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Finnish Higher Education, the Digivision 2030 initiative, and global data governance: From global utopias to local alternative futures of digitalisation and datafication

Various international actors such as the OECD and Microsoft impact global digitalisation and datafication discourse and thus national decision making. The core governing rule of this discourse is, “digitalization and datafication have potential”.

This presentation explores how international education, technological and business discourse flows into national education visions and practices, and how it mutates in local discursive practices. To illustrate this, it uses various empirical data such as international and national policy documents and reports, learning analytics needs analysis conducted with several Finnish higher education institutions (HEIs), and the Digivision 2030 initiative documentation.

Digivision 2030 is a national-level initiative funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. The aim is to transform Finnish HEIs into data driven communities and to open national data reserves for the use of individuals, society and national and international actors, including companies. The main purpose of Digivision 2030 is to create a national datafied digital service platform which would host individuals’ learning data for life. As such, Digivision 2030 could be seen as a concrete national-level culmination of the dominant global discourse of digital education governance.

The presentation argues that much of the dominant discourse is based on a myth of certainty and controllability of life. Therefore it also asks, can we still speculate alternatives futures of digitalisation beyond the dominant discourse of total data governance and if so, how?

Speaker

Dr. Marko Teräs works as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Academy of Finland research project “Speculative social science fiction of digitalization in higher education: Towards a humanized digital future” at the Faculty of Social Sciences (Sociology) in Tampere University. He is the lead of Critical Applied Research of Digitalization in Education (CARDE) research group and one of the founders of CreditEd network.

Dr Teräs has a broad professional history with research and development projects in online learning, HCI, virtual reality, virtual environments, digitalisation and datafication, and has worked in Tanzania, the UAE, Southeast Asia and Australia.

This event was part of the CPPR Lunchtime Seminar series.