Facilitated by: Dr Janja Komljenovic who is the co-convenor of the Digital University Network. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here.

Join this two-part webinar linked to the Learning, Media and Technology journal’s Special Issue on assetisation in digital higher education. Featuring presentations from co-editors and authors, the events will encourage discussion and invite participant interaction.

The digital economy is increasingly governed via rentiership arrangements. Global digital cloud infrastructures are owned and controlled by a small number of tech giants, digital platforms plugged into these infrastructures are important assets, and the personal data extracted by these digital platforms are controlled by platform owners and made valuable through various forms of data aggregation, processing, and analytics.

We are witnessing the emergence of digital rentiership beyond the usual monopolies and digital asset-making in search of future value. These processes, however, are mostly hidden from the public eye, often legally operated via private, contractual relations. Since most of our social lives are now either digital or digitally mediated, it is key that we democratically discuss what kind of governance we want for the digital world. As in other sectors, rentiership is on the rise in education too. In their emerging work on assetization in education, scholars argue that this is a productive way to understand the impact of privatising, enclosing, and financialising public education. The special issue aims to investigate digital(ising) education by considering assetisation as both a transformative process and a mode of governance. The contributions will address aspects of assetisation-related issues in education and their impact.

Schedule

Speaker bios

Kean Birch is Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy and Director of the Institute for Technoscience and Society at York University, Canada. Kean’s research concerns the transformation of things into assets.

Janja Komljenovic is a Senior Lecturer in Education Futures at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the political economy of higher education digital transformation and particularly higher education digital markets, the datafication of universities, and the EdTech industry.

Sveta Milyaeva is Associate Professor in Sociology at Bristol University, UK. She studies markets, valuation, assetisation. 

Daniel Neyland is Professor of Digital Futures and co-director of the Digital Futures Institute. His research focuses on governance, accountability and technology.

Ben Williamson is a Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh.