Ferrante, P., Williams, F., Büchner, F., Kiesewetter, S., Chitsauko Muyambi, G., Uleanya, C., & Utterberg Modén, M. (2024) “In/equalities in digital education policy – sociotechnical imaginaries from three world regions” Learning, Media and Technology 49(1): 122-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2023.2237870 (open access)

The 15-minute podcast episode is here and wherever you listen to your podcasts:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/episodes/16588168-what-is-critical-in-critical-studies-of-edtech

Our events are taking place on Thursday 20 February and Friday 21 February. Feel free to reach out, if you would like to participate. We may still have a few free spaces. Each event explores four questions, each event is face-to-face, each event is focused on talking, sharing, inter-thinking. (No presentations, no slides, no flights!) We will be thinking about:

#1. What are the pressing issues, concerns, tensions and problems that surround EdTech in our locality? What questions do we need to ask, and what approaches will help us research these questions?

#2. What social harms are we seeing associated with digital technology and education in our locality?

#3. What does the political economy of EdTech look like in our region? What do local EdTech markets look like? How are global Big Tech corporations manifest in local education systems? What does EdTech policy look like, and which actors are driving policymaking? What do we find if we ‘follow the money’?

#4. What grounds for hope are there? Can we point to local instances of digital technology leading to genuine social benefits and empowerment? What local push-back and resistance against egregious forms of EdTech is evident? What alternate imaginaries are being circulated about education and digital futures?

More information on the Gothenburg meet-up here: https://www.credtech.se/en/cset2025

More on Oldenburg here (in German): https://relab.uol.de/2024/11/06/cset2025-oldenburg/

More on Buenos Aires here:

Local meet-ups will each capture their key responses to the questions, which will feed into an international report on critical studies of education and technology (CSET) that collates ideas from across the local meet-ups.

The hype surrounding digital technologies in education has now partly been replaced with a opposite tendency where schools worldwide are going back to printed books and banning mobile phones from the classroom. At the same time, digital technologies are deeply embedded in educational practices and the global ed-tech industry is thriving. In this panel, four distinguished researchers from the field of media and education will give their perspectives on this development:

Neil Selwyn, Professor in the Faculty of Education (Monash University, Australia)
Petar Jandrić, Professor of Information Science (Zagreb University of Applied Science, Croatia)
Felicitas Macgilchrist, Professor of Digital Education and Schooling (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany)
Sarah Hayes, Professor of Education and Research Lead (Bath Spa University, UK)

The plenary discussion can be attended on site at Södertörn University or as a webinar.

Academic Writers’ Workshop (2 hours)External link.
For on-site participants, there will also be a workshop session in academic publishing in the afternoon. The Academic Writers’ Workshop is designed for people who wish to develop their abstracts and presentations into publications, or for those with papers that are nearing submission, who would like to improve their work through constructive critique from experienced academic journal editors. The workshop begins with participant introductions followed by a short talk. Based on their work as editors of Postdigital Science and Education (Petar Jandrić & Sarah Hayes) and Learning, Media and Technology (Felicitas Macgilchrist) the workshop convenors look into the intersections between political economy of academic publishing, review processes, and approaches to editorial decisions. After the talk, participants will split into three groups to discuss their ideas for articles and receive feedback. Abstracts and draft articles are sent to the workshop convenors in beforehand.

Please use this link to sign up for the symposium (you can choose to attend either or both of the sessions in the form). If you have any questions, please contact Saga Hansén or Ingrid Forsler.

Reposted from Södertörn University Stockholm: https://www.sh.se/english/sodertorn-university/calendar/events/2025-02-06-the-digital-backlash-in-education—critical-and-postdigital-perspectives

“Affordances” is likely to be an important word. “Participation” will also make an appearance. And perhaps (with a nod to Ursula K. Le Guin) “imagination” is more helpful than “creativity”.  

The event is organised together with the “Arbeitsstelle Schulentwicklung” (Task Force for School Development) at the University of Oldenburg’s Centre for Teacher Education.

As inspiration, here is an image we have used in the Re:Lab with the title of “how not to design the classroom of the future?”

“Reading, writing and narrating the world differently. With an enthusiasm that defies the virulence of the times that surround us, Orit Halpern invites us to explore the intersections of education, artificial intelligence, cognitivism and even economic theory. Orit is an American historian who talks to us about all this in a FLACSO classroom on a Buenos Aires midday.

Freedom, equality and ‘fraternity’: speculative history of artificial intelligence’ was the title of the keynote given by Halpern at a conference organised by Reconfigurations of Educational Inequality (RED), the Organisation of Ibero-American States (OEI) and FLACSO.

The expert in digital culture surprised the audience by adding to her hypotheses the theory of economist Friedrich Hayek: “The particular point is that each member (neuron, buyer or seller) is induced to do what, in the overall circumstances, benefits the system”.

The full article (in Spanish) is available here: https://www.clarin.com/revista-n/orit-halpern-educacion-importante-ahi-formamos-ensenamos-gente-pensar-manera_0_M6AhhR8e6J.html

Photos are from the full article

The articles in the most recent issue of Learning, Media and Technology all focus, in various ways, on how digital technologies are enacted in context-specific ways within formal institutions of education – whether schools, colleges or universities – and their mismatch with imaginaries of digital transformation. They collectively draw attention to the complex and unpredictable institutionalization of digital technologies and edtech. When digital technologies connect with institutional contexts, things rarely play out as their advocates and supporters would wish.

In the editorial, we wonder:

Given the empirically documented history showing that educational technologies rarely work as intended or expected, why do the visionary promises of inventors, investors, and industry figures continue to persist and gain traction?

And we suggest:

The problem, to a significant extent, is that the actual contexts of educational institutions are still rarely considered when new digital technologies are promoted for use in schools, colleges or universities. The contextlessness of glossy imaginaries and optimistic promises comes up against mundane realities. Educational institutions are deeply complex, highly diverse, and bound to encounter digital media and technologies in ways that are shaped by matters as everyday as budgetary restrictions, procurement practices, staff competence, student mood, policy mandates, and myriad other contextual factors. Contextlessness is a strategy for technological failure in educational institutions rather than disruption or revolution, as the history of edtech research has documented

Indeed, exploring contexts – institutional, cultural, political, historic, social, economic, technical, linguistic – is one of the key things that RED aims to do.

To explore who else is working on this puzzle, it is worth checking out issue 48(3) of Learning, Media and Technology, where we brought a few papers together.

Header image by Danielle-Claude Bélanger on Unsplash

RED’s Felicitas Macgilchrist and Dr. Elke Van dermijnsbrugge will be discussing Elke’s Beyond Hope and Despair: The Radical Imagination as a Collective Practice for Uprising on 11 April 2024 (online).

In this session of EERA’s Network 28, we actively engage in alternative world-making through the exploration of Education for Uprising. We investigate the concepts of hope, despair and the radical imagination, driven by the following questions: 

Can we exist beyond the binaries of hope and despair, two key concepts that drive educational practices? And if so, what does this place look like?

What is the radical imagination and what are the conditions for it to be put to work in educational spaces?

Elke Van dermijnsbrugge first explores education as a hyperobject that is owned, imagined and practiced collectively. The semiotic square is introduced as a heuristic tool to illustrate the limitations of the binary opposition between hope and despair, and allows for an exploration of what is possible when these binaries are being set aside. The radical imagination then, is described as a collective practice that is radical in the sense that alternative social forms can always be imagined once we acknowledge that every social form is the result of the collective imagination. Finally, we explore conceptual as well as practical ideas and examples that underpin Education for Uprising which is understood as the emergence of micro-political, autonomous spaces of direct action where community, solidarity and self-organization are key principles.

Join us by registering here: https://forms.gle/5BSUe4cwaXxsmd2y6

As part of the RED project, we developed a tool called InfraReveal. It tracks and visualizes the digital infrastructure that powers educational technology. By analyzing the metadata attached to data packets—those tiny bits of data that zip across the internet—we can see which companies are involved and how these services are interconnected. In the article, Epistemologies of data visualisations: on producing certainties, geographies and digitalities in critical educational research, we critically examine our own development and use of InfraReveal in relation to three themes:

The Illusion of Certainty

Data visualizations like those in InfraReveal can give a sense of certainty. But this clarity can sometimes mask the messiness of the underlying data. We need to remember that visualizations are simplifications, and they can hide the complexities and uncertainties of the real world. In our work, we’ve chosen to reflect on these uncertainties, reminding users that what they see is a representation, not the full picture

Mapping Our World

Maps are a common feature in data visualizations, but they come with their own set of stories and biases. They can emphasize certain geographies and reinscribe power hierarchies, shaping our understanding of the world. With InfraReveal, we’ve had to balance the familiar with the critical, using traditional maps while trying to highlight global data inequalities.

The Challenge of Participation

Creating tools like InfraReveal is a collaborative effort. However, participation varies across different contexts. What works in one place may not in another, as local norms and infrastructures influence the use and understanding of these technologies. We’ve tried to navigate these differences, ensuring our visualizations resonate with diverse audiences.

In the end, data visualizations are not just about presenting information; they’re about engaging with the world. By understanding the stories they tell, we can foster a more nuanced and inclusive approach to interpreting the digital landscape of education. With InfraReveal, we’re striving to reveal the underlying data practices in education and question the inequalities they may perpetuate. It’s a balancing act of being critical and reflexive, using these tools to uncover new insights while acknowledging their limitations. Read more about our journey here…

Büchner, F., Bittner, M., & Macgilchrist, F. (2023). Imaginationen von Ungleichheit im Notfall-Distanzunterricht: Analyse eines Policydiskurses und seiner Problemrepräsentationen. MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung, 20, 347-373.

A policy study by RED’s local team in Germany has just been published in the journal MedienPädagogik. Using Bacchi’s “What’s-the-Problem-Represented-to-Be” approach (e.g. Bacchi 2012), we reconstructed the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) in the policy discourse around emergency remote education. For this purpose, we partnered with the CoBiS project at the University of Flensburg. The CoBiS team has built an extensive archive of educational policies related to COVID-19 in Germany. Initial results of this study were presented in 2022 at the autumn conference of the German Educational Research Association‘s division on Media Education. We are now happy to present the final publication.

Overall, the paper suggests that a key sociotechnical imaginary is a particular kind of “frictionless” living. But where would frictionlessness take society? How does an imaginary of frictionless living reproduce or transform relations of inequality?

This paper understands emergency remote education as a sociotechnical phenomenon and analyses its construction in the policy discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic. It asks how remote education is imagined in German federal states’ policy documents and how socio-digital inequality is represented as a problem in these imaginaries. Based on the thematic document collection ‹CoBiS – Covid 19-Corpus des Bildungssystems›, a policy analysis was conducted using the ‹WPR approach›. Findings suggest a ‹sociotechnical imaginary› of frictionlessness. The paper illustrates this imaginary through three aspects: (1) frictionless living spaces, (2) friction through inequality and (3) equality through technology.

It is shown that through the imaginary of frictionlessness in the policy discourse, ideas and visions of educational subjects are generated that favour affluent, privileged and middle-class white contexts and at the same time disadvantage marginalised, deprived and minoritised contexts. Overall, the paper proposes a framework for inclusive media education to critically reflect on sociotechnical imaginaries invoked in policy discourses. 

For more details, feel free to peruse (and perhaps automatically translate!) the full paper (open access; German) here: https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/jb20/2023.09.14.X.

(Image credits: The images are taken from the front covers of policy documents in Germany. Credits are given in full in the publication.)