As I reflect on the last ten years of Panoply Digital what ties all the disparate work that I do together is the fact that I focus specifically on education and its intersections with technology. So that is what this post is about. As I reflect on the last ten years of Panoply Digital, I also reflect on the field of digital education, however defined. What has changed. What hasn’t. What is being accelerated and what is being slowed; what voices are submerged and which ones are surfaced. What shiny new technological thing captures our imagination and runs riot on educational systems that are increasingly underfunded, underdeveloped, and under-appreciated.

These things ride on the discourses that we have heard for years: education is broken, an old industrial model that hasn’t changed in over a century; we need disruption, transformation, efficiency, scale. Populism and a growing distrust in civic institutions and indeed civil society in general contributes to this. All of this can create closures where alternative futures are muted.

Countries I work in are increasingly entangled in a network of global actors and agents: supranational and national policies and strategies; non-government organisations (NGOs) that interpret and accelerate these policies; and commercial organisations wanting to capitalise on perceived gaps in local educational capacity. Over the last ten years (and indeed for much longer), education is being renegotiated through an explicit, seemingly inexorable link to technology, an explicit call to rapidly construct technological markets for education, and potentially an erosion of local educational autonomy as a result. I have grown to believe over the last ten years that autonomy is a precious resource in education; it is directly linked to teachers’ view of themselves as creative and critical professionals. Technology used in education must be working towards bolstering that agency amongst teachers and amongst local educational systems. Not all technological insertions in education do this, though.

As a practitioner with Panoply Digital and elsewhere, I do active and pragmatic work in micro and at times meso spaces often with marginalised groups or with effort aimed at institutional development. I work often with refugees, the groups that support them, and on pragmatic outputs like curricula, blended learning design, accreditation, and support mechanisms. An example of one such project is here. I work often on teacher training initiatives largely in Sub-Saharan Africa and that almost always carries with it a technological component. The need for this sort of practical work is the same as it was 10 years ago: curricula, course and programme design, building confidence and creativity in teachers, developing programmes and networks of support, and internal advocacy for systems to shift in light of the needs of marginalised students. Much of this though is granular, bespoke, and more often than not, doesn’t scale all that well. Marginalisation is rather contextual specific and requires a specific address.

As Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, I critique the macro machinations and power asymmetries that make my micro and meso work difficult, the ones that are fueling the scale that can at times sit uncomfortably with my practical work. We have seen a range of these over the last 10 years and will undoubtedly see an acceleration post-pandemic and with the advent of AI: Bridge International Academies, One Laptop Per Child, any number of School/Classroom in a Box initiatives gave way to a general (and largely commercial) platformisation in education and their accompanying rents, assets, and online programme managers (OPMs). All of these still echo through the educational imagination.

But even with this academic work, there are practical extensions of what the research is finding. I often work with Ministries of Education in several Sub-Saharan Africa countries on their ICT in education policies, strategies, and programming work (some of this is captured in this article). I caution against grand initiatives like those mentioned above, caution against getting locked in to commercial platforms with little transparency, and advise towards domestic capacity building ideally with domestic educational technologies and epistemologies.

But if not this increasing reliance on commercial technologies to satisfy ambitious development goals, then what? What would be the characteristics of digital education that isn’t reliant on commercial, ever surveilling digital architecture? Might the digital practices of developmental education be aligned with open technological systems that are readily deployable and align with the lived experiences of those that are using them? Might they involve decolonised and co-designed digital learning spaces, and measures of governance around (educational) data and digital sovereignty? Would rights to repair be explicit? Might community-owned and operated networks more equitably serve this growing territory of digital education? Alternatives exist, if we allow ourselves the freedom to imagine them.

That is what the last ten years of Panoply Digital has taught me.