Against contextlessness in Learning, Media and Technology

Why do so many educational technologies not work as imagined or intended? The articles in this 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.

More than two decades ago, Larry Cuban wrote about how educational technologies are routinely ‘domesticated’ when they reach school settings, as teachers use them to fit existing approaches rather than in the transformative ways they were imagined to be used, if they use them at all (Cuban 2001). More recently, scholarship on edtech has shown how schools, universities, educators and students not only adopt, but also adapt, resist or refuse various technologies in context-sensitive ways, confounding the ‘techno-optimistic’ predictions of entrepreneurs, reformers and visionary educationalists (Reich 2020). Despite the ‘charismatic’ appeal of new digital technologies such as laptops, smartboards, platforms or – most recently – AI, they are routinely not used as intended, fail to live up to the expectations of their designers and promoter, and lead to unforeseen and often deleterious consequences (Ames 2019).

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? Why is it that Microsoft can boast it is about to revolutionize schooling by funding the rapid rollout of Khan Academy’s OpenAI-powered Khanmigo chatbot to all US K-12 schools? Khan Academy’s founder, Salman Khan, even once acknowledged that digital school transformation was not as easy to accomplish as it seemed in theory (Reich 2020). How, then, contrary to this recognition, can Salman Khan seriously claim in a mass market book that bot-based one-to-one tutoring will achieve statistically significant effects on measurable student performance (Warner 2024), despite the questionable historical evidence on tutoring (Von Hippel 2024)? How can the educational, technology and business presses continue to publish breathless puff about the coming AI transformation when evidence for how it is actually being used, ‘domesticated’ and even ‘tamed’ in educational institutions – in context-specific ways – remains so scant (Selwyn and Cumbo 2024)? Recent surveys indicating that a percentage of teachers or students do use chatbots are not sufficient to indicate whether this usage has any value, what purposes they’re being used for, or with what outcomes (if any), because these surveys do not record how specific contextual factors affect those results.

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 (Watters 2021). To address this contextlessness in much digital education discourse, in this issue of Learning, Media and Technology we have collected together articles that engage with the context-specific institutionalization of platforms and other digital applications.

Various digital technologies and services that have become institutionalized in schools and universities raise the risk of privacy invasions and safety violations. Rosenberg et al. (2024) reveal the costs of the institutionalization of social media platforms, in their study of how schools end up revealing personally identifying information about students when they use Facebook. Many institutions, they note, have a social media presence for information and communication. Through this institutionalization of social media in schools, students’ personally identifiable information has become increasingly exposed online, raising the risk of safety and privacy violations. The paper points to the unintended consequences and challenges of institutionalizing social media in schools.

Privacy and data protection violations can also occur through the institutionalization of dedicated edtech platforms, as Day et al. (2024) demonstrate in their study of school data governance regimes. Their analysis points to the important legal and regulatory contexts in which schools operate, and the new responsibilities on institutions to adhere to governance regimes, while large technology and edtech companies routinely mobilize their resources to interpret and apply the law as they choose. Likewise, Lai, Andelsman, and Flensburg (2024) highlight how widespread use of data technologies is resulting in a datafication of school life and a commodification of learning that challenges the established welfare state ideal of public schooling. These studies point to the complex and fragmented data and privacy frameworks that educational institutions need to navigate, and the considerable power imbalances with commercial technology companies that provide critical institutional services.

Digital platforms for online teaching and learning have been institutionalized in many education contexts, in a process often called platformization. Platforms are certainly becoming institutionalized, but this is no straightforward linear process following the plans of platform proprietors. For Gravett (2024), the institutionalization of online courses in higher education raises the issue of student ‘presence’. In this analysis, Gravett notes that students on online courses may feel ‘dislocated’ from the physical campus. The analysis importantly raises questions about institutional belonging and the performance of presence for online students. Such student presence is also, however, mediated by the architecture and business models of specific platforms, which, as Veletsianos and Houlden (2024) demonstrate, are imprinted by their proprietor’s own visions of the ‘future of education’.

The implications for institutions are significant, as platform companies seek to reshape institutions around their own business interests. In this context, student presence may also be highly profitable. Moreover, Clark (2024) demonstrates how such processes of digital transformation are promoted by key education sector agencies and authorities, often in tandem with investors and private organizations. These actors play considerable roles in legitimizing and circulating discourses of reform, naturalizing the idea that platforms should become institutionalized in universities and schools. Indeed, extreme visions of platformization foresee the de-institutionalization of education, with schools and universities playing decreasing roles as formal institutions of learning, and a re-institutionalization of education through commercial profit-producing platforms.

The institutionalization of platforms has significant implications for educators. In the context of platform institutionalization, platform proprietors may treat courses as commodities and data-based surveillance as a pedagogic model, as Czerniewicz and Feldman (2024) also explore. However, their analysis of institutions in South Africa shows that educators are not only vulnerable to platform offerings, especially in low resource environments; educators are also driven by their own contextual and institutional concerns, particularly the needs of diverse students and personal aversion to monitoring. These studies point to how educators often feel they have little choice over the digital platforms their institutions procure, but are far from acquiescent with regimes of datafication, surveillance and personalization introduced by the institutionalization of edtech platforms.

In contrast, Schroeder, Shelton and Curcio (2024) explore the phenomenon of ‘social media education influencers’ and their construction of the ideal of a ‘consumer teacher’ who advocates the use of commercial branded products in classrooms. Here we see the education influencer as a kind of intermediary actor who institutionalizes digital technologies through internal advocacy, ambassadorship and ‘micro-celebrity’ performances, with an aim of monetizing their influence. Lee and Lee (2024) are also concerned with an emerging teacher subject – the ‘smart teacher’ who is imagined to be ‘adaptive’ and ‘compatible’ with grand ‘smart city’ visions. Their study highlights the implications of urban regeneration and infrastructure modernization programs for educational institutions and educators, as schools and universities become enrolled in public-private partnership efforts to materialize the digital future in built form.

One of the most institutionalized platform companies in education worldwide is Google, particularly through its Workspace suite and Classroom platform. Contrary to media reports of a Google ‘takeover’ of the classroom, Kerssens, Nichols, and Pangrazio (2024) show how the institutionalization of Google technologies in schools in different countries has been enabled by networks of intermediaries and brokers. Rather than a global ‘googlization’ of education, their analysis suggests, various ‘googlizations’ have taken place as Google platform products and services have been institutionalized according to national and local contexts and pressures. These intermediary actors, they argue, operate in context-specific ways in different countries, mediate platform power between private tech companies and public education systems, and institutionalize Google in diverse educational settings.

The forms of institutionalization and their consequences detailed in the above articles might, however, be imagined otherwise. As several of the authors highlight, institutionalization of digital technologies is rarely straightforward, and can meet refusal and resistance. For example, in this issue, Swist et al. (2024) offer a framework for ‘socio-technically just pedagogies’ as a counter to dominant forms of edtech in institutions. Based on a partnership between staff and students, the framework is intended to be disruptive and resistant, and to counter tendencies towards the reproduction of inequalities in dominant institutionalized edtech practices. This issue concludes with an article by Bayne (2024) outlining a more hopeful, creative and optimistic vision of ‘digital education utopia’. Bayne questions the extractive, surveillant and inequitable tendencies of edtech, and argues for the participatory design of institutions and modes of organization that might anticipate futures shaped through justice. Rather than educational disruption by digital technology optimists, Bayne argues for institutions to participate creatively in their own future-making practices. These articles offer counter-projects to the institutionalized forms of digital technology that critical scholars have documented in recent years, and that the other papers collected in this issue exemplify.

The papers in this issue offer a selection of the critical, contextualized, empirical and theoretical research that Learning, Media and Technology publishes, informed by the social sciences, arts and humanities. Similarly, in a more recent submission, Hangartner, Hürzeler, and Aebli (2024) tease out how teachers circumvent platform logics of personalization that encourage the use of data-driven and algorithm-based analytics. Instead, they maintain control over their pedagogical practices by embedding the platforms in their organizational routines and situated ideals of autonomy. Such studies demonstrate the importance of countering the contextlessness of much recent (and historical) discourse about digital technologies and transformation in educational institutions. We welcome further submissions that critically analyze the messy, mundane and context-specific institutionalization of digital technologies in diverse education systems and settings, as well as theoretically-informed interventions, using inventive methods and concepts, that aim to establish alternative digital practices in educational institutions.