Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training - Higher Education Higher Education - Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in...

Part of our recent paper led by @jkom.bsky.social was on how academic papers are assetized by being licensed tp big tech for LLM training - and now we see the subscription products appearing from publishers to double the financial yield of those agreements link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training - Higher Education Higher Education - Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in...

"Assetization of academic content (and assetization in HE more broadly) constructs students and staff as a new kind of economic actor – an ‘assetizen’...with diminished educational and social rights as assetization becomes a governance principle in higher education.”

Assetizing academic content and the emergence of the ‘assetizen’: education platforms, publisher databases, and AI model training - Higher Education Higher Education - Academic content, such as teaching materials and academic publications, has become an economic resource. This has occurred through assetization as the key economic regime in...

New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I'm co-chairing the Society for Social Studies of Science @4sweb.bsky.social Conference in Toronto, Oct 2026. #STS #scipol #innovation

Theme: "TechnoPower • Technoscientific Futures".

Open panel submissions portal is open! ls!

Deadline: 2nd February 2026

www.4sonline.org/about_the_co...

The alarming aspect of this deliberate "anti-woke" algorithmic biasing of LLMs from an educational perspective is our institutions all bought in to an imaginary of innovation, then got locked in to enterprise contracts, and now the models are being recoded so they undermine educational values

Another brilliant piece by @keanbirch.bsky.social

Thanks!

The Political Economy of Datafication and Platformization: Digital Transformation in Higher Education Platforms, data, and artificial intelligence are impacting higher education systems and universities internationally. Future research is required to examine their concrete effects, and to understand t...

Platforms, data, and AI are impacting higher education systems and universities internationally. @jkom.bsky.social and I have a short piece on the political economy of digital transformation in HE just out ihe.bc.edu/pub/499eknm0...

Huge congrats, Joe. You’ve truly conducted such excellent research!

I’m looking forward to speak at the @work2025fi.bsky.social conference! I’ll be discussing academic labour and HE in the age of digital rentiership.

Thanks very much for organising this excellent panel and for having me @rachelbrooks.bsky.social! So great to discuss the current matters in HE with @unsocialtheory.bsky.social, @alinecourtois.bsky.social and everyone there!

if you're at the @britsoci.bsky.social annual conference next week, do come along to the session on The Future of Higher Education, with contributions from @unsocialtheory.bsky.social @jkom.bsky.social & @alinecourtois.bsky.social

Presidential event description

If you happen to be at the @britsoci.bsky.social's annual conference and if you want to hear something beyond the moan about how "they" are destroying "our" higher education, I'll be speaking (alongside @jkom.bsky.social and @alinecourtois.bsky.social) at the Presidential event on the Future of HE:

Such a great pleasure to work with @keanbirch.bsky.social on this paper. I’m really pleased with it and think it brings important new insights. Check it out!

Learning, Media and Technology Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education Edited by Janja Komljenovic, Kean Birch and Sam Sellar This special issue builds on emerging work on rentiership and assetisation in education to address the lack of analytical attention on these dynamics and to begin mapping a future research agenda for the field. To date, research in this field has introduced key concepts for understanding assetisation and has illuminated potential challenges for the digitalisation of higher education (Komljenovic 2021, 2022). Other areas of investigation include: how assetisation relates to other economic processes in education and how it remakes educational processes and subjects as com- modified entities (Grimaldi, Ball, and Peruzzo 2023); how automated interventions in education are calculated based on assetised resources (Hansen and Komljenovic 2023); the potential for, and challenges of, digital disruption in digital economies organised subject to assetised governance (Komljenovic et al. 2024a); the assetisation strategies of edupreneurs as they collaborate with edu- cation and research sectors (Ideland and Serder 2023); the futuring activities of EdTech investors (Komljenovic et al. 2023; Komljenovic, Sellar, and Birch 2024b; Williamson and Komljenovic 2023); and the translation of tuition fees into assets (Milyaeva and Neyland 2020)

🟨Volume 50, Issue 1 (2025) of LMT🟪

Let's introduce our new Special Issue! In their editorial
@jkom.bsky.social, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Sam Sellar intruduce the dynamics of #rentiership and #assetisation in the digitalisation of education.

Read all articles: tinyurl.com/a8bvzkxe

The promise of AI in education is it will save educators time. That's rubbish. It's sapping all our time already in working groups, committees, workshops, and marking anxiety. It's the most time-sapping, exhausting and frankly boring thing I've ever encountered in HE - and it's in my research area.

Learning, Media and Technology Rents, assets and governance in digitalised education. Guest Editor: Janja Komljenovic, Kean Birch and Sam Sellar.. Volume 50, Issue 1 of Learning, Media and Technology

Our special issue ‘Rents, assets and governance in digitalised education’ is now published! Check it out: www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjem20/c...

The whole thing is amazing and absolutely worth watching until the end.

But @meredithmeredith.bsky.social gave the best pitch for @signal.org answering if there are any downsides of using it: "No-none! It's free, classy and we're not shoving and weird #AI shit into it." 🤣 👏

Funny thing about this 360 degree multimodal surveillance classroom is it's absolutely nothing new conceptually, so it's not really to do with "innovative" tech but continuing a much longer history of intensifying student monitoring and teacher automation, eg www.computer.org/csdl/magazin...

Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education Published in Learning, Media and Technology (Ahead of Print, 2025)

Check out our article here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is a recently published editorial that I wrote with Kean Birch and Sam Sellar. We hope this editorial and Special Issue as a whole will offer a useful framework for understanding assetization and rentiership in education and beyond; and for future work on these important processes.

New publication: we discuss different ways to think through and map assetization in education. i, we look at the variety of assets in education; ii, the production and monetization of assets; iii, the embeddedness of assets in everyday, mundane practices; and iv, the politics of assetization.

Chuffed our paper on edtech market forecasting - we called it "algorithmic futuring" - made it into this special issue on digital assetization in education doi.org/10.1080/1743...

Just in case you thought everything was hunky dory in UK universities ...

🔥Superb agenda-setting editorial on assetization and rentiership in education ⏬️

Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education Published in Learning, Media and Technology (Ahead of Print, 2025)

Full article: Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our Introduction article with @keanbirch.bsky.social and Sam Sellar, “Mapping rentiership and assetization in the digitalisation of education” is now published and freely available. It explains how assetization manifests in education, its consequences and how to analyse this dynamic. Check it out

Image of two people on a stage with a screen behind featuring text reading: " HE data: Reflect, research, rethink".

But edtech trade shows - sometimes - invite people like @jkom.bsky.social and me to offer a different, more "sociotechnical" perspective on why edtech, data, and AI are *not* going to inevitably or straightforwardly "transform" education. Hopefully at least a small dent in the industry bandwagon.

And, as expected, the official AI Plan document just makes a couple of refs to "AI assistants" reducing teachers' time spent planning and marking - but quite a lot on educating AI "talent" and wider AI skills training www.gov.uk/government/p...