Bonny Williamson
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 287903 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Bonny Williamson |
| NOMBRES | Bonny |
| APELLIDO | Williamson |
| FIRMA | WILLIAMSON B |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9356-3213 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 63 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 559 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 63 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2000 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Polygenic scores as bio-social policy instruments
The use of genetic data has proliferated in social and behavioural genomics research, leading to proposals for genetically-informed social policy. In particular, in the domain of ‘educational genomics’, researchers using ‘polygenic scores’—summary statistics used to calculate social outcomes from genetic data—have generated scientific knowledge claims about the potential to predict educational outcomes from biological samples. These polygenic sco…
Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’
Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in contemporary techno-capitalism. We analyse three cases of academic content being made into revenue-generating assets: (1) universities enclosing online learning content, (2) EdTech platform companies building databases of academic assignments and manuscripts, and (3) academic…
Algorithmic futuring
Futures of education are increasingly defined through predictive technologies and methods. We conceptualize ‘algorithmic futuring’ as the use of data-driven digital methods and predictive infrastructures to anticipate educational futures and animate actions in the present towards their materialization. Specifically, we focus on algorithmic futuring in the education technology investment industry, and the role of predictive infrastructures of valu…
Future challenges for critical research on educational technologies
2025 has been a significant year for critical research on educational technologies. In our last collective editorial, the past and present editors of Learning, Media and Technology looked back over
Looking back and looking forward
Anniversaries of all kinds are good opportunities to look back and reflect, as well as to look forward to the future. Learning, Media and Technology is now 20 years old, but it also has a longer hi
Sociodigital futures of education
As EdTech industries grow in reach and power it is imperative to motivate conditions for ethical challenge and contestation, always remaining attentive to the kinds of education futures that dominant imaginaries of technology foreclose. In this paper, we explore how the multiple lenses of reparations, sovereignty, care and democratisation can offer resources for envisaging alternative sociodigital futures of education. We identify how these ideas…
Knowledge infrastructure crisis
The production and circulation of knowledge in education increasingly depends on large-scale digital infrastructures. In this article we provide a critical review of the transformation of the contemporary ‘knowledge infrastructures’ underpinning knowledge production and reproduction in education. Contributing to the Special Issue on ‘knowledge crises’ in education, we conceive of recent and ongoing developments in the digitalisation and dataficat…
Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation
Innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain–computer interfaces are increasingly used to inform understandings of human brains and behaviours while also catalysing imaginaries of neuroscientifically measured and enhanced economic productivity. In this paper, we focus on neurotechnologies that claim to capture, monitor, measure and train learners’ attention. We analyse a corpus of relevant scientific, governance, and commercial texts to explor…
Enthuse and inspire’
Digital technologies interact in different ways with the professionality of teachers to ultimately reshape the most defining features of their job. In this article, we explore how edtech brokers, intermediary organizations that guide schools in edtech procurement, adoption, and usage, are playing a role in transforming the professional role of the teacher in the context of rapid developments in digital technologies. Through interviews, observatio…
Virtual flying carpets and digital disaster rooms
Around the world we are seeing the emergence of new institutions and organisations offering immersive speculative environments which deploy virtual and mixed realities to give participants a ‘live experience’ of the future. Often (but not exclusively) found in an emerging network of ‘museums of the future’, the distinctive affordances of these mixed reality environments have yet to be fully grasped in terms of their implications for public partic…
Brokering the brain
Educational neuroscience has expanded its influence since the 1990s, positioned as advancing new forms of intervention in educational policy and practice. Simultaneously, the gap between the neuroscience lab and the classroom has preoccupied educational debate. Yet, little is known about the discursive practices by which educational neuroscience seeks to translate science into application. In this paper, we analyse the translational knowledge bro…
Digitalised higher education
Higher education is already profoundly digitalised. Students, academics, and university administrators routinely use digital technologies, many of which rely on data, including artificial intelligence. Universities aim to operate as data-powered organisations to support institutional efficiency and the personalisation of learning and student experience. These developments are occurring against the backdrop of university digital infrastructure mov…
Infrastructuring Educational Genomics
Technoscientific transformations in molecular genomics have begun to influence knowledge production in education. Interdisciplinary scientific consortia are seeking to identify ‘genetic influences’ on ‘educationally relevant’ traits, behaviors, and outcomes. This article examines the emerging ‘knowledge infrastructure’ of educational genomics, attending to the assembly and choreography of organizational associations, epistemic architecture, and t…
Near future academic publishing – a speculative social science fiction experiment
Learning, Media and Technology turns 20 years old in 2025 (or 50 if you count its former lives as the Journal of Educational Television from 1975 to 1995, and as the Journal of Educational Media fr
Challenging the inequitable impacts of edtech
New forms of bias, injustice, discrimination and inequality have become harmful characteristics of contemporary digital landscapes.In 1996, Batya Friedman and Helen Nissenbaum developed a framework for identifying bias in computer systems.From their analysis of computer systems, they proposed three categories of bias: 'Preexisting bias has its roots in social institutions, practices and attitudes' (Friedman and Nissenbaum 1996, 332).This exists w…
Against contextlessness in Learning, Media and Technology
Why do so many educational technologies not work as imagined or intended? The articles in this issue of Learning, Media and Technology all focus, in various ways, on how digital technologies are en
Edtech brokers and evidence governance
New types of intermediary organisations are creating evidence to guide school practices and shape markets around education technologies. This article focuses on the practices through which edtech brokers–understood here as evidence-making organisations that mediate between the edtech industry, schools, policy and research centres–create edtech knowledge and evidence. When inserted into policy and practice through recommendation systems, platform …
Re-examining AI, automation and datafication in education
When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education
Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched.We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape of Edtech investment into education research.We empirically examine venture capital Edtech investors and argue that they are economic and political actors.Investors construct the Edtech industry through their investment and advancing particular imaginarie…
Chapter 7 Smart Citizen Apprentices
Reading internationally
Reading internationally: If citing is a political practice, who are we reading and who are we citing
Big EdTech
Amazon and the New Global Connective Architectures of Education Governance
In this analytical essay, part of Harvard Educational Review’s symposium on Platform Studies in Education, Ben Williamson, Kalervo N. Gulson, Carlo Perrotta, and Kevin Witzenberger argue that global technology companies have begun acting as governance organizations in education. Their analysis focuses on the global technology company Amazon, which has begun penetrating education through a connective architecture of digital infrastructure and plat…
Investing in imagined digital futures
Educational technology is the focus of increasing financial investment. In this article, we examine how edtech investors imagine and invest in the future of higher education through an empirical case study of a UK investing company. Utilising concepts and methods from economic sociology, we analyse how investment companies engage in techno-financial ‘futuring’ practices. We identify two kinds of futuring practices. First, investors’ imaginary pra…
Biosocial education
Reviewed by Bob Lingard and Ben WilliamsonBiosocial Education is a challenging, indeed demanding, yet very informative book, co-authored collaboratively by critical sociologist of education Deborah
Ochre in hafting in Middle Stone Age southern Africa
Ochre is well-known as a substance used in Stone Age symbolism, but it can be shown to have had practical functions too. The authors used microscopic examination of Middle Stone Age tools to show they had been hafted, making use of an adhesive compound which included ochre in its recipe
Microwear and residue analyses in perspective
The datafied child
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 c…
Digital education governance
Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a massive online data bank, produced by Pearson Education, which deploys highly sophisticated digital intera…
The first residue analysis blind tests
Algorithmic skin
The emergence of digitized health and physical education, or ‘eHPE’, embeds software algorithms in the organization of health and physical education pedagogies. Particularly with the emergence of wearable and mobile activity trackers, biosensors and personal analytics apps, algorithmic processes have an increasingly powerful part to play in how people learn about their own bodies and health. This article specifically considers the ways in which a…
Postdigital Dialogue
Silicon startup schools
Technology companies are investing billions of dollars in educational technology, but also creating their own alternative schools. This article traces the emergence of four prototypical ‘silicon startup schools’ as exemplars of a technocratic mode of corporatized education reform: IBM’s P-TECH, part of its Smarter Cities program; AltSchool, a chain of schools based on ‘makerspaces’ established by a former Google executive; Kahn Lab School, a new …
Governing methods
Policy innovation labs are emerging knowledge actors and technical experts in the governing of education. The article offers a historical and conceptual account of the organisational form of the policy innovation lab. Policy innovation labs are characterised by specific methods and techniques of design, data science, and digitisation in public services such as education. The second half of the article details how labs promote the use of digital d…
Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom
Digital platforms have become central to interaction and participation in contemporary societies. New forms of ‘platformized education’ are rapidly proliferating across education systems, bringing logics of datafication, automation, surveillance, and interoperability into digitally mediated pedagogies. This article presents a conceptual framework and an original analysis of Google Classroom as an infrastructure for pedagogy. Its aim is to establi…
Knowing public services
Discourses of public sector reform in the UK have been shaped in recent years by the participation of new kinds of hybrid cross-sector intermediaries such as think tanks, social enterprises and other third sector organisations. This article provides a documentary analysis of Demos, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the Innovation Unit as intermediary organisations in public sector reform, exploring their promotion of…
Making markets through digital platforms
‘Platform capitalism’ and ‘surveillance capitalism’ describe the new business model and market form of the web. These forms of digital capitalism have begun to infuse the higher education landscape by merging with existing political demands for universities to become more data-driven, competitive, and market-focused. This article presents a case study of the education business Pearson and its expansion of the digital platform as a model for globa…
Political computational thinking
Reflecting political shifts toward both ‘network governance' and ‘digital governance', the idea of ‘learning to code' has become part of a major reform agenda in education policy in England. This article provides a ‘policy network analysis' tracing the governmental, business and civil society actors now operating in policy networks to project learning to code into the reformed programs of study for computing in the National Curriculum in England.…
When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education
Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched.We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape of Edtech investment into education research.We empirically examine venture capital Edtech investors and argue that they are economic and political actors.Investors construct the Edtech industry through their investment and advancing particular imaginarie…
Education recoded
Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the ‘policy mobilities,’ ‘fast policy’ processes and distributed ‘policy assemblages’ that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture…
Investing in imagined digital futures
Educational technology is the focus of increasing financial investment. In this article, we examine how edtech investors imagine and invest in the future of higher education through an empirical case study of a UK investing company. Utilising concepts and methods from economic sociology, we analyse how investment companies engage in techno-financial ‘futuring’ practices. We identify two kinds of futuring practices. First, investors’ imaginary pra…
Psychodata
Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students’ ‘noncognitive’ skills, SEL consists of a ‘psycho-economic’ combination of psychometrics with economic analysis, and is producing novel forms of statistical ‘psychodata’ about students. Constituted by an expandin…
Educating Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is seeking to reform education in its own image, as part of a ‘techno-economic revolution’ that is spreading globally. This essay provides an original analysis of how Silicon Valley is seeking to reproduce its centrality to the techno-economic revolution through technology-based reformatory efforts in education. In so doing, it is becoming a major influence in corporate education reform, seeking to take its new pedagogic practices,…
Educating the smart city
Coupled with the 'smart city', the idea of the 'smart school' is emerging in imaginings of the future of education. Various commercial, governmental and civil society organizations now envisage education as a highly coded, software-mediated and data-driven social institution. Such spaces are to be governed through computational processes written in computer code and tracked through big data. In an original analysis of developments from commercial…
Digital policy sociology
Software code, algorithms, data analytics and infrastructures have become inseparable from policy processes and modes of governance. This article introduces ‘digital policy sociology’ as a way of studying the role and influence of digital technologies in education policy. Building on existing ‘policy sociology’ approaches combined with emerging insights rom ‘digital sociology’, digital policy sociology extends the analytical gaze to new technical…
Mediating Education Policy
This article examines the participation of ‘third-sector’ organisations in public education in England. These organisations act as a cross-sectoral policy network made up of new kinds of policy experts: mediators and brokers with entrepreneurial careers in ideas. They have sought to make education reform thinkable, intelligible and practicable in terms of a computational discourse consisting of code, networks, interactivity and feedback, and rela…
Direct Testing of Rock Painting Pigments for Traces of Haemoglobin at Rose Cottage Cave, South Africa
Attention as an object of knowledge, intervention and valorisation
Innovations in mobile neuromonitoring and brain–computer interfaces are increasingly used to inform understandings of human brains and behaviours while also catalysing imaginaries of neuroscientifically measured and enhanced economic productivity. In this paper, we focus on neurotechnologies that claim to capture, monitor, measure and train learners’ attention. We analyse a corpus of relevant scientific, governance, and commercial texts to explor…
Biosocial spaces and neurocomputational governance
Recently, technologies based on neuroscientific insights into brain function and structure have been promoted for application in education. The novel practices and environments produced by these technologies require new forms of ‘biosocial’ analysis to unpack their implications for education, learning and governance. This article provides an original analysis of current ‘brain-based’ R&D by the edu-business Pearson to apply artificial intelligenc…
Digitalised higher education
Higher education is already profoundly digitalised. Students, academics, and university administrators routinely use digital technologies, many of which rely on data, including artificial intelligence. Universities aim to operate as data-powered organisations to support institutional efficiency and the personalisation of learning and student experience. These developments are occurring against the backdrop of university digital infrastructure mov…
Direct Testing of Rock Painting Pigments for Traces of Haemoglobin at Rose Cottage Cave, South Africa
The first residue analysis blind tests
Microwear and residue analyses in perspective
Ochre in hafting in Middle Stone Age southern Africa
Ochre is well-known as a substance used in Stone Age symbolism, but it can be shown to have had practical functions too. The authors used microscopic examination of Middle Stone Age tools to show they had been hafted, making use of an adhesive compound which included ochre in its recipe
Policy Utopias, Sci-Fi Dystopias, and Contemporary Contests Over Childhood in Education Reform in the UK
Educational policy and children’s science fiction literature provide two distinct visions of the future for children and corresponding representations of the future of childhood. By refracting the literary and the political through a sociological critique, this article scrutinizes how such texts construct ideas about childhood and thus motivate an impetus for social and economic change, especially in the context of children’s digital media use an…
Centrifugal schooling
This article examines changes in curriculum policy in secondary education in England. It is concerned with recent curriculum policy and reform, and the proliferation of non-government actors in curriculum policy creation. It examines the emergence of a loose alliance of third sector organisations and their involvement in a series of alternative ‘curriculum experiments’. The third sector curriculum policy network revolves around a policy vision of…
Effective or affective schools? Technological and emotional discourses of educational change
British schools have been positioned by recent educational policy discourses as sites of innovation and transformation in new technological contexts, but more recent concerns about well-being suggest a more 'affective turn' in educational policy-making. This article provides an analysis of a project which has explored the ways in which schools are being re-imagined as spaces of effective technology-centredness, as well as sites for more emotional…
Algorithmic skin
The emergence of digitized health and physical education, or ‘eHPE’, embeds software algorithms in the organization of health and physical education pedagogies. Particularly with the emergence of wearable and mobile activity trackers, biosensors and personal analytics apps, algorithmic processes have an increasingly powerful part to play in how people learn about their own bodies and health. This article specifically considers the ways in which a…
Mediating Education Policy
This article examines the participation of ‘third-sector’ organisations in public education in England. These organisations act as a cross-sectoral policy network made up of new kinds of policy experts: mediators and brokers with entrepreneurial careers in ideas. They have sought to make education reform thinkable, intelligible and practicable in terms of a computational discourse consisting of code, networks, interactivity and feedback, and rela…
Knowing public services
Discourses of public sector reform in the UK have been shaped in recent years by the participation of new kinds of hybrid cross-sector intermediaries such as think tanks, social enterprises and other third sector organisations. This article provides a documentary analysis of Demos, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the Innovation Unit as intermediary organisations in public sector reform, exploring their promotion of…
Political computational thinking
Reflecting political shifts toward both ‘network governance' and ‘digital governance', the idea of ‘learning to code' has become part of a major reform agenda in education policy in England. This article provides a ‘policy network analysis' tracing the governmental, business and civil society actors now operating in policy networks to project learning to code into the reformed programs of study for computing in the National Curriculum in England.…
