GDS webinar: Ben Williamson on "Pandemic platformisation: edtech market-making in higher education during Covid19”

The next installment of the GDS webinar series will be on December 14^th. The GDS webinar series, an online seminar series, is organized by the Special Interest Group (SIG) coordinators. They have each invited a leading expert in their research field to enlighten the audience about the different aspects of governing the digital society. Once a month you will have the opportunity to tune in via the GDS Team or the link to the public stream that will be shared in Teams and on the GDS website.

Pandemic platformisation: edtech market-making in higher education during Covid19

Niels Kerssens, coordinator of the SIG “Platformisation of education”, will host this webinar on December 14^th, from 15.30-16.30. He has invited Dr Ben Williamson, chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Dr Williamson will share his thoughts on Pandemic platformisation: edtech market-making in higher education during Covid19.

About Ben Williamson

Ben Williamson is a Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, examining the intersections of digital technologies, science, and data with education policy and governance.

His current research focuses on two key themes. One is the expansion of educational data infrastructures to enable information to be collected from schools and universities, then analysed and circulated to various audiences. The second is the emergence of ‘intimate data’ relating to students’ psychological states, neural activity, and genetic profiles, and the implications for increasingly scientific ways of approaching educational policy and practice.

Governing the Digital Society

This webinar series is organized by the Utrecht University focus area Governing the Digital Society. Governing the Digital Society promotes research on the social processes of datafication, algorithmisation and platformisation. The focus area's basic research inquiry revolves around the question: How to develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies?