning analytics: the ethical dilemmas of intervention strategies in a higher education institution. Educational Technology Research and Development, 64(5), 957–968. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-016-9459-0
Mayer-Schonberger, V. (2011). Delete: the virtue of forgetting in the digital age: Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Roberts, L. D., Howell, J. A., Seaman, K., & Gibson, D. C. (2016). Student Attitudes toward Learning Analytics in Higher Education: ‘The Fitbit Version of the Learning World’. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01959

2 Replies to “Big Data, learning analytics, and posthumanism”

  1. Chandler’s paper sounds fascinating – definitely on my reading list! I guess I need to read it, certainly before we potentially discuss this as a assignment topic, but for now…

    It sounds like there may be something of a conflation of causation and essentialism here. Firstly, I’m not sure any data scientist would be concerned with the idea that they aren’t finding causes. Their trying to find proxies, and the argument is really whether the proxy can stand in for a cause. This is precisely the ‘”what” is often good enough’ (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier 2013, 59) position often taken.

    Secondly, I wouldn’t have necessarily equated the critique of essence (that we find in theoretical traditions related to critical posthumanism) with a questioning of cause. It seems to me that overturning essence shifts to ‘process’, but that still implies ’cause’, just one that is attributed to multiple agents and/or their relations. Hmm I guess I need to read that paper! Happy to take about this further as an assignment idea too…

  2. Thanks for your comment, Jeremy! Definitely pushing me to think more about what I’ve written 🙂 I could also well be misrepresenting Chandler too, must be said. I unquestionably need to read more about posthumanism before I can engage with it in a critical sense – feel like I’ve only really skimmed the surface, and it’s SO interesting 🙂

    I finding it difficult on the issue of causation and proxies; I can see how big data might be able to point to correlation, but not necessarily causation. E.g. if a student’s LMS clicks have tailed off, but their Netflix clicks have risen, we can clearly identify a relation between the events. But causation? Struggling a bit with that one…

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