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Learning, Media and Technology

@lmt-journal.bsky.social

#LMT 🟨🟪 aims to stimulate debate on digital media, digital technology and digital cultures in education. Edited by @benpatrickwill.bsky.social, @johnpp.bsky.social, @discoursology.bsky.social‬ & @lucipangrazio.bsky.social.

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Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🟨 Volume 51, Issue 2 (2026) 🟪 In the editorial for our latest issue, Ken Horvath, @simonaszakbehl.bsky.social, @tobiasroehl.bsky.social & @michaelgeiss.bsky.social discuss the digital transformation of research methodologies for critical scholarship in education. Read more: lnkd.in/gQHnNU6G

This special issue of Learning, Media, and Technology asks how the digital transformation reshapes the methodologies of educational research. This question is deceptive in its seeming simplicity. On closer sight, it opens a Pandora's Box of intricate and complex issues. Methodological change proves inseparable from the profound reconfigurations we are witnessing on a societal level, which affect how knowledge is produced, who holds authority to interpret social reality, and under what political, economic, and cultural conditions research unfolds.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 In this paper Gideon Dishon proposes a framework to investigate and operationalise #speculativestorytelling about technology in education (and #AI in particular). Read more: lnkd.in/gkeTdD6e

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Nina Brandau and Toon Tierens use the concept of "technical obstinacies" to show that a clean break from Big Tech in critical codesign practices is far from self-evident. Read the article here: lnkd.in/gwrXv7nU

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Drawing on examples from physical education classes, Ove Østerlie and Chad Killian show how technology can become "rehumanised" when used in teaching practice. Read the article: lnkd.in/gHdQSu3H

The rapid digitalisation of education has intensified fundamental questions about how technologies shape the purposes, practices, and possibilities of teaching and learning. Physical education (PE), grounded in embodiment, relational interaction, and shared inquiry, offers a distinctive vantage point for examining these shifts, as learning in PE is inseparable from bodily presence and situated social relations. This paper argues that digitalisation should not be understood as an external force acting upon education, but as a constitutive condition in which pedagogical, technological, and ethical dimensions are continuously intertwined. To navigate this condition, the paper advances rehumanisation as both a pedagogical praxis and an analytic lens. Rehumanisation is conceptualised as an interpretive, ethical, and relational effort through which teachers and students actively shape digital entanglements toward meaningful and embodied learning, rather than merely adopting technologies as neutral tools. Using an entangled view of pedagogy, the paper examines three illustrative cases in PE. Across these cases, technologies gain educational value only through contextual interpretation, relational framing, and teacher-led mediation. Pedagogical judgment, therefore, remains irreducible to technical outputs or algorithmic recommendations. The paper concludes by positioning PE as a critical site for imagining more humanising digital futures in education.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Nicole Oster and Punya Mishra use the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia, to explain how academic frameworks, fiction and public narrative come together to create new pathways for thinking about educational futures. Read the article (🔒): lnkd.in/g9WX3QK5

This paper explores an innovative approach to understanding educational futures through the Future Tense Fiction: Learning Futures project. The project paired three science fiction stories exploring technology's role in education with scholarly response essays and public webinars, creating spaces for generative dialogue across creative, academic, and public communities. Using a three-stage analytical approach (descriptive characterization, thematic analysis, and Bakhtinian interpretation) we examine how fiction writers, academics, and audiences engaged in productive dialogue about educational transformation. The study reveals dynamic interplay where fiction writers challenge dominant narratives, academics provide theoretical frameworks, and audiences contribute lived experiences and catalyze unexpected dialogue directions. Thematic analysis identifies interaction patterns (reinforcing, enriching, complicating) and contextual engagement themes, while Bakhtinian analysis reveals how productive tensions between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses generate deeper insights. The three-step framework, combining creative fiction, scholarly response, and public dialogue, offers one case for structuring conversations that honor multiple forms of knowledge. This approach demonstrates potential for bridging creative, academic, and public discourse about complex societal challenges, suggesting a replicable method adaptable to other domains beyond education.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Hanne Shapiro, Manuel Souto-Otero and @rpwatermeyer.bsky.social, argue that AI literacies should not be seen as an individual competency but as a collective endeavour to (critically) engage with the way GenAI is being implemented. Read the article: lnkd.in/gvWxqtJz

While use of artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates across educational, professional, and civic domains, conventional AI literacy frameworks remain anchored in functional skills acquisition and fail to address the fundamental epistemological challenges posed by probabilistic, opaque algorithmic systems. This article argues that AI literacy must be reconceptualised as a metacognitive social practice that transcends individual competencies to encompass collective capacity for critical engagement with AI design, deployment, and governance. We examine how the probabilistic nature and epistemic opacity of contemporary AI systems – particularly large language models – render traditional rule-based digital literacy paradigms obsolete. Drawing on case studies from higher education institutions and the Nordic financial sector, we illustrate how participatory co-design processes and experimental pedagogical spaces can cultivate metacognitive awareness and democratic agency in AI-mediated environments. Our analysis reveals that efficacious AI literacy development requires institutional transformation: universities must evolve beyond skills transmission to become sites of collective intelligence where learners interrogate algorithmic power structures and mobilise alternative AI futures. Framing AI literacy as a critical social practice positions higher education as essential infrastructure for civic resilience, demanding fundamental reconfiguration of university missions, governance structures, and pedagogical approaches to anchor AI literacy as a public good rather than a private asset.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Anastasia Gouseti and Patricia Shaw ⬇️ investigate how digital platforms are adopted in two secondary schools in England and how they change the way schooling is done. Read the article here: lnkd.in/gX8bT58Z

The use of digital platforms in education has rapidly proliferated with schools adopting a range of tools to support them with everyday administrative, pedagogical, and communicative functions. This has resulted in intense forms of platformised education and the reshaping of compulsory schooling in multiple ways. Digital platform use is seen to create a range of opportunities, but it also raises urgent questions about how platformisation is changing schooling. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this paper explores how platformisation is experienced by school leaders, teachers, students, and parents in two secondary schools in England. While the streamlining of administrative and teaching and learning operations, organisational effectiveness and the ease of communication appear to be valued, our findings show how school platformisation can also normalise monitoring and surveillance, contribute to the professionalisation of parenting, resulting in digital exclusion, and impacting teachers’ digital wellbeing. This paper provides valuable empirical insights on how schooling has become entangled with platformisation in complex ways and the implications this has for teachers, students, and parents. It contributes to the growing body of research in the field of platform studies and offers critical accounts that can inform future policymaking, research, and practice.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 4mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Jessica Löser & Marta García García explore how teachers in a German school, share, store, organise and search for knowledge that supports their teaching using a newly introduced Student Information System (SIS). Read the article here (🔒): lnkd.in/gJUSwf5E

Based on increasing digitalisation in schools, more and more research is being carried out on how students and teachers use data technology within their classes and schools. However, there is little research about the specific process of knowledge transfer between teachers, and even less so when it takes place in the digital space. In this article, we ask which digital knowledge practices are used by teaching staff at a German secondary school where a new digital tool concerning the knowledge transfer is being introduced. We analyse how teachers use school platforms (in this case IServ) when they share, store, organise, and search for relevant knowledge concerning their teaching. Using an ethnographic approach, we analyse data such as interviews and field notes to identify what practices teachers use when they pass on knowledge digitally and what chances and obstacles regarding digital knowledge transfer can be found. We identified the school platform as a digital collegial knowledge space that operates alongside a variety of platforms. Apart from identifying the changes in knowledge practices resulting from the introduction of a new digital tool, we also demonstrate where these practices came into conflict with established routines.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Kenneth Horvath and @barbaragetto.bsky.social explore some of the issues researchers are faced with while doing critical research about and with digital technologies. The authors provide 7 'areas' of reflection. Read the article: lnkd.in/gXWx7KU5

