Is a star a document? Catalogued students and learning analytics

Is a star a document? Catalogued students and learning analytics
 

Professor Lesley Gourlay

Department of Culture, Communication and Media

University of College London

Institute of Education

April 28, 2026 (Tuesday)

Room 401-402, Meng Wah Complex, HKU

16:30 - 17:45

Chair: Professor David Carless

Abstract:
The media theorist Suzanne Briet proposed that through the recording of information about entities in the world, these entities are not only documented, but they themselves are rendered into documents. In this seminar, I propose that Briet’s notion of the document can be applied to data visualisation used in learning analytics, and its effect on students. I argue that a learning analytics dashboard designed for individual student use not only renders the student into a document but also imbricates the student in a co-constitutive form of relationality with that document, which explicitly encourages and rewards a very particular form of action in the world in relation to the learning management system. I conclude that this has real-world effects not only in this inculcation, but in the reification of a particular neoliberal ideology of student engagement as a performance of observable, traceable, self-optimisation in a highly individualised educational worldview.
 

About the speaker:

Lesley Gourlay is a Professor of Education in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media, University College London, Institute of Education, UK. Her research focuses on datafication, posthumanism, phenomenology in digital higher education. She was a recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship 2021-2025 focused on ‘The Datafied University: Documentation and Performativity in in Digitised Education’. Her recent publications have focused on questions relating to surveillance and audit cultures in higher education; she is currently working on a monograph for Bloomsbury Academic on generative AI and authorship. https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/48714-lesley-gourlay