Platforms, perceptions, and privacy: ethical implications of student conflation of educational technologies

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories.

Findings

Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.

Citation

Greenhalgh, S.P., DiGiacomo, D.K. and Barriage, S. (2023), "Platforms, perceptions, and privacy: ethical implications of student conflation of educational technologies", Information and Learning Sciences, Vol. 124 No. 9/10, pp. 247-265. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-03-2023-0030