Most of the language we use to talk about technology in education assumes a line between the digital and everything else. We talk about technology integration, as if the technology arrives from somewhere outside and gets folded into the real work of teaching. We talk about adopting a tool, resisting a platform, or running professional development on a new system, and each of those phrases quietly treats the digital as a separate domain, something we bring to the table or choose to leave off it. For a long stretch that vocabulary described the situation well enough. What has changed, and changed without much announcement, is that the line it depends on has mostly dissolved.

Consider the ordinary texture of a teacher’s week. Attendance, grades, communication with families, the readings students do, the place where the class effectively lives between meetings: most of that already runs through digital systems, not as an enhancement bolted onto the work but as the medium the work is conducted in. The same is true on the administrative side, where the platform is often where a course or a program exists at all, not a representation of something happening elsewhere. When the digital is the water rather than an object dropped into it, the question that the integration vocabulary is built to answer, whether or not we should use technology for a given purpose, starts to feel beside the point. The technology is already constitutive of the situation. The more useful questions are about what it is doing there and on whose terms.

A lens, not a verdict

This is the condition that a growing body of scholarship has taken to calling postdigital, and the word repays a little care before we lean on it. The “post” does not mean after, in the sense that the digital is finished or that we have moved on to something newer. The reference point most of this work returns to is Nicholas Negroponte’s 1998 claim in Wired that the digital revolution was over. He did not mean that computing had stopped mattering. He meant nearly the opposite, that the technology had become so ordinary it would recede into the background and be taken for granted, the way electricity or plumbing did before it. Florian Cramer later sharpened the point with an analogy to the word post-apocalyptic. The event, in this case widespread digitalization, has already happened, and the interesting question is what life looks like in the world it produced rather than whether the event is coming.

When Petar Jandrić and colleagues brought the term into education in 2018, in the editorial that launched the journal Postdigital Science and Education, they were deliberate about refusing a clean definition. They described the postdigital as messy and unpredictable, as both digital and analog at once, and as both a break with our existing theories and a continuation of them. Jeremy Knox put the core move more plainly a year later: to think postdigitally is to stop treating the digital as something separate from, or other to, ordinary life. That refusal to pin the concept down is not sloppiness. It signals that the postdigital is better understood as a stance or a sensibility than as a theory with propositions to test, which is precisely what makes it useful as a lens rather than a verdict. Like the other frames I find myself returning to, whether speculative fiction, natural systems, or contemplative practice, it does not tell you what to conclude about a given tool or program. It changes what you are able to notice about it.

What the lens brings into view

The central instruction of the lens, in Knox’s framing, is to decentre the technology itself so that its relations to larger systems move into the foreground. Instead of asking whether a tool is good or bad in isolation, you ask what arrangements the tool participates in, and several things that the integration vocabulary tends to keep out of frame become visible.

The first is economic. A platform is never only a set of features. It is also a business model, an ownership structure, and a set of dependencies, and the language of “sharing” or “free” tools often obscures how value actually moves through those arrangements. Seen through the lens, a procurement decision is not simply a comparison of capabilities but a decision about what kind of relationship a district or program is entering, and how easy or hard it will be to leave later. The second is the quiet work that digital systems do on policy and measurement. When institutional quality gets routed through dashboards and metrics, the things that are easy to count begin to stand in for the things we actually care about, and that substitution tends to happen without anyone deciding it should. The lens asks what a system has changed about what we measure and value, especially where no one chose the change deliberately. The third is material. It is tempting to experience the digital as weightless, but every platform rests on physical infrastructure, on labor, on energy, and on extracted resources. The cloud is someone’s hardware running on someone’s electricity. Bringing that materiality back into view is part of what the postdigital lens is for, and it connects directly to questions about the environmental cost of the systems we are increasingly told to adopt.

For those of us who design learning rather than only study it, Tim Fawns offers the most immediately practical version of this thinking. He pushes back on the familiar mantra that pedagogy should come first, with technology following along behind it like a cart behind a horse. The problem, he argues, is that putting technology either first or last still treats it as separable from pedagogy, which leaves us swinging between two kinds of determinism: one that treats technology as the force driving all change, and another that treats it as a neutral set of tools that carry no assumptions of their own. His alternative, which he calls entangled pedagogy, holds that methods, technologies, purposes, values, and context all shape one another in a given situation. For a designer, this reframes the central question. The point is not to settle whether pedagogy or technology leads, but to look closely at how they are already shaping each other in the situations we are responsible for.

Why this lens, and why now

I will be honest about part of what draws me to this frame, which is that it dissolves a tension I used to feel about my own position. I administer a statewide learning management system and I build tools, and at the same time I write critically about vendor dependency and about the surveillance features that platforms increasingly ship by default. Through the integration vocabulary, with its clean line between the digital and the rest of the work, that looks like a contradiction, the posture of a critic who is also comfortably inside the thing he criticizes. The entanglement view suggests the line was never real to begin with. There is no clean outside to occupy. Everyone who shapes these systems, including the people building alternatives to them, is already entangled in the arrangements they are working within. What the lens asks of me, then, is not to pretend to an outside position I do not have, but to be deliberate and honest about the relations I am helping to shape from where I actually stand.

That is the quieter argument for adopting a postdigital lens, beyond its analytic usefulness. It tends to replace a posture of judgment, in which technology is something to be approved or refused, with a posture of attention, in which technology is something to be understood in its relations and worked with carefully. For people doing the daily work of learning design and educational technology in real institutions with real constraints, that shift in posture is worth something on its own.

Questions worth bringing to a team

None of this resolves into a procedure, and it is not supposed to. A lens earns its keep by changing the conversation, so the most useful thing I can offer is a set of questions to sit with, ideally with colleagues rather than alone. They are written for a team that designs, supports, or makes decisions about digital learning, and they are meant to surface disagreement rather than settle it.

1. Where in our own work do we still talk as though the digital is separate, with language like integration, adoption, or going back to paper, and what does that framing keep us from seeing?
2. If we took one platform we rely on and deliberately looked past its features to the relations it sits inside, who owns it, what data it generates, what it makes easy and what it makes hard, what would come into view that a feature comparison misses?
3. What has a system we depend on quietly changed about what we measure or treat as a sign of quality, and did anyone actually decide to make that change?
4. When we choose a digital tool, do we ever account for its material costs, the labor and energy and hardware behind it, and if we do not, what would it mean to start?
5. If technology and pedagogy shape each other rather than one leading the other, where have our tools been quietly shaping our methods and our purposes without our noticing, and are we comfortable with the direction?

References

• Cramer, F. (2015). What is “post-digital”? In D. M. Berry & M. Dieter (Eds.), Postdigital aesthetics: Art, computation and design (pp. 12–26). Palgrave Macmillan.
• Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in design and practice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(1), 132–145.
• Fawns, T. (2022). An entangled pedagogy: Looking beyond the pedagogy–technology dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education, 4(3), 711–728.
• Jandrić, P., Knox, J., Besley, T., Ryberg, T., Suoranta, J., & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital science and education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 893–899.
• Knox, J. (2019). What does the postdigital mean for education? Three critical perspectives on the digital, with implications for educational research and practice. Postdigital Science and Education, 1(2), 357–370.
• Negroponte, N. (1998, December). Beyond digital. Wired, 6(12).