The Perceptron: A Partial History of Models and Minds in Data-Driven Educational Systems

Abstract

This chapter considers some of the limit points of contemporary relations between International Large-Scale Assessments, learning analytic platforms, and theories of mind circulating in contemporary comparative and transnational educational policy discourses. First, aspects of the rise of Big Data and predictive analytics are historicized, with particular attention to how emergent notions of concepts like an intelligent educational economy paradoxically seem to offer unprecedented opportunities for personalizing education that increasingly rely on efforts to construct, universalize, and predict transnational benchmarks. Then, the chapter pursues how such efforts to universalize measures and predict changes have located the mind as a primary target for solving social problems through educational reform. More specifically, the emergence and circulation of the perceptron in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s is suggested as one example of how efforts to model the human mind as a neuro-dynamic learning system became entangled with efforts to produce universal, mobile, and adaptive neuro-dynamic learning systems targeting the transnational optimization of human minds.

Citation

Ziols, R. (2019), "The Perceptron: A Partial History of Models and Minds in Data-Driven Educational Systems", Jules, T.D. and Salajan, F.D. (Ed.) The Educational Intelligent Economy: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things in Education (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 38), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 51-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-367920190000038004