Society. Spaces. Screens

Abstract

The outcome of two years of remote pedagogy was the boom of educational technology (EdTech). Innovations led by EdTech businesses were hailed as necessary and transformative to public education and we saw a wider pattern of governments turning to EdTech as a solution to educational problems such as uneven teacher-student ratio and digital divide (Outeda, 2024). Nonetheless, as schools return, what we witness across the countries is the ways in which the spatial design and nature of education become challenged and reconfigured through surveillance through digital technology. Dubbed the “classroom revolution (Yoon, 2024),” I use the South Korean case of the “AI-digital textbook (AIDT)” to argue that remote pedagogy has shifted the ways in which we think about future classrooms and how it has normalized different modes of surveillance in classrooms through content management platforms and EdTech products. Working with rhizomatic learning by Deleuze and Guattari (1988) and engaging critical media studies and critical EdTech studies (Reich, 2020; Bulger, 2016; Selwyn, 2023), I analyze the COVID-19 pandemic era policy documents (2020-2024) and news media reports to unravel the tech fix arguments and larger hype driven by myths of modernization and technological progress (Kim, 2014). Through the critical analysis of these data, I demonstrate how AIDT is being posed as a way to erase an intrinsic space of social development and interaction and embed particular kinds of surveillance gaze into classrooms.