Stephen Downes posted about the mutating metric machinery of higher education this morning.
His post contained links to Ben Williamson’s discussion of the mutating metric machinery and David Berry’s post the data-intensive university.
Ben and David have insights to share with us as we deal with the use of data in sport contexts.
David starts his post with this observation about data-intensive society:
we now live within a horizon of interpretability determined in large part by the capture of data and its articulation in and through algorithms.
He defines data-intensive science as the fourth paradigm in scientific enquiry (the others are: experimental; theoretical; and computational). David suggests:
we are on the verge of a new challenge for the university under the conditions of a society that is based increasingly upon digital knowledge and its economic valorisation.
David’s conclusion led me to think about the transformation of sport and the digital skills required. He argued:
a data-intensive university supports efforts to ensure a new spirit of discovery and the promotion of research through the use of computational techniques and practices which will transform the culture of departments in a university.
Ben noted that contemporary culture is increasingly defined by metrics. He discusses the emergence of a narrative in higher education that it has “been made to resemble a market in which institutions, staff and students are all positioned competitively, with measurement techniques required to assess, compare and rank their various performances”.
Ben links his discussion to David Beer’s (2016) concept of metric power that “accounts for the long-growing intensification of measurement over the last two centuries to the current mobilization of digital or ‘big’ data across diverse domains of societies”.
Ben concludes “A form of mobile, networked fast policy is propelling metrics across the sector, and increasingly prompting changes in organizational and individual behaviours that will transform the higher education sector to see and act upon itself as a market”.
David and Ben’s observations and arguments have a resonance for me in the context of sport. As sport acquires more data in training and competition environments, it is a good time to reflect in a second order way on data intensivity and behavioural change. David and Ben use their insights to investigate higher education but my reading of their posts had me interchanging sport with their higher education contexts and thinking about performance and performativity.
Photo Credits
Photo by ev on Unsplash
Photo by Jovan on Unsplash
Postscript
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