The digital transformation creates persistent pressure for change in educational institutions and practice. Researchers actively involved in these digital change processes face specific methodological challenges that have so far been seldom discussed. Drawing on pragmatist methodology, this paper identifies and outlines key areas for methodological reflection that follow from the interlocked dynamics that characterize change-oriented research in education. Pragmatism proves productive for this endeavor due to its situational methodology and its socio-historical perspective on research. We identify seven reflection areas, each bridging methodological concerns with the social, political, and educational issues at stake: the digital transformation of research methods themselves, underlying assumptions of educational quality, appropriate generalization strategies, consideration of uncertainties and side effects, actor configurations, overlapping temporalities, and challenges to common wisdom. We discuss why each of these aspects points to important methodological issues and demonstrate how these reflection areas enable more deliberate engagement with established frameworks for change-oriented educational research, such as Evidence-Based Practice and Design-Based Research. The proposed methodological reflection areas thus respond to the pressing need for more reflexive research designs and strategies when researchers are themselves embedded in the digital transformation processes they investigate.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Simona Bernotaite shows how the adoption of a Norwegian Curriculum Planning Tool was constrained by absence (of relations) and the 'otherness' of the tool. Read the article: lnkd.in/gXWx7KU5

The increasing digitalisation of education has directed scholarly focus towards technologies and how they become part of the teaching practice and govern education. This study contributes to the research on digital technologies by examining a Norwegian Curriculum Planning Tool (CPT), introduced with the Knowledge Promotion Reform 2020 to support local curriculum work. Through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT), the study analyses how this instrument is contextualised or decontextualised through actor relations across schools. Building on teachers’ feedback about the instrument and interview data, this study explored misalignments restricting teachers’ planning practices, breakdowns and absences of relations that could ensure the durable use of the CPT. The messy ordering of relations across schools revealed the otherness of the CPT as an instrument that becomes partially contextualised, transformed or disconnected from teachers’ planning practices. The findings point to the multiplicity of governance through digital instruments across schools and stress the importance of contexts as constructed through relations in understanding the governance of education.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Jaime Buchanan looks at how a Learning Management System (LMS) used in a higher education institution shapes what kind of feedback becomes possible, valued and enacted. Read the article (🔒) : lnkd.in/gFJ5GXfe

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Steve Watson and Megan Ennion propose three interactional dynamics that are typical of GenAI learning: supportive, corrosive, and manipulative. Read the article: lnkd.in/giuQZu-e

As generative AI becomes embedded in education, research has largely emphasised outputs, ethics, and performance, with less attention to how these systems shape learners’ conduct and dispositions through interaction. This conceptual paper addresses that gap by treating large language models (LLMs) not as neutral tools but as meaning-mediating infrastructures: interactive systems that organise what kinds of learning moves become easy, sensible, and repeatable, and how learners come to interpret effort, struggle, and success. Extending socio-cognitive accounts of feedback and norm perception through Luhmann’s systems theory, we introduce programmatic behaviour to describe how repeated engagement with structured environments – including AI systems – stabilises habitual orientations toward help-seeking, completion, and contestation. We also develop meaning mediation to explain how tone, pacing, dialogue structure, and closure shape the lived significance of error, progress, and competence in practice. On this basis, we outline three heuristic trajectories that may emerge through sustained LLM use – supportive, corrosive, and manipulative patterns – showing how behavioural drift is co-produced by interaction design and institutional framing. The paper argues that evaluating generative AI in education therefore requires attention to interactional defaults and their normative effects, and it proposes an AI literacy agenda centred on noticing and steering participation within AI-mediated infrastructures.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 @idamlunde.bsky.social, @ingrid-rb.bsky.social, Fritjof Sahlström, Antti Paakkari & Verneri Valasmo, explore the use of screen recording as a method to study digital education environments. Read the article: lnkd.in/gVZ9fYwJ

Interrogating the role of technology in practice can be challenging because of the ubiquitous, yet often private, use of technology, rendering large parts of practice invisible. This article proposes screen recording as a promising method for studying digital environments in education, presenting three cases of integrating screen recordings into a qualitative design: social media use in the classroom, school leadership practice, and writing practices in multilingual classrooms. We consider collection and analysis of screen recording data in connection to conversation analysis and sociomaterial frameworks. By doing so, we use the co-constitution of theory and methodology as a framing device to discuss elements of practice which the screen recording method makes visible: private activities, distributed space and time, and materiality. While digital education research calls for methodologies that involve direct researcher engagement with technology, we argue that screen recording ensures a concurrent engagement with technology and with participants and their practices.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Louise Couceiro, Rebecca Eynon & Laura Hakimi show how insufficient recognition of the interplay between traditional and digital literacies affects how students interact with an edtech platform aimed at improving literacy. Read the article: lnkd.in/grPT6gNN

The precise definition of digital literacy has long been contested. Although early definitions recognised the importance of traditional literacy (the ability to read and write) for engaging in digital practices (Gilster 1997), this connection is often overlooked in recent scholarship, policy initiatives, and digital literacy frameworks. This article draws on ethnographic data from two secondary schools in England to present a case that highlights the relationship between traditional and digital literacies, underscoring the importance of acknowledging and better understanding their interplay. Situated within a socio-technical approach and complemented by Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading (1978, 1986, 1995) to conceptualise technology-as-text and user-as-reader, the article presents analysis of three classroom vignettes to illustrate how students’ interactions with an ‘adaptive’ EdTech platform intended to support literacy learning are shaped by their traditional literacy skills. Our analysis identifies a series of transactional breakdowns between reader and text, each marking a moment in which no meaningful transaction can occur due to insufficient consideration of how traditional and digital literacies intersect. Framing EdTech as a straightforward solution to literacy challenges without attending to the nuanced and context-specific ways students engage with such technologies ultimately risks reinforcing the very disparities they seek to address.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 Call for Papers 🟪 Submit an abstract for a Special Issue entitled "Reframing AI ethics in education: From individual responsibilisation to shared responsibility". Abstracts ➡ 10 July 2026 Manuscripts ➡ 31 March 2027 Read more: tinyurl.com/5yzzprjy

Central question of the special issue:

What would it mean to embed AI ethics within shared—institutional, infrastructural, and collective—responsibility frameworks in education?

The aim is to move beyond “responsible use” narratives and reclaim ethics as a collective, situated, and future-oriented practice.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 5mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Jack Webster looked at enablers and constrainers of #digitalcitizenship #education in #NewZealand #schools. He notably sheds a light on the conflict between "thick" and "thin" approaches. Read the article: tinyurl.com/4jdxemew

This paper explores teachers’ perceptions of digital citizenship education and the causal mechanisms that influence their perceptions. While digital citizenship education is promoted across the curriculum in New Zealand, school cultures, leadership priorities, and systemic pressures influence how digital citizenship education is interpreted and enacted. Drawing on data from 11 semi-structured interviews with secondary school teachers from across the eight learning areas in New Zealand, this study presents a visual representation of teachers’ perceptions across four domains – safeguarding, equipping, empowering, and resistance – followed by an examination of the realities of digital citizenship education in practice. Analysis suggests some consistency in teachers’ perceptions, particularly techno-optimistic narratives, but indicates that school culture, leadership, and curriculum demands are key factors shaping digital citizenship education. The findings indicate the paradoxical role of schools as both enablers and constrainers of digital citizenship education. Despite teachers’ appreciation for the importance of ‘thick’ understandings of digital citizenship education that equip and empower students as digital citizens, the realities of schooling constrain digital citizenship education to ‘thin’ approaches focused on skill development and risk management. The research addresses a critical gap in understanding how systemic and organisational-level factors mediate digital citizenship education policy intentions and classroom realities.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 Volume 51, Issue 1 (2026) of LMT 🟪 In the editorial for our latest issue, @lucipangrazio.bsky.social questions the usefulness of #literacy as a response to #AI. Read all articles: tinyurl.com/mma35vah

