Mediating pedagogy: Third sector governance and expertise in education policy

Abstract

This paper provides an initial sketch of the emergence of the "public policy lab" in educational governance, a new hybrid kind of organisation that traverses public, private and third sectors and blurs political, academic and digital media fields. These new kinds of policy actors include the Public Services Innovations Lab at the national Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, as well as the think tank Demos and the social enterprise the Innovation Unit. Their activities represent an attempt to shift to a new mode of educational governance through the cross-sectoral expertise of "policy networks." Their current preoccupation is with "computation power" in public services, especially the "democratic" digital methods of user-centredness, open access, P2P technologies, crowdsourcing, and data analytics. The central argument is that computation power provides a "diagram" on which future policies and pedagogies alike are being proposed by such public policy labs. These developments may be leading to the automatic production of pedagogy by learning analytics technologies acting autonomously of human input.