ABSTRACT
Buzzwords for twenty-first century education include “creativity,” “critique,” “collaboration,” “communication,” or sets of core skills that are often linked to the classic flexible, entrepreneurial selves of neoliberal imaginaries. This chapter overviews recent critical scholarship on education and technology in the twenty-first century, highlighting three aspects: practices, datafication and subject formation. One priority in discussions on the digital in education is how to enact critical practices, whether this refers to teachers practicing critical digital pedagogy, school leaders establishing critical digital data infrastructures or students engaging in critical digital literacy, media literacy and radical digital citizenship. As educational data mining and learning analytics have become established as substantial fields of inquiry with a focus on improving learning by using large datasets, so too has a body of critical scholarship on datafication emerged. Lurking at the edges of the scholarship on critical digital practices and datafication are conceptions of the digital subject of twenty-first-century education.
