This paper reports the findings of a scoping review on the environmental harms of AI. We reviewed 198 publications to consider the specific environmental harms explored in the literature, the life stages of AI development that are commonly discussed, and the potential solutions that are being researched in the field of AI development. The findings point to a dominant focus on the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of AI in existing literature, at the expense of other environmental harms, such as water usage, mining, and waste. The literature also predominantly focused on the time during which AI is being used, with less focus on the production and aftermath of AI technology, and the environmental harms associated with these stages of use. The solutions proposed in the literature were wide-ranging, from reducing the carbon emissions of AI models, to producing alternatives to mainstream LLMs. Overall, there was little focus to date on the environmental harms of AI used in education settings in the literature, pointing to a significant gap in research. Drawing on the findings of this review, we suggest future directions for AI research in order to be more critically engaged with the environmental impacts in education policy and practice.
This paper discusses data governance models for educational platforms that could better protect students' and teachers' privacy and reduce data management burdens for teachers and administrators. Within an ethnographic study involving four Swedish secondary schools and municipal- and national-level administrators working with educational technology, we conduct qualitative interviews informed by educational data-tracing activities done with the help of computational methods from infrastructure studies. We highlight the extractive nature of the current data governance model, and demonstrate the power imbalances inherent to it, the uncertainties surrounding big tech companies' data management practices, the burdens placed on teachers and administrators, and the fragmentation of the data/platform ecosystem. This allows us to engage in conceptual analysis of the desirability and feasibility of three alternative data governance schemes as applied to education: personal information management systems (which enable individuals to make data-related decisions), data trusts (expert bodies handling data governance in a fiduciary way) and data cooperatives (which steward data in a decentralised fashion through participatory and democratic decision-making). We conclude that data trusts offer the best response to the concerns identified through our infrastructural and ethnographic study, while also being the most feasible to implement in a variety of school systems.
This article examines the French EdTech market through the social properties of its founders, shifting attention from technologies and policy agendas to the actors shaping legitimate forms of technological intervention in education. Drawing on a Bourdieusian framework combined with science and technology studies, it analyses how founders' trajectories, resources, and dispositions structure access to the EdTech field and influence the ways educational issues are framed through technology. The study combines a quantitative mapping of 327 EdTech companies and founders, based on a professional association database and LinkedIn profiles, with 14 semi-structured interviews. Findings show that access to EdTech entrepreneurship is socially selective and depends on the accumulation of valuable forms of capital, including prestigious academic credentials, professional networks, and economic resources. They further indicate that legitimacy within the field relies less on pedagogical expertise than on entrepreneurial and commercial capital. Consequently, founders who are often weakly socialised within educational settings tend to frame educational issues through market-oriented categories such as efficiency, optimisation, and scalability. The article highlights how educational technologies are shaped by socially situated actors whose dispositions influence both the definition of educational problems and the forms of intervention considered legitimate.
EdTech companies increasingly mobilise 'inclusive learning' and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), yet we know less about how these values are produced and stabilised inside platformed EdTech work. This article examines a South Korea-founded global early-childhood foundational learning company with a U.S. headquarters and Asia-based offices, serving families and schools across multiple Asian countries. Data comprise five semi-structured interviews across partnerships, product and accessibility leadership, content and curriculum design, video production, and customer-facing communication, plus desk-based analysis of public-facing texts and publicly available platform screenshots. We show that inclusive learning becomes a production accomplishment: UDL operates as a boundary object coordinating heterogeneous labour and is translated into shippable, auditable tokens such as accessibility settings, multimodal delivery, localisation routines, and doability scaffolds. Legitimation relies on portable evidence - platform traces, dashboards, checklists, and documentary claims - together with narrative credibility infrastructures that render care-intensive labour publicly intelligible. Taken together, the case offers a model for more systematic case studies in critical EdTech studies of the values, work, and evidence practices through which EdTech companies shape contemporary education.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping academic writing and, in doing so, reframing how students understand integrity, authorship, and learning. Drawing on semi-structured focus groups with 58 undergraduates in two courses, this study examines students' lived experiences of AI-assisted writing through a qualitative, practice-oriented lens. We develop a conceptual model in which perceived AI superiority, concerns about social judgment, and uncertainty about detection tools operate as antecedent conditions generating intellectual anxiety and identity disruption. These socioemotional dynamics shape ethical reasoning and authorship practices. Findings show that students engage with AI not as passive users or efficiency seekers but as active curators. They revise, reject, disclose, and reshape AI-generated text to preserve authorial voice, legitimacy, and ownership of learning. Academic integrity thus appears not as simple rule compliance or misconduct avoidance, but as an intentional, negotiated practice enacted through emotionally inflected judgment and contextual decision-making. Anxiety, self-doubt, and fear of misjudgement function as central mechanisms linking AI use to ethical engagement and student agency. Empirically, the study offers qualitative insight into how emotions, identity, and agency intersect in AI-assisted writing. Conceptually, it advances an integrity-as-practice framework and supports process-oriented assessment, engagement, and policy approaches beyond detection-centred or punitive models.
