I am fifth of 26 authors, led by the remarkable Aras Bozkurt, of a new paper,  “Redefining Educational Technology: A Critical Collaborative Inquiry,” published in Open Praxis this month.  I find myself in the company of some extremely luminous researchers from around the world, old and young, famous and less famous, who worked together on this using a collective writing methodology. In a loosely Delphi-like process, Aras started by gathering some quite detailed answers to some fairly open questions around the topic, assembled them into a draft of the paper, and then let us rip on it for a month or two, before some intensive collaborative work resolving what appeared to be hundreds (but might have just been scores) of comments involving quite rich debate and contrary opinions. The fact that we were spread across many timezones meant that, for a few weeks, there were always plenty of new changes and comments to follow every morning when I woke up and each evening at the end of a working day, and it got to be fiendishly difficult but very rewarding to follow them all. Seeing the finished paper, I’m sad it is now fixed. I still see a few places that I would like to make some small changes, so it would be super cool to be able to open it up to the broader community for further development. Imagine what not just 26 but 100 or even 1000 authors could come up with: a truly timely and organically evolving definition of the field.

I’ve participated in a few of these collective writing projects over the past few years, including View of Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape,  The Manifesto for Teaching and Learning in a Time of Generative AI: A Critical Collective Stance to Better Navigate the Future, and  Venturing into the Unknown: Critical Insights into Grey Areas and Pioneering Future Directions in Educational Generative AI Research. All (especially the first) have been cited at a far higher rate than any other papers I have ever been involved with, partly because they are all really good, timely and authoritative papers, partly due to the skill and reputation of those who have led them, and partly because of promotion and citation by the large number of well-known authors involved in writing them. They have some of the same strengths as meta-studies (generally among the most highly cited papers in any field), representing an assortment of views stemming from prior research, with the added benefit of the original researchers having to defend their cases to the rest, albeit with social factors intruding that can lead to group-think, more voluble participants getting more of the air time, and so on.

Though the positive factors remain much the same in this one, I’m not sure whether this new paper will achieve a similar impact. It will get cited because it is, arguably, among the best ever written on the evolution of the educational technology field itself. If you are working in a niche where you need a shorthand high-level abstract analysis of every major thing that has happened in the field for at least the last half century, as well as (in more detail) currently significant themes, then this is the paper for you.  However,  I’d be slightly surprised if the definition we came up with at the end of it will get a great deal of broader traction. I think Aras did a great job of editing it down to something most of us found agreeable but it was a Sisyphean task that was never going to lead to something that would delight everyone. Apart from anything else, though a vast improvement on some of our earlier drafts, the definition is still very long and unwieldy. The refinements in the final paragraph are more contentious because they speak to aspirