This chapter examines how ethical frameworks for education have been displaced through processes of standardization both historically and contemporarily. Before turning to current examples, the chapter begins with an analysis of twentieth-century movements in philosophy of education and curriculum to illustrate how processes of standardization and educational “narrowing” emerged as the dominant educational vision for American schooling, corresponding with the push for accountability and neoliberal reform in the last few decades of the twentieth century. How this narrowing exists in today’s K-12 and higher education environment, as well as its impact on historically marginalized groups, is then explored. The chapter then turns to how the contemporary emphasis on educational technology, datafication, and digitalization reinforces educational standardization to the detriment of ethical educational possibilities. The chapter concludes with considerations of how ethical educational visions might be revived in our current era.

This paper is set against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world that brings considerable challenges and possibility for UK higher education. While the world of work is transitioning to Industrial Digitalisation (I4.0) technologies, the widespread lack of relevant skills among academics in a number of non-STEM disciplines is a fundamental impediment to harnessing the power of I4.0 in learning and teaching. Furthermore, there is no clear direction for how to start the process of curriculum innovation. To guide academics in non-STEM subjects, a three-step heuristic model for embedding core digitalisation competencies in the non-STEM curriculum is introduced. This chapter - as well as seeking to bring curricular change by empowering academics to make the first steps in embedding disciplinary relevant digitalisation competencies – intends to stimulate discussion about how universities can best produce graduates with the skillset and mind-set to critique, understand and find spaces to thrive in digitalisation-informed workplaces.

This chapter explores the ways that private media companies take users’ personal data as a proxy for public life, and discusses the consequences this development poses for public knowledge. In contrast to sweeping claims about the efficacy of data analytics, Melissa Aronczyk argues that the data these companies collect are often relevant only to specific behaviors carried out in a predetermined context. They reflect a system engineered to maximize attention and profit while adhering to security and privacy regulations. The resulting data set thus are highly specific to the conditions in which they are produced and cannot stand in for any more general public opinion. Aronczyk discusses the United Nations’ use of datasets donated by private companies to address their agenda for climate mitigation, and questions the reliability of that data for making inferences about human behavior. More broadly, she interrogates the wisdom of taking our cues from corporations by adopting the same assumption they make about what their data means.

This chapter summarizes the book’s aim, which is to explore how scholars working at the intersections of journalism, politics, and activism make sense of and relate to some of the most pressing issues concerning contemporary developments in media and public life. Matthew Powers and Adrienne Russell describe recurrent questions that confront scholars of media and public life, and then summarize the core themes explored in the volume, which are living in a datafied world, journalism in times of change, media and problems of inclusion, engagement with and through media, and the role of scholars.