Using a communication lens, this article shows how interactions with a persuasive, but not entirely trustworthy, artificial partner (ChatGPT) are explained and 'made sense of' in an educational setting. The argument draws on a year-long qualitative study in a language school for international students. The findings draw attention to communicative negotiations about contextual criteria of authority, pedagogical meaning, and trust. In particular, the fieldwork highlighted three distinct dynamics: (a) retrospective rationalisations of AI use and misuse shaping teachers' sensemaking; (b) simple forms of tactical prompting to accomplish basic tasks among students and (c) a moment-to-moment interplay of communicative roles, accompanied by situational variations in trust attribution. These findings suggest that a focus on pragmatic communicative interactions is a productive avenue of empirical research in education technology research. In the conclusion, the article reflects on the possibility that the analysis of projections, expectations, and desires flowing from human agents to communicative AI systems - and vice versa - could encourage the creation of educational practices of human distinctiveness.
Early accounts of educational platforms celebrated their potential to revolutionize professional learning through 'participatory culture,' enabling teachers to share resources, gain knowledge from peers, and build professional identities. However, research on platformization has shown how platforms' technical architectures and commercial interests often, in practice, narrow instructional expertise and convert peer networks into markets. This article reports findings from a design-based research study that applied insights from platform studies to co-design of a free, resource-sharing platform with educators and developers. Data sources include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and fieldnotes on the iterative design process. Findings center on 'reciprocal design' as both a process and a value. First, reciprocity was central to negotiating competing stakeholder needs (instructional requirements, technical constraints, material costs) during platform development. Second, reciprocity functioned as a professional value that participants sought to embed in the platform's design itself. The study demonstrates the potential for educators and developers to forge participatory practices that avoid the extractive tendencies of platformization, leading toward technologies that prioritize the needs of educators and students over commercial imperatives.
This article proposes a critical, creative, and collaborative research methodology designed to playfully misuse the order of platformization in education. Platform ecosystems, typically operated by Big Tech companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, have become authoritative forces in schools, prescribing ways of doing, being, and thinking for students and teachers alike. Within such totalizing digital systems, even educators who find ways to critique platformization may struggle to imagine alternatives. Reimagining such systems may be brought about by the process of playful profanation (Agamben, 2007. Profanations. Zone Books) in which the power of platformization can be temporarily deactivated. With play, what has become sacred in platformized educational systems can be made common and unremarkable. Through three illustrations of profanations - playful misuse designed to toy with and temporarily neutralize the power of educational platform ecosystems - this article offers a novel research approach intended to open space for new and different ways of thinking, and to help move towards the reimagination of digital ecosystems in education.
The Democratic Digitalisation (DD) suite, a free non-commercial software platform implemented in pilot primary and secondary schools in Barcelona, has become a paradigmatic case internationally, both for its attempt to offer an alternative to Google's hegemony and for the involvement of its promoters in debates within the European Union oriented at fostering democratic digitalisation and digital sovereignty. With the aim of identifying the drivers that led to the emergence and decline of the DD, the article examines its adoption through the voices of policymakers, activists, developers, school principals and teachers. The analysis identifies three concatenated tensions: first, it highlights the lack of a common understanding of the role of technology in education combined with the naturalisation of sociotechnical techno-solutionist imaginaries; second, the DD experience falls into the trap of emulating commercial platforms, which limits its potential for pedagogical transformation; third, there is a temporal disjunction between the needs of educational processes and the immediacy demanded of digital platforms. These tensions reveal the naturalisation of hegemonic sociotechnical imaginaries that shape how software is recognised and valued in the education sector, often setting pedagogical concerns aside.
Educational technology in Australia has been shaped as much by governance and legitimacy as by software and design. This paper examines four Australian edtech cases, Canva for Education, Education Perfect, LearningField, and Grok Academy, through a comparative case study based on public document analysis and temporal mapping. Drawing on production-culture theory and the political economy of education, the study analyses how funding structures, governance arrangements, and moral narratives shaped each platform's emergence, expansion, crisis, and consolidation. The findings identify four contrasting governance configurations in the Australian edtech sector: platform philanthropy, financialised infrastructure, statutory consortium, and sponsored non-profit provision. Across the cases, success depended not primarily on technological novelty but on the alignment of public legitimacy, organisational governance, and sustainable capital. Conversely, collapse or restructuring most often followed crises of ethics, governance, and reputational trust rather than pedagogical or technical failure. The paper argues that Australian edtech is best understood as an industry-education complex in which innovation is co-produced by public policy, private capital, philanthropy, and cultural narratives of educational good. Understanding how edtech is made, unmade, and remade in this way offers a sharper account of digital education futures and the governance conditions required for more ethical and durable infrastructures.
