Presenting on Governing US Education Knowledge Commons at IASC

My paper, "Addressing the Challenge of Governing the US Educational Knowledge Commons When Stakeholders’ Goals, Interests, and Resources are Misaligned" was accepted at the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) conference to be held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on June 16-20, 2025.  

I will speak about how the US edtech ecosystems’ stakeholders have misaligned motivators, power differentials, and a lack of incentives to align better. Edtech tools are commonly designed to surveil both teachers and students who have limited access to knowledge derived from walled gardens of corporate and sometimes governmental data. The US has limited privacy and security regulation while corporate governance is driven more by market forces than lifelong learning goals. The private walled gardens are designed to sell products such as software, devices, and data itself, rather than benefit students directly. Meanwhile, commercial research incentivizes product-driven evaluation over deeper learning questions and limits external researchers’ contributions. Edtech tools’ cognitivist approach to measuring student progress may provide insights into short-term improvements, rarer insights across a given school year, and limited to no information across years. The cognitivist orientation has limited or no data on student motivation and interests or the classroom environment, and limited capacity to support creative or less structured lessons. Based on previous focus group findings, several alternative approaches will be described including codesign with school experts as necessary approaches to sustainable design of digital infrastructure, shared access (and not necessarily ownership) to data across walled gardens, and changes to regulation that both incentivize and require change.