This book attends to the transformation of processes and practices in education, relating to its increasing digitisation and datafication. The introduction of new means to measure, capture, describe and represent social life in numbers has not only transformed the ways in which teaching and learning are organised, but also the ways in which future generations (will) construct reality with and through data.
Contributions consider data practices that span across different countries, educational fields and governance levels, ranging from early childhood education, to schools, universities, educational technology providers, to educational policy making and governance. The book demonstrates how digital data not only support decision making, but also fundamentally change the organisation of learning and teaching, and how these transformation processes can have partly ambivalent consequences, such as new possibilities for participation, but also the monitoring and emergence/manifestation of inequalities.
Focusing on how data can drive decision making in education and learning, this book will be of interest to those studying both educational technology and educational policy making.

The increasing datafication, in particular the availability of data and corresponding algorithms introduces new means to measure, capture, describe and represent social life in numbers. The education sector is one of the most noticeable domains affected by datafication, because it transforms not only the ways in which teaching and learning are organised but also the ways in which future generations (will) construct reality with and through data. The datafication of education comprises of the collection of data on all levels of educational systems (individual, classroom, school, region, state, international), potentially about all processes of teaching, learning and school management. This proliferation of data changes decision-making and opinion-forming processes of educational stakeholders such as education policy, school supervision, school authorities, teachers, students and parents. For example, data are used to improve school development, to hold schools and teachers accountable, to control access to schooling or to compare student achievements across countries. Such use cases raise expectations with respect to increased transparency, accountability, service orientation and civic participation but also associated fears with respect to surveillance and control, privacy issues, power relations, and (new) inequalities (e.g., Anagnostopoulos, Rutledge, and Jacobsen 2013; Eynon 2013; Selwyn 2015; Livingstone and Sefton-Green 2016; Lupton and Williamson 2017). Within the educational context, more and heterogeneous data are being generated – deliberately – for monitoring, surveillance or evaluation purposes, but also – automatically – through routine operations of a manifold of digital devices and systems (Selwyn 2015), producing ‘digital traces’ (Breiter and Hepp 2017). Schools, for example, are being transformed into ‘data platforms’ in which ‘a wide range of data tracking, sensing and analytics technologies are being mobilised’ (Williamson 2015a, 134). These digital educational data are distinct from pre-digital forms as they may be exhaustive in scope, highly detailed, and can be combined in a flexible manner and at different aggregation levels (Parks 2014). Such possibilities have always existed on a small scale, but new data infrastructures and algorithmic capabilities allow for analytics of an ‘unprecedented complexity and scope’ (Parks 2014, 356). However, the underlying algorithms and the ways in which data are produced by data providers, statisticians as well as the role of software companies and educational technology providers are hardly understood (Eynon 2013; Williamson 2015b).
This special issue aims to shed light on the dynamics of datafication and related transformation of education. Contributions consider data practices that span across different countries, educational fields and governance levels from early childhood education (Bradbury, this issue), to schools (Ratner et al, this issue; Manolev et al, this issue), universities (Jones & McCoy, this issue), educational technology providers (Macgilchrist, this issue) to educational policy making and governance (Williamson & Piattoeva, this issue).