Testimonials

This essay will discuss if research activities can be seen as generating “products”, as well as what are the consequences of inspecting and evaluating them as such, instead of evaluating their contribution as ideas, thinking, research data, and materials for a collective process of inquiry.

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There are dozens of proposals for integrating ethics into the early planning and assessment of technological innovation. Beginning with John Dewey in the United States, the call continued with Hans Jonas and the rise of environmental justice and regulatory risk assessment. Schemes for integrating ethics into the innovation process were advanced under the banners of “constructive technology assessment,” “anticipatory governance,” “democratizing technology,” and “responsible innovation,” among others. During the same era, the call for protecting the interests of human and animal subjects were framed as “research ethics” and research organizations created Institutional Review Boards to oversee scientific activity.

This paper tracks some of Larry Hickman’s contributions to these trends. Hickman first followed Langdon Winner’s critique of “straight line rationality” by demonstrating how Dewey’s approach offers much that has been unrealized in subsequent attempts to reform the innovation process. Later, Hickman demonstrates how pragmatist ethics and epistemology provide a positive program of action that complements the negative critique the Frankfurt School. While Hickman’s suggestions could be incorporated into virtually any of the new proposals for integrating ethics into technological research, development, and dissemination, the sheer plethora of new approaches suggests that the field lacks the continuity to follow up on Hickman’s suggestions.

In this paper, I will explores some reasons why the field remains fragmented, emphasizing weaknesses in the pragmatist approach. First, I will acknowledge the significance of obvious explanations: the technical community’s unfamiliarity with ethical inquiry and the lack of both administrative and financial commitment to ethics-oriented research. There is, in short, an epistemic gap between the message that innovators are prepared to hear and the sophisticated response that Hickman’s pragmatism offers. This gap may be a practical limitation to philosophical pragmatism in many of its manifestations.

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Assessment practices have come to dominate much of formalized education, especially within the United States. Currently, learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining (EDM) are purported by many educational companies and institutions to successfully improve learning through what are often considered as objective collection, classification, and analysis of educational data. Enthusiasm about big data in education has contributed to the naturalization of datafication within the field. Educational data is regarded as a natural resource that exists “out there” to be mined by EDM and refined by LA. Once refined, it is thought to bear the truth of educational assessment that leads to successful learning outcomes.

Here I use Larry Hickman’s work on pragmatism and technology to interrogate this trend in formal education. I begin with an explanation of the key concepts and practices used in my argument, including Hickman’s definition of technology, big data, datafication, naturalization, learning analytics, and educational data mining. Next, I provide a brief overview of the rhetoric of assessment within education. I then discuss how enthusiasm born from such rhetoric, especially for LA and EDM, has contributed to a form of reductionism within formalized education that denies that values are concealed and smuggled into assessment practices. By applying Hickman’s pragmatic philosophy of technology to educational assessment, I suggest ways in which LA and EDM may be useful for learning when values and their relation to data are consistently acknowledged and critically examined. I argue that this pragmatic approach provides a transactional framework that dismantles the naturalization of datafication and focuses instead on education as embodied experience that is critically reflective.

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