The hype surrounding the potential of AI to augment human capabilities and supercharge productivity is matched by fears that it will irrevocably change life and the world as we know it. On the one hand, AI is thought to be a ‘gamechanger’ in terms of its potential to transform industries and make new discoveries. But on the other hand, fears around AI replacing jobs, degrading the environment, and changing the way we think and learn are making many sceptics very cautious and pessimistic. For both the AI optimists and pessimists, however, literacy has been put forward as a response. If one is AI literate, then one is ‘empowered learners’ who use AI ‘ethically’ and ‘meaningfully’ (OECD Citation2025), not only guarding against the concerns but also ensuring one is making the most of its potential. In this sense, literacy becomes a kind of ‘cure all’ – a solutionist, normative approach to the complex and evolving phenomena of AI. But what exactly is literacy and can it be applied to AI?

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Terrie Lynn Thompson explores the use of #more-than-human approaches to study how #educators are learning to work with #AI and automated decision making. Read the article: lnkd.in/g64QGqsd

This article explores how more-than-human research approaches can respond to the complexity of political and ethical questions of AI-mediated practices amidst complex transformations of education practice. Three shifts to research practices are explored: understanding AI-data systems based on the day-to-day experiences of workers, evoking conceptual and methodological re-envisioning to produce new forms of situated data, and considering how researchers and professionals can work closely together to document and critically analyse the performative relations between AI systems and workers. A participatory research project, which worked with education practitioners to study how they are learning to work with AI-automated and assisted decision-making systems, provides empirical data to help illustrate facets of this methodology. Insights include working in the hyphenated AI-human space, materializing digital-human relations differently, and unsettling and shifting the gaze.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Prue Miles, Kylie Boltin, @spoyntz.bsky.social and Jill Willis explored how #videostorytelling could be used to convey students' #affect toward #verticalschools, informing decision-makers in the process. Read more: tinyurl.com/y6s99nu2

Voices of young people are essential in civic discourse about thriving futures. Yet dialogue can be complicated when the experiences of adults and young people are vastly different, for example in school spaces designed by adults in cities designed for adults. Vertical, highrise inner city schools represent this intersection. A new genre of school in Australia, vertical schools symbolise aspirations for young people and livable cities as designed by adults. This paper draws from data collected in the Thriving in Vertical Schools project to explore the importance of affective learning atmospheres for students, and the value of digital stories to prompt dialogue between young people and adults. 204 secondary students created 96 one-minute digital stories about what it takes to thrive in vertical schools. A close analysis of 4 representative videos shows how students communicated a wide range of affective, embodied experiences and used the friction inherent within digital narratives to highlight issues of importance, which promoted dialogue with adults in audio-recorded screening discussions. The power of digital stories to mediate civic discourse with adults, and new insights like the importance of unscripted, edge spaces as spaces for young people to learn to thrive, have implications for thriving schools and cities.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Lucas Joecks and Sigrid Hartong investigate the role of #digital #consultants in education. Using a ‘constellations of valuation’ approach they sketch a more nuanced picture of these stakeholders than inherently 'bad'. Read more: tinyurl.com/3ezm7p3n

This paper positions itself within a growing body of critical scholarship on the increasing impact of private sector actors, including various types of intermediaries and brokers, on the implementation of educational technologies (ed-tech) in public schooling. While we argue that such research has been crucial in raising awareness of the many problematic effects of digitalization, we aim to challenge the implicit assumption and dichotomous narrative that casts private actors as ‘harmful’ and the public sector as inherently ‘good’. To support this argument, we present insights from interviews with (private, local, and big-tech-independent) consultancy actors involved in (digital) school development. These actors understand themselves as ‘transformative’ in the sense of being fundamentally critical of both the public and the ed-tech sector's prevalent approaches toward integrating digital technologies in schools. We use a ‘constellations of valuation’ approach to analyze consultants' narrations, disentangling their notions of non-/transformative valuations and their strategies to navigate or enact them. The findings expand existing research perspectives by highlighting the heterogeneity within the landscape of educational consultants, as – unlike common tech-solutionist approaches – ‘transformative’ consultants aim to promote more holistic, participatory, sustainable and humanistic approaches to school development in the digital age.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 @mxdylanp.bsky.social looked at how #transyouth used #VR painting to envision livable and joyful futures for themselves, showing how #BigTech technologies can be used "towards liberatory ends". Read more: tinyurl.com/nkwwj38t

