Carlo Perrotta’s new article takes a critical look at the dominant role of Google Classroom as an ‘infrastructure for pedagogy’. The article, in collaboration with colleagues from the UK and Australia, argues that Google is trying to shape pedagogy on a global scale, through the development of an educational app ecosystem revolving around its proprietary Classroom API, and new forms of division of labour involving system administrators, teachers and guardians/parents. The article argues that the extractive tendencies of Google’s business model shape a bidirectional algorithmic pedagogy, as the platform learns constantly from its users, while also creating an infrastructure for partially automated teaching and school management.
Full Citation: Carlo Perrotta, Kalervo N. Gulson, Ben Williamson & Kevin Witzenberger (2020) Automation, APIs and the distributed labour of platform pedagogies in Google Classroom, Critical Studies in Education, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2020.1855597
