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Podcast: New Books in Sociology
Episode: Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia, "The Left Hand of Data: Designing Education Data for Justice" (MIT Press, 2024)
Description: Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a ānormativeā learner does. InĀ The Left Hand of Data:Ā Designing Education Data for JusticeĀ (MIT Press, 2024, open access atĀ this link), educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumptionāthat outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. Berland and Garcia argue that the aim of analytics should not be about enforcing and entrenching norms but about using data science to break new ground and enable play and creativity. From this speculative vantage point, they ask how we can go about living alongside data in a better way...