This article examines how transgender youth used virtual reality (VR) painting to critique harm and imagine more livable futures. Drawing on a 2018 linear and 360° documentary with three trans youth, I analyze their 3D VR paintings and narratives to show how they moved from recounting exclusion and constraint to envisioning futures grounded in joy, kinship, and belonging. I frame these creative acts as virtual world-becoming – a process of pivoting between lived histories and imagined futures while creating virtual worlds. The analysis brings together trans-queer phenomenologies, studies of trans joy, speculative approaches, and restorying to explore how youth storytelling resists erasure and constructs counter-narratives. While the project is presented through Big Tech infrastructures, the youths’ stories emphasized cozy, accessible, and communal technologies rather than sleek corporate futurism. Their visions highlight the importance of collective spaces where trans and queer people can thrive. This work contributes to educational research on fiction and digital media by showing how digital storytelling can function as both critique and possibility: revealing how technologies are entangled with inequities while opening space for collective imagination and trans-queer joy.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 @helgetun.bsky.social and Mathias Decuypere present a spatio-temporal analysis of #TeacherTapp. Most notably they look at how the app's #data streams are enacted differently over time and depending on geographic location. Read more (🔓): tinyurl.com/mrxk5n2e

In this article, we conduct a follow-up study of the smartphone application TeacherTapp. In a previous study, we analysed TeacherTapp as a multiple enactment with an emphasis on its differences across various spaces such as England/Flanders, and the multiple enactment of the app’s data streams across social media and policy documents/debates. Here, we follow up on that study by providing a spatio-temporal analysis to trace the evolution of TeacherTapp over time since our first study, and complementing it with a study of how TeacherTapp’s data streams are enacted in research. More particularly, we find that the app, as a mutable mobile, has continued its divergent enactment between localities, whilst its common core remains the same (albeit expanding in scope). In so doing, the article seeks to promote why and how follow-up studies are a necessity to understand the dynamism in digital technology, which must be understood in relation to what remains static over time. Such studies, we argue, are not done enough in critical educational technology (edtech) studies, but they ought to be.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 6mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Rosalyn Black, Ceridwen Owen, @margaretbea.bsky.social and Rola Ajjawi analyse 4 influential academics' #affectiveimaginaries of #onlineteaching in #highered. Read more: tinyurl.com/79th3wc8

Digitally enabled technologies and pedagogies, including the use of AI technologies, have become integral to higher education. Despite this, online teaching continues to give rise to particularly strong and variable affective responses, responses which orient the academics who feel them towards possible futures, whether desired or feared. In this paper, we consider what affective imaginaries might be informing the future of online teaching within higher education. We describe four affective stances which we interpret from our interviews with influential senior academics in Australia and the United Kingdom, and reflect on how affective imaginaries of online learning may be speaking academic practice into being. We conclude that giving legitimacy to the affective may support the collective potential of academics to mobilise their visions and hopes for higher education going forward.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Suzy Edwards, Louise Paatsch, Honor Mackley, Jacqui Jarvis, Martin Thomson, Courtney Mogensen, Claire Lay and Nichola Mead discuss how #criticalconstructivism can be used to theorise #digitalplay in the early years of #primaryschool. Read more: tinyurl.com/48bkbcym

