EdTech e a plataformização da educação

Abstract

This study investigates EdTechs - companies that offer services involving the use of technology for education -, analyzing their inscription in the current context marked by the centrality of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education and trying to identify their correlation with the phenomenon of the plataformization of education. Our research uses dialectical historical materialism as a method of understanding reality. We understand that in our time information and communication technologies (ICTs) are configured as an essential element among the different accumulation mechanisms created by capitalism, therefore technological innovation is linked to the dynamic engine of the capitalist system and play a fundamental role for the logic of its functioning. Some problematizing questions guided this study: To what extent the transformations of contemporary capitalism and the predominance of the informational-digital machinery have impacted the organization and content of education? In what ways are neotechnicalism, digital neotechnicalism and learning articulated? Considering that technologies have been recontextualized in educational policy discourse, can we claim that EdTech will be (or is) the "new" agent representing this discourse? Is it possible to affirm that the growth of EdTech signals a plataformization process of education that will impact the public school and the teaching work? The methodological instrument used to deepen our study was Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (FAIRCLOUGH, 2001), which helped us understand the documents analyzed in this work as well as the discourses and consequent positions in dispute. We defend the thesis that EdTech represents the advance of the phenomenon of the platformization of education, impacting the work of teachers and public education, facilitating the increasing insertion of capital in the field of education. The platformization of education is based on digital neotechnicism that commodify social relations themselves through the collection of data from students and teachers and increased surveillance, with the aim taking education out of the state's hands or privatizing it internally.