{"id":7479,"date":"2023-07-14T12:58:57","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T11:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/digital-learning\/?p=7479"},"modified":"2023-07-17T13:53:17","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T12:53:17","slug":"educational-technologies-and-universities-discourse-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/digital-learning\/2023\/07\/14\/educational-technologies-and-universities-discourse-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Educational Technologies and Universities: Discourse Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Professionals using data analytics <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The ways in which EdTech investors create future imagineries can have important repercusions on Higher Education<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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In the context of the current SARS-COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing process of digitalisation of education has become a prominent area for social, financial and, increasingly, (critical) educational research. Higher education, as a pivotal social, economic, technological and educational domain, has seen its activities drastically affected, and Universities and the multitude of people involved in them have been forced to adapt to the unfolding crisis. HE researchers agree both on the unpreparedness of countries and institutions faced by the pandemic, and on its potential lasting impact on the educational sector (Goedegebuure and Meek, 2021<\/a>). In as much as educational technologies (EdTech) have been brought to the fore due to their pivotal role in the enablement and continuation of educational practices across the globe, EdTech companies and investors have also become primary financial beneficiaries of these necessary processes of digitalisation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The extensive use and adoption of EdTech to bridge the gap between HE professionals and students due to the application of strict social distancing measures has been welcomed by investors as an opportunity for EdTech to establish themselves as key players within an educational landscape under a process of assetisation (Komljenovic, 2020<\/a>, 2021<\/a>). Investors and EdTech are scaffolding new digital markets in HE, reshaping the conceptualisation of universities, HE and the sector itself more generally (Williamson, 2021<\/a>; Komljenovic and Robertson, 2016<\/a>). In this brief entry, I focus on EdTech investors\u2019 discourses, owing to the potential of such discourses to shape the future of educational practices broadly speaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within the \u2018Universities and Unicorns\u2019 ESRC-funded project<\/a>, this exploratory research (see full report<\/a>) aimed at unveiling the ideological uses of linguistic, visual and multimodal devices (eg<\/em> texts and charts) deployed by EdTech investors in a variety of texts that have the potential, due to their circulation and goals, to shape public understandings of the role of Educational Technologies in the unfolding crisis. The research was conducted deploying a framework anchored in Linguistics, specifically cognitive-based approaches to Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS; eg<\/em> M\u00e1rmol Queralt\u00f3, 2021b<\/a>). A central assumption in this approach is that language encodes construal<\/em>: the same event\/situation can be alternatively linguistically formulated, and these can have diverse cognitive effects in readers (Hart, 2011<\/a>). From a CL-CDS perspective, then, texts can potentially shape the way that the public think<\/em> (and subsequently act) about social topics (cf<\/em> Watters, 2015<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to extract the ideologies underlying discourse practices carried out by HE investors, we examined qualitatively a variety of texts disseminated in the public and semi-private domains. We investigated, for example, HolonIQ\u2019s explanatory charts<\/a>, interviews with professionals<\/a> and blog entries (eg<\/em> Charles MacIntyre<\/a>, Alex Latsis<\/a>, Jan Lynn-Matern<\/a>), and global financial reports by IBIS Capital, BrightEye Ventures<\/a>, and EdTechX<\/a>, among several others. Our main goal was to better understand how EdTech investors operationalised discourse to shape the imageries of the future in the relationship between HE institutions, EdTech and governance. In line with CDS approaches, we examined the representations of social actors in context using van Leeuwen\u2019s (2008)<\/a> framework, and more in line with CL-CDS, we also operationalised the analysis of metaphorical expressions indexing Conceptual Metaphors<\/a>, and Force dynamics<\/a>. Force-dynamics is an essential tool deployed to examine how the tensions between actors and processes within business discourse are constructed (see Oakley, 2005)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This study yielded important findings for the critical examination of discourse processes within the EdTech-HE-governance triangle of influences. In terms of social actor representation (whose examination also included metaphor). The main findings are:<\/p>\n\n\n\n