Emergent developments in the datafication and digitalization of education

This chapter documents emergent developments in the datafication and digitalization of education, as well as their implications for education policy and the work of systems, schools and teachers. These developments are based on enhanced computational capacities, with much of the work of schooling systems, schools and teachers now datafied and digitalized, enabling complex analyses of these data. The chapter also documents the move from the collection of discrete, point-in-time data to the collection of continuous, real-time data, and related moves from small data sets to big data. Consideration is given to the centrality of data infrastructures to these moves, with a focus on datafied bodies and datafied modes of governance. The analysis suggests that Foucault’s disciplinary society functioning through the panopticon is now synchronously overlaid with Deleuze’s control society of continuous assessments. We also discuss the multiple ways these emergent changes both reflect and express complex imbrications of global, national and local relations.