Education reproduces a poverty in social imaginaries regarding technological futures. Dominant discourses of AI in education remain narrowly framed around efficiency and techno-solutionism, limiting the critical and creative engagement needed to imagine and shape alternative futures, while these technologies increasingly shape educational practice and broader societal institutions. This article explores how drama-based pedagogy combined with speculative design can unearth and expand social imaginaries about AI in higher education. Using critical pedagogy, transformative learning theory and research on futures, fiction and speculative design, we developed a 45-min workshop with university teachers at a technical university in Sweden. Participants created and performed speculative scenes envisioning AI futures in education, generating three scenarios spanning techno-centric extrapolations of current anxieties to a post-climate-collapse reimagining of learning oriented around basic survival. We reflect on how speculative design, combined with embodied drama, enables the expression of emotions and critiques of AI futures. Our analysis suggests that this creates productive conditions for challenging dominant sociotechnical imaginaries and making visible the normative assumptions embedded in current trajectories of educational technology. We contribute to critical debates on AI in education by demonstrating how arts-informed pedagogical methods can open spaces for counter-hegemonic imagining within STEM, where such approaches remain uncommon.
This methodological paper responds to calls to resist the 'protocolisation' of ethics through an analytic move that connects thinking about the ethics of technology to the doing of ethics in university settings. This move draws from the engaged program in Science and Technology Studies (Sismondo 2008), and the speculative ethics of care articulated by Puig de la Bellacasa (2011). We argue that this critical, more-than-human understanding of care ethics can be researched empirically by using symbolic interactionism and situational analysis as a theory-methods package (Clarke 2005). We illustrate this approach using data related to a sociotechnical controversy about government sponsorship of an AI assistant for schools. Our paper illustrates how ethics-in-practice and radical participation can be enacted in universities (Knox 2023), where speculative ethics are constituted through alternative infrastructures for dissensus rather than serving as a means to technological ends.
The concept of digital sovereignty is a key framework for analysing geopolitical, economic and ideological disputes over technological infrastructures in contemporary capitalism. From a critical perspective, digital sovereignty in education is a contested field where state, corporate and social-movement actors struggle to define how digital infrastructures should be governed, owned and operationalised. This article analyses two configurations of digital sovereignty in Spanish education policy: ALIA, a state-led public AI infrastructure within Spain's national AI strategy, and Democratic Digitalisation (DD), a social-movement-driven platform alternative to Google's dominance. Methodologically, the study combines Critical Discourse Analysis, Policy Network Analysis and Technographic Analysis to examine how digital sovereignty is articulated through policy discourse, governance relations and socio-technical configurations. Findings show that ALIA translates public autonomy into an AI project, but its operationalisation remains entangled with market-oriented agendas and public-private governance that limit state-led sovereignty. Meanwhile, DD advances technological sovereignty through open-source software, auditability, interoperability and community data control. However, through the lens of critical digital sovereignty in education, its transformative potential remains limited insofar as infrastructural autonomy is not fully connected to teachers' labour, curricular democracy and collective participation in school governance.
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.
Big Tech platforms, and their largely proprietary logics, have been scrutinised within the field of critical edtech studies as bringing forth an increase in surveillance and inequality in education. There has therefore been a rising call to apply critical, participatory and speculative design approaches to develop alternative platform infrastructures that correspond with values such as communality.However, as research on public-oriented approaches to educational platform design has shown, also those technologies oftentimes mimic the constraints of proprietary platforms. One reason for this is the technical elements constituting those platforms and pre-existing their design. Due to specific operating mechanisms, they cannot be freely adapted in software development but entail certain obstinacies. However, there is limited research concerning the role of such technical elements in educational platform design, especially when aiming for pedagogical plurality.This contribution focusses on such specific technical elements that co-constituted the design process of a digitality-oriented, transnational school development platform. Applying a technogenetic perspective, we analyse two vignettes from the design process and show how certain technical elements genealogically become obstinate in semantic and operational ways. Technical obstinacies therefore produce an architectural lock-in that has implications for what it means to critically design alternative platform architectures.
Discourse on technology in education is dominated by deterministic, techno-centric narratives that portray technology as an inevitable force, while positioning education in a reactive role. Speculative storytelling strives to challenge such tendencies and imagine alternative educational futures. However, further clarity is needed concerning the opportunities and trade-offs characteristic of speculative storytelling. Drawing on research in science fiction studies and critical EdTech, this paper develops a four-axis framework that operationalizes speculative storytelling's potential contributions and limitations. The first two axes explore the relations between the empirical and fictional reality: extent of departure from current reality (radical-reinforcing), and valence of the imagined world (utopian-dystopian). The next two axes examine the fictional reality itself: type of case examined (extraordinary-mundane), and scope of analysis (holistic-atomistic). To clarify and concretize this framework, I analyze four canonical works of science fiction on AI, a timely issue also rooted in a rich history of fictional engagement: R.U.R. (Capek), Reason (Asimov), The Player of Games (Banks), and Klara and the Sun (Ishiguro). This analysis illustrates how the framework could function as an analytical tool that facilitates a more nuanced understanding of speculative storytelling's capacity for critical engagement with the stories we tell and the futures we imagine.
