By Juliana E. Raffaghelli
Takeaways after the session organized by Sigrid Hartong (ETH-TECH research unit coordinator) and Ina Sander, supporting reflections on open practices and situated ethics.
The session Beyond solutionism in educational technologies: Open educational resources and practices as a promise for critical approaches to digital technologies promised well, when it started, last Thursday 20 August in Tampere, Finland.
There was a connecting thread: openness, as a practice of sharing that entails care for what we build and what, how, and with which digital infrastructures we expect to share it; the ethics of engaging with technology through the means and frame of open education. But it became clear to me that the intention was to understand how these elements combined generated the possibility to move beyond the mere critique of platformisation, datafication and AI.
I’m aware that one of the needed areas of exploration is infrastructuring and procurement, since the types of ecologies we create with the SMEs and the schools shape, hence, the ethical responses we are able to make. Precisely! Annekatrin Bock and colleagues focused specifically on that element. Neil Kerssens and colleagues’ focus on their game co-design and the need for “time to make the transitions from school to that space of shared vision and engagement” appeared to me as a strong instantiation of the labour needed by the teachers to make educational things happen, with or despite the technologies. The ETH-TECH presentation by Sigrid brought to the fore how open educational resources and practices offer an opportunity to reflect ethically, but only if there is a purpose in doing so. The ethics of openness is not embedded in choosing open tools, or in selecting the right recommendations, or engaging with the appropriate open education principles as part of a just vision of education; nor is it about correcting undesirable effects of restricted-access technologies—all of which is not what makes something open.
All three presentations pointed to one relevant thing: the challenge is not the simple critique or deconstruction of platformisation or AI, but rather to create spaces where technologies themselves, the problems they claim to solve, and the educational futures they contribute to producing, can become objects of collective inquiry. And that was a hint about the meaning of all three presentations packed together, beyond their individual message.
I was certainly searching for the elements resonating with the work in ETH-TECH. I recalled some of our mantras: recommendations matter -they provide language, orientation and points of departure-; the distance between thinking ethically and doing ethically remains substantial; educators’ actual capacity to act is constrained by institutional decisions, infrastructures and commercial technological ecosystems. The ethics of AI and data as a terrain where we stay with the problem, engaging with it through situated reflections and shared responsibility. My head was moving back and forth: what was the final take away?
I will explore in what follows some of the key takeaways from each presentation in the session, connecting them to the broader takeaways for the ETH-TECH community and our endeavour relating to ethics. But in the end, it was the discussion that made me pause and ask: what did all of this, taken together, actually mean? So I tried to venture an interpretation… Sapere aude!
When responsibility is everywhere and nowhere. Annekatrin’s presentation examined cooperation between schools and educational providers around digital change and Open Educational Resources and Practices. What emerged was an organisational landscape in which responsibility is formally distributed but can effectively disappear. Schools operate in silos. Decisions are postponed because of budget constraints, legal uncertainties or the absence of coherent strategies. Equipment may arrive without an educational concept; concepts may be developed without the necessary equipment. The result is often a succession of local adaptations and quick fixes. Perhaps the most striking contradiction was simple: open educational content can end up being produced and circulated through closed technological infrastructures. This is more than an unfortunate technical inconsistency. It asks us what we actually mean when we call an educational practice open. If openness concerns only the licence of an educational resource while the infrastructures through which people produce, access and interact with it remain opaque, proprietary and difficult to contest, how open is the educational practice itself?
This is very much a problem we encountered when we discussed from the Awareness Raising Sessions to the OER’s co-design process, particularly with regard to transparency and some more complicated ethical dimensions like technological robustness, that land more on the technology building side. And Annekatrin’s presentation helped me to understand that thinking about infrastructure as relational practice helps shift attention from technological objects towards the arrangements of actors, institutions, rules, resources and responsibilities through which technology becomes educational practice.
Starting with values. Neil’s and colleagues’ contribution explored how dialogue about EdTech changes when participants are invited to examine technologies sequentially through children’s rights, power and agency, and formative impact. Here, what interested me was not simply the analytical framework but the way reflection was organised. Three mechanisms appeared particularly productive: value-first sequencing, experiential and affective knowledge, and material scaffolding. Participants physically positioned themselves, encountered different perspectives and used visual materials to make judgments visible and discussable. Small and diverse groups, sufficient time, connections with the school’s educational vision, and skilled moderation were crucial conditions for this dialogue. So, the idea is moving beyond -classical approach in teachers’ training- “what to do with this technology”. The question here is, maybe: What do we care about in education, and what happens to those things when this technology enters the situation? The difference is substantial, I’m quite sure.
That is another resounding note for ETH-TECH, where we clearly observed how the people we invited to reflect about AI and data do not enter these situations as abstract rational subjects applying ethical principles. They enter them with experiences, fears, enthusiasm, professional responsibilities, limited room for manoeuvre, institutional histories and relationships with others. We could use the term “affective infrastructures” (Bosworth, 2023). And precisely those infrastructures, when work well, support care, collective inquiry and the discussion of what is ethical.