Governing methods
Policy innovation labs are emerging knowledge actors and technical experts in the governing of education. The article offers a historical and conceptual account of the organisational form of the policy innovation lab. Policy innovation labs are characterised by specific methods and techniques of design, data science, and digitisation in public services such as education. The second half of the article details how labs promote the use of digital d…
Educating the smart city
Coupled with the 'smart city', the idea of the 'smart school' is emerging in imaginings of the future of education. Various commercial, governmental and civil society organizations now envisage education as a highly coded, software-mediated and data-driven social institution. Such spaces are to be governed through computational processes written in computer code and tracked through big data. In an original analysis of developments from commercial…
Digital education governance
Educational governance today increasingly needs to be understood as digital educational governance. The monitoring and management of educational systems, institutions and individuals is taking place through digital systems that are normally considered part of the backdrop to conventional policy instruments and techniques of government; technical systems that are brought into being and made operational by certain kinds of actors and organizations,…
Silicon startup schools
Technology companies are investing billions of dollars in educational technology, but also creating their own alternative schools. This article traces the emergence of four prototypical ‘silicon startup schools’ as exemplars of a technocratic mode of corporatized education reform: IBM’s P-TECH, part of its Smarter Cities program; AltSchool, a chain of schools based on ‘makerspaces’ established by a former Google executive; Kahn Lab School, a new …
Digital education governance
Educational institutions and governing practices are increasingly augmented with digital database technologies that function as new kinds of policy instruments. This article surveys and maps the landscape of digital policy instrumentation in education and provides two detailed case studies of new digital data systems. The Learning Curve is a massive online data bank, produced by Pearson Education, which deploys highly sophisticated digital intera…
Big Data in Education
Big data has the power to transform education and educational research. Governments, researchers and commercial companies are only beginning to understand the potential that big data offers in informing policy ideas, contributing to the development of new educational tools and innovative ways of conducting research. This cutting-edge overview explores the current state-of-play, looking at big data and the related topic of computer code to examine…
Computing brains
This article examines IBM’s ‘Smarter Education’ program, part of its wider ‘Smarter Cities’ agenda, focusing specifically on its learning analytics applications (based on machine learning algorithms) and cognitive computing developments for education (which take inspiration from neuroscience for the design of brain-like neural networks algorithms and neurocomputational devices). The article conceptualizes the relationship between learning algorit…
The datafied child
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 c…
Educating Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is seeking to reform education in its own image, as part of a ‘techno-economic revolution’ that is spreading globally. This essay provides an original analysis of how Silicon Valley is seeking to reproduce its centrality to the techno-economic revolution through technology-based reformatory efforts in education. In so doing, it is becoming a major influence in corporate education reform, seeking to take its new pedagogic practices,…
Postdigital Dialogue
Biosocial spaces and neurocomputational governance
Recently, technologies based on neuroscientific insights into brain function and structure have been promoted for application in education. The novel practices and environments produced by these technologies require new forms of ‘biosocial’ analysis to unpack their implications for education, learning and governance. This article provides an original analysis of current ‘brain-based’ R&D by the edu-business Pearson to apply artificial intelligenc…
Digital policy sociology
Software code, algorithms, data analytics and infrastructures have become inseparable from policy processes and modes of governance. This article introduces ‘digital policy sociology’ as a way of studying the role and influence of digital technologies in education policy. Building on existing ‘policy sociology’ approaches combined with emerging insights rom ‘digital sociology’, digital policy sociology extends the analytical gaze to new technical…
The datafication of primary and early years education
The datafication of primary and early years education: playing with numbers." Journal of Education Policy, 34(4), pp. 595–596
Education recoded
Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the ‘policy mobilities,’ ‘fast policy’ processes and distributed ‘policy assemblages’ that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture…
Political science (35 obras) · Sociology (35 obras) · Computer Science (33 obras) · Public relations (24 obras) · Psychology (19 obras) · Engineering (18 obras) · Economics (17 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Corporate governance (15 obras) · Business (14 obras)