Moulding student emotions through computational psychology: affective learning technologies and algorithmic governance

Ben Williamson
2017 Educational Media International  
Recently psychology has begun to amalgamate with computer science approaches to big data analysis as a new field of 'computational psychology' or 'psycho-informatics,' as well as with new 'psycho-policy' approaches associated with behaviour change science, in ways that propose new ways of measuring, administering and managing individuals and populations. In particular, 'social-emotional learning' has become a new focus within education. Supporters of social-emotional learning foresee technical
more » ... ystems being employed to quantify and govern learners' affective lives, and to modify their behaviours in the direction of 'positive' feelings. In this article I identify the core aspirations of computational psychology in education, along with the technical systems it proposes to enact its vision, and argue that a new form of 'psycho-informatic power' is emerging as a source of authority and control over education. Digital technologies are never simply neutral tools or devices but the products of complex interplays of technological innovations with social arrangements. As the field of science and technology studies (STS) has demonstrated, technologies are produced, deployed, configured and used in specific social and political contexts (Gillespie, Boczkowski & Hood 2014). As such, STS has shown how 'technological objects' are 'thoroughly enmeshed in society, as integral components of social order,' which have been fashioned to encourage, exclude or regulate certain behaviours (Jasanoff, 2015, pp. 2-3). Informed by the STS outlook, recently studies have begun to focus on digital technologies, software, code and algorithms, and traced how they are both socially produced and socially productive of particular effects-such as new ways of doing things, new forms of social and economic relations, new modes of cultural activity, and new ways of exchanging information and producing knowledge (Kitchin & Dodge 2011). Studies of software have also been undertaken in the field of education research, focusing on how educational technologies are produced in relation to particular policies, commercial aspirations and scientific insights, and which produce effects as they are then inserted into other policymaking processes, management techniques, knowledge exchange, and pedagogic practices (Lynch 2015; Williamson 2017). This article focuses on the emergence of 'computational psychology' in education, and specifically examines new digital technologies designed to capture psychological data about learners. Although computational psychology as a branch
doi:10.1080/09523987.2017.1407080 fatcat:c6kldetim5afll27gxvwtvhi3i