From ethical recommendations to ethical inquiry. Sigrid’s presentation, representing our ETH-TECH team, pointed out how the European ethical guidelines for AI and data provided us an important structure for our work around human agency and oversight, transparency, diversity and fairness, societal and environmental wellbeing, privacy and data governance, technical robustness, and accountability. However, she emphasized how the Awareness Raising Sessions conducted by each local team repeatedly showed something interesting. Participants appreciated guidelines while simultaneously finding them insufficient when they encountered concrete educational situations. Students participating in the sessions described the guidelines as useful but sometimes fuzzy, too interconnected to isolate into neat principles, or insufficiently actionable when norms are violated or conflicts emerge. So, these sessions, and later on the co-design process coordinated by HSU, put the emphasis on recommendations as a normative infrastructure, where emotions and affection was connected to more critical questions like: Who can act here? Who cannot? Who decided that this technology was necessary? Whose interests and assumptions have already been inscribed into its design? What happens to pedagogical relationships when it is introduced? Who carries responsibility when something goes wrong? And what happens when legitimate values conflict?
And such questions make space for the critical inquiry and a practice of care, in which different people participate in navigating decisions together, including disagreement and dissensus.
OERs as things to think with
The session’s discussion of co-constructing material and conceptual ecosystems of technology and co-designing instruments and resources for reflection took this argument one step further.
If ethics is an open and situated problem, perhaps OERs should not be understood primarily as finished objects containing the appropriate ethical knowledge. They can instead become artefacts for inquiry: things people manipulate, question, redesign, and appropriate while negotiating what responsible educational technology could mean in their context. I liaise here with the idea of “Open (education) for good” by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz — open to live by the idea of openness, open to stay in it, open to learn to work openly. And in doing so, we can enjoy, share, and grow as human beings. An Open Educational Resource is a living artefact that allows others to start their own journeys, but it is not necessarily something that has to scale up. The questions, indeed, revolved around what remains afterwards. What happens with the OERs after they have been created? How can they then reach the masses? The co-design processes generated role switches (like students-as-teachers), reflections about responsibility, and discussions of how power becomes inscribed in design. They also exposed difficulties that cannot conveniently be designed away: different organisational cultures, tensions between collective reflection and decisions already made elsewhere, and the temporal mismatch between slow ethical deliberation and rapid technological development.
That slowness matters.
The technological industry operates through acceleration: rapid development, adoption, iteration, expansion — escalation, in fact. Educational institutions are increasingly asked to respond at the same speed, with the same quantity and productivity. Yet critical pedagogical inquiry may require precisely the opposite: time to notice, discuss, disagree, reconsider, and sometimes decide not to proceed. Slowness and the uniqueness of situations that do not [lead] to escalation can therefore be understood as a postdigital positionality (a concept that we borrow from Sara Hayes, discussant in the session) rather than as resistance to innovation.
Ethics and the post-platform educational imagination
Can we situate this discussion about the ethics of AI and data in relation to the post-platform educational imagination?
I do not mean an education magically purified of platforms. Nor do I mean replacing today’s platforms with ethically certified alternatives and declaring the problem solved. That would merely give solutionism another pleasant afternoon at the office. I deal with the concept of post-platform as a moment/space where our educational no longer accepts platform’s solutionism and the attached ethical recommendations, as the natural organisational form through which educational relations must occur.
It is instead the space we are pushing to generate through the critical debates like the one in this session, to move from technology usage to educational relationships and practices with/through this or that or any technology. And the connected forms of agency. And the dependencies technology creates. And the forms of contestations, negotiations and inquiries we engage in because of that technology.
In that juncture, I don’t think that the familiar problem in Open Education on how OERs be sustained, disseminated and more widely used is the key problem. In the post-platform imagination, this type of concern itself maybe deserves some suspicion.
For decades, technological innovation has celebrated scalability. More users, more reach, more adoption, more growth. Platforms became extraordinarily powerful precisely because millions and eventually billions of us adopted the same infrastructures. Scale could be deemed one of the mechanisms through which technological power becomes concentrated. So why should every alternative educational technology reproduce the same ambition?
Perhaps an OER co-designed by eight people does not need eight thousand users to justify its existence. Perhaps what matters happened while those eight people were making it: they disagreed, changed perspective, encountered somebody else’s experience, recognised an assumption embedded in a technology, or imagined another way of teaching.
This made me think of another strange criterion for evaluating open educational practices: enjoyability. Not enjoyment as entertainment or frictionless user experience. Rather, enjoyment as the affective trace of doing something meaningful together. Did participants enjoy thinking together? Did we enjoy creating the resource? Did somebody encountering it later enjoy the invitation to stop, question and imagine?
Some of these effects may never appear in an analytics dashboard. Perhaps they should not: they are part of those invisible affective infrastructures that make technology (and the whole world) move. They are the invisible -but highly sustainable- energy of a post-platform education.
In that imaginative space that, as Sigrid said, there is a momentum to be created, I believe may be educational practices whose value lies precisely in their modest reach: local fabrics of relationships, conversations, artefacts and appropriations that do not aspire to become universal solutions. If care can become participation, and participation can become enjoyment, then enjoyment can sustain reflection without necessarily becoming adoption, growth or measurable impact.
Perhaps that is one way of imagining education after the platform, and the open education debate led us to walk these reflective paths.
Thank you for this fantastic session!
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