Critical perspectives on educational technology (edtech) are more important than ever. Just in recent days, I’ve seen a lengthy post about the “buttonification” of AI in education, as new interfaces make it possible for educators to design and create lessons “at the push of a button”. And I’ve heard of wealthy parents getting litigious with a school that gave their son a bad grade for using AI in his assignment, with the parents concerned it would prevent him getting into a prestigious university.

Despite frequent insistence in the press and on social media, clearly AI is not straightforwardly a transformative force for education, as technology never is. Buttonification is the most reductive, semi-automated, efficiency-driven approach to incorporating AI into education it’s possible to imagine. Push-button pedagogy isn’t even a new imaginary – Audrey Watters did the historical homework on this idea of robotized schooling nearly a decade ago. As for parents slapping the law down on schools – here AI is just another wildly proliferating problem with serious unexpected but real-world consequences for educational institutions.

Critical edtech studies

While up-to-the-minute critical commentary on these developments is extremely welcome, what the last couple of years has really demonstrated is the need for detailed, sustained and critical research on the complex interactions between education, technology and society. Over the last decade there has been a rapid growth in critical edtech research. But what has been lacking are dedicated spaces for sharing knowledge and building the relationships necessary to forming what we might think of as an emerging field of critical edtech studies.

Critical edtech research sits as the intersection of education studies, critical data studies, digital sociology, platform studies, history of technology, and other disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. It has powerful potential to generate insights and intervene in the ongoing digitalization of schools, universities, and nonformal sites and practices of learning. And now it has a forthcoming conference for knowledge sharing and building a community of scholarship.

European Conference on Critical Edtech Studies

I’m really pleased to have been asked to team up with Mathias Decuypere, Sigrid Hartong and Jeremy Knox to co-organize a European Conference on Critical Edtech Studies (ECCES) in Zurich, 18-20 June 2025. ECCES is intended to help build a field of critical scholarship on edtech by bringing together researchers and students from Europe and internationally. While it certainly won’t slow the rapid flow of hype and controversy around contemporary technologies in education, our hope is it will help support the development of a collective identity for critical edtech scholarship, catalyze new research, and lay the foundations to reshape how edtech is understood and treated in our education systems.

If we want to contend with edtech, AI, or whatever comes next in our education systems, we need thoughtful, creative, theory-informed and critical researchers to take up the ongoing challenge of conducting painstaking studies – and then to challenge persistent waves of technological hype and expectation with actual research-informed insights.

The conference is aimed at established, early career, and doctoral researchers alike, and we’ve sought funding to keep fees as low as possible, particular for PhD students. Here is the call text.

ECCES call for abstracts

The rapid evolution of educational technologies (edtech) has transformed, and continues to transform, the landscape of education, particularly through the ongoing growth of digital networks, data-based and, more recently, AI-driven technologies. As these technologies become ubiquitous, a critical examination of their implications for teaching, learning, and society has become increasingly imperative. Responding to this need, over the last decades, a growing number of studies dedicated to the critical analysis, evaluation, and (re)design of educational technologies has emerged. More specifically, by examining the pedagogical, social, technical, political, economic and cultural dimensions of edtech, Critical EdTech Studies have sought to uncover the underlying power dynamics, biases, and unintended consequences that often accompany the introduction of technological innovations into educational policy and practice.

Despite their growth in number, however, Critical EdTech Studies have remained dispersed and lack a dedicated space for debate, networking, knowledge building, and agenda-setting – practices vital to the establishment, identity, and maturing of the field. To address this need, we invite junior and senior scholars, as well as educational practitioners and edtech developers, to participate in the inaugural European Conference on Critical Edtech Studies (ECCES). Open to contributors from anywhere in the world, the first edition of ECCES aims to establish a foundational understanding of Critical Edtech Studies, but also to provide a forum for intense discussions around potential futures for the field. The conference invites participants to share in this agenda, through engagement in an informal and supportive community that can stimulate debate and further research in Critical EdTech Studies.

The ECCES conference is particularly dedicated to critical scholarship around the following areas:

• Technological Artifacts: Educational platforms, apps, AI, VR, data visualizations, and other digital tools.
• Policy and Governance: The role of governments, institutions, actor networks, and particular discourses in shaping edtech development and adoption.
• Political Economy: Business practices, capitalization, assets, value creation, corporations, EdTech industry, startups, edu-businesses.
• Social Justice and Diversity: The impact of edtech on marginalized communities, the (re-) production of inequalities, and how edtech is (not) addressing heterogeneous or postcolonial audiences.
• Learning, Pedagogy and Assessment: Types and visions of learning, teaching, pedagogy and assessment enhanced or inhibited by interfaces, data analytics, and algorithmic modelling.
• Ethical Considerations: Privacy, surveillance, and the ethical implications of data-driven education.
• Methodological Approaches: The various ways in which Critical Edtech Studies can investigate and contribute to (re-)shaping edtech, including evolutions towards more participatory and co- design approaches.
• Sustainability and Planetary Futures: The environmental impact of edtech, how it matters, and how it can be mitigated.
• Histories of EdTech: patterns and repetitions, hype cycles, persistent discourses, antecedents and early traces, hidden histories.
• Future Visions: Speculative futures, utopian and dystopian scenarios, alternative pathways for edtech development and education policy, literacy frameworks for professionalization.

We hope the event will help showcase and stimulate critical edtech research, and are especially keen to attract early career and doctoral students to share their work and help build the field of critical edtech studies. Check out the call for full abstract submission details.