The circle of digitising and datafying
‘Digitising’ and ‘Datafying’ (Williamson 2017) are becoming more commonplace in society and education; they work together and strengthen each other. The use of digital learning creates opportunities for data to be mined which then leads to the use of the data or ‘datafication’ which can then be imported into the e-learning systems. It is quite a nice circular movement, which you can imagine growing if the ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ (Williamson 2017) continue in the same direction. The tweetorial we did this week, can be seen as ‘digitising’ and ‘datafying’ (Williamson 2017) of our learning; it took place on a digital platform and after the week, we were asked to use a google sheet to analyse the data we had created with our activities on Twitter.
Using a digital platform is expected within this course, that is the purpose of it and our activities have taken place across a series of digital platforms. Twitter has some aspects of that we had not yet come across though, like ‘reinforcement learning’ which tries to influence the way the learner behaves through positive and negative responses (Knox et al. 2020). On the Twitter platform, this is done through the likes that other people give your tweets, or the replies that you receive, or at times when your tweet is quoted or retweeted. Interestingly, it is not the digital platform that reinforces the good behaviour of tweeting, unless there is a bot present, but the other users on the platform. The outcome is much the same though; you feel rewarded when your tweet gets attention, which makes you check the platform for responses. This leads to more time on Twitter and more data to gather for the software, completing the circle.
If we turn to the datafication aspect of the tweetorial, one of the questions this brings up is the availability of this data on an open platform which can be used and analysed by anyone, for any purpose. There might be an expectation by some that your tweets are only seen by those you follow and those that follow you; the people who you are communicating with on Twitter. However, the platform is available to anyone with the right equipment, does it then follow that the data can be used for anything? Zimmer (2010) has an interesting discussion about this on his blog, but no real answer to the issue. Personally, I think that anyone using a platform like Twitter cannot reasonably expect their tweets to be anonymous and they can therefore be used for anything. If you don’t want your data to be used, you should not make it publically available. Another interesting aspect about using a platform like Twitter, is the idea that the student ends up being the product as well as the consumer (Knox et al. 2020) because the data can be mined. Platforms like Twitter can use the data they collect from their users and analyse this, making the student the product. According to Biesta’s (2012) ‘learnification’ theory students are also the consumers of their education, which makes another full circle.
Biesta, G. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 35-49.
Knox, J., Williamson, B. & Bayne, S. 2020. Machine behaviourism: future visions of ‘learnification’ and ‘datafication’ across humans and digital technologies, Learning, Media and Technology, 45:1, 31-45
Williamson, B. 2017. Introduction: Learning machines, digital data and the future of education (chapter 1). In Big Data and Education: the digital future of learning, policy, and practice.
Zimmer, M. 2010. Is it Ethical to Harvest Public Twitter Accounts without Consent? [online]. 10 February [viewed 19 March 2021]. Available from: https://michaelzimmer.org/2010/02/12/is-it-ethical-to-harvest-public-twitter-accounts-without-consent/
That’s a good and clear summary of the datafication ‘system’ of Twitter with its behaviourist orientation for users to spend more time/ generate more data on Twitter and to respond to advertising (and so monetise the platform).
There is an interesting question on how public is a public statement? If you are having a conversation with a friend in a public space and someone overhears something you said, could and should they then repeat that to anyone else. What does a public space – whether physical or virtual mean in terms of expectations of behaviour? Of course, the digital exhaust of Twitter can be mined, stored, analysed and reanalysed repeatedly and also the practical challenges of gaining informed consent can be difficult which then places a higher responsibility on the researcher in how that data is presented (while also conforming to the end-user agreement with Twitter).