Education Prototyping: a Methodological Device for Technical Democracy

Abstract

The potential of applying a ‘technical democracy’ (Callon et al. 2009) to the context of sociotechnical controversies in education is the focus of this paper. This process reflects an emergent 'thought collective' (Fleck 1979) whose common interests, yet diverse expertise, are articulated through provisional objects and infrastructure for collective and experimental knowledge production. The technique of ‘prototyping’ was then deployed for a design experiment to: first, slow down, or suspend, existing power relations of co-evolving technologies and methodologies and, second, to accelerate, or expand, new possibilities and configurations for democratisation. Education prototyping is then introduced, with the intent to co-produce pluralistic spaces that expose challenges and test possibilities. Key aspects include the following: (i) prototyping dynamics: problematization and prefiguration; and, (ii) prototyping practices: spanning the temporal, methodological, relational, material, and spatial. These aspects were tested in the context of a research project exploring automated essay scoring in Australian schools. While always situated and partial, we argue that prototyping offers a unique device to interrupt and experiment with the politics of collaboratively researching increasingly networked and commercialised technologies across education and society.