Digital play is a pedagogical construct used to explain children’s engagement with digital technologies. Much of the digital play literature draws upon theories of play derived from a time of pre-digitality in which play is understood as a central mode of learning. A more recent, but under-used, theoretical construct in digital play literature is that of technical code from critical constructivism. Technical code explains how alternative knowledge sources can be used to expand digital understandings in practice. Expanded knowledge in practice is represented within cultural-historical thinking as new cultural formations – or ways of thinking and doing. While digital play remains a dominant pedagogical construct, it is unclear how digital learning is understood by teachers, beyond a reliance on theories of play. This paper reports on a two-year collaborative project conducted with teachers working in the early years of schooling alongside three university-based researchers. Teachers and researchers used philosophy of technology, focusing on critical constructivism, as an alternative knowledge source to theories of play to expand digital play as a technical code. Findings showed that the teachers generated three new cultural formations related to the ‘digital’ aspect of digital play, including (1) cyber-safety; (2) networked technologies; and (3) creativity.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Drawing on #Foucault, Hannes Hautz and Silvia Lipp discuss how students internalise (and resist) the #algorithmic #governance of #learninganalytics, marked by self-optimisation, nudging, and standardised metrics. Read more: tinyurl.com/4t8v72sx

This study critically explored the impact of learning analytics on students’ subjectivities in higher education. We introduce the perspective of algorithmic governmentality as a novel analytical lens for critical research in learning analytics, offering empirical insights into how students internalise, question or subvert subtle forms of technological guidance. Using a mixed qualitative methodology, we investigated the narratives of 103 students in a master’s programme in business education at an Austrian university. The study revealed fundamental ambivalences in students’ modes of subjectivation, oscillating between enthusiasm as well as resignation and anxiety. The introduction of learning analytics tends to result in a circumvention of reflexivity and an activation of self-regulation, which aligns students’ behaviours with data-driven norms. This engenders a restriction on the scope of action and the (re)production of educational inequalities. Conversely, this study indicates potential avenues for disruption and reflexive enquiry through students’ critical engagement with learning analytics.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 David Rousell, Bixiao Zhang, Seth Brown, Susan Rook, Jonathan J. Felix, Bonnie Lester, Zihua Wu, and Ha Mi Tran-Dinh shed a light on practices challenging instrumental use of #AI in the #creativeindustry and in #education. Read more (🔓): tinyurl.com/3uk6ma72

The creative industries are shifting rapidly with the emergence of generative AI technologies. These transitions provide new opportunities for young people entering higher education in the creative industries, while perpetuating existing patterns of extraction and marginalisation under late capitalism. This article turns to the algorithmic arts in search of counter-practices that disrupt instrumental applications of AI within creative industries and higher education. Bringing the philosophy of technology into conversation with education and the digital arts, the authors identify three tactics to inform educational design with AI: (1) continuous mattering between algorithms and world; (2) playing with algorithmic assemblages; and (3) ethics-in-formation. The article builds on these critical tactics to inform the development of AI-powered software for navigating education and work futures in Southeast Asia. By situating generative AI within broader assemblages of human relationships with algorithms, the article offers critical interpretations of AI and its situated design implications for the creative industries and higher education.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Using four speculative scenarios Bec Marland and @arantes.bsky.social look at the ways in which commercial interests affect access to #AI applications used to support #students with #dyslexia. Read more (🔓): tinyurl.com/5yz85nwd

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers potential benefits for students with hidden disabilities like dyslexia but also risks exacerbating inequities due to digital poverty and commercial bias. This paper explores how commercial interests shape access to AI tools for students with dyslexia. Using the social model of disability, we critique how commercial influences shape access to assistive AI technologies through four speculative scenarios. The first scenario highlights exploitative commercial practices driving inequities, the second inadequate institutional policies failing to address digital poverty, the third insufficient accountability among developers prioritizing profit over fairness, and fourth weak government oversight lacking safeguards against commercial bias. We advocate for inclusive AI governance that recognizes the interconnected dynamics of human, technological, and commercial power to promote equitable access for students with disabilities, drawing on the social model of disability and Australia's Voluntary AI Safety Standards. While situated in the Australian context, the analysis contributes to global discussions on the role of AI in creating accessible learning environments. We argue that inclusive AI governance must address the entangled roles of human, computational, and commercial power to ensure accessibility for students with disabilities.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 Clio Stearns investigates the way in which the #child is recruited by teacher #influencers on #Instagram as part of their identity. While mostly absent, the child is framed both as a threat and something in need of protection. Read more (🔓): tinyurl.com/3tt7rmhu

