ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 examines the extent to which data-driven platforms are being envisioned as technologies of ‘personalisation’ in education, involving a valorisation of one-to-one pedagogical relationships, and the assumption ‘super-human’ teaching abilities brought about by data-driven platforms. These visions will be shown to involve conflicting narratives of the human teacher, as both increasingly redundant and valued for authentic teaching knowledge. The imaginary of personalisation will be contrasted with an examination of the ‘knowledge space’, a key functional aspect of educational artificial intelligence (AI) platforms that renders topic areas into mathematical representations of knowledge, and algorithmically controls student pathways. Such functioning will be suggested to have significant implications for ideas of student agency and subjectivity. The final sections of the chapter will suggest three different notions of the ‘self’ emerging from Chinese political and social history: the ‘divided self’’; the ‘entrepreneurial self’; and the ‘creative self’. As such, these perspectives suggest rich articulations of subjectivity and identity that are often erased in the imaginaries of ‘personalising’ AI.