Extant research on teacher social media influencers tends to either
describe influencer accounts and culture, or critique the intense
neoliberal, capitalistic sensibilities promoted by teacher influencers. This paper takes a new theoretical lens, applying Erica Burman’s (Burman, E. 2019. “Child as Method and/as Childism: Conceptual – Political Intersections and Tensions.” Children & Society; Burman, E. 2022. Child as Method: Othering, Interiority and Materialism. New York: Routledge) ‘child as method’ approach to an analysis of three popular US teacher influencers on Instagram. My study of approximately one thousand teacher influencer posts from 2023 to 2024 reveals a striking absence of the child as a figure on teacher Instagram, even apart from privacy concerns about showing specific children. I offer various interpretations of this absence and I also show that when the child is recruited as part of teacher influencer identity, they are represented in very particular ways. Most notably, the child is shown as a threat or irritant but is also figured as someone in need of protection. I discuss how the platform of Instagram is particularly meaningful in terms of perpetuating social constructs of childhood because of its ubiquity, rapid-fire updates, and combination of visual, auditory, and textual material. The paper closes with implications for future research and teacher education.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨Volume 50, Issue 4 (2025) of LMT🟪 In this editorial for our new issue, @discoursology.bsky.social, @lucipangrazio.bsky.social, @johnpp.bsky.social & @benpatrickwill.bsky.social reflect on the current moment of critical research on educational technologies. Read all articles: tinyurl.com/5ewyb9fn

Future challenges for critical research on educational technologies
Editorial by Felicitas Macgilchrist, Luci Pangrazio, John Potter and Ben Williamson
Learning, Media and Technology has sought to be the leading journal for critical research on educational technologies for 20 years, so as we now move into the late 2020s it’s a good opportunity to reflect on events like CSET and ECCES, as well as the current context, and surface some key challenges for researchers. Each of the present editors has reflected on their experiences at either CSET, ECCES, or both, and we offer here four challenges for researchers to address in coming years.

Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social · 7mo ago

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪 By examining Swedish GenAI policies, this study by @sporrong.bsky.social, McGrath, Viberg & Cerratto Pargman provides insights into how policy problems and solutions contribute to constructing discourses of educator responsibility. Read more (🔓): tinyurl.com/2r7pupvf

What is the problem with generative artificial intelligence in higher education? – a critical analysis of educator responsibility in the Swedish policy landscape
by Elin Sporrong, Cormac McGrath, Olga Viberg and Teresa Cerratto Pargman
ABSTRACT

The widespread integration of Generative AI (GenAI) tools in higher education has compelled universities to develop policies for responsible GenAI use. As educators play a pivotal role in enacting policy in teaching and assessment practices, we conducted a policy study to critically examine how educator responsibility is articulated in this evolving landscape. Approaching policy discursively, we drew on Bacchi’s what’s-the-problem-represented-to-be approach and examined problems and assumptions represented in policy solutions targeting educators. Through the analysis of 37 policy documents collected nationwide from 14 out of a total of 18 Swedish universities, the study identified three overarching themes of problematisations. Specifically, we found represented problems pertaining to (i) threats to educational practices, (ii) concerns that higher education is falling behind, and (iii) the obscure role of GenAI in higher education. Underpinned by assumptions of the inevitability and solutionist nature of GenAI, and educators’ roles in addressing challenges associated with GenAI use, we identify that policies frame educator responsibility as multidimensional, under revision and key in safeguarding educational values. The study contributes insights on potential discursive shifts regarding educator responsibility in light of GenAI and highlights the need for careful deliberation concerning GenAI-mediated responsibility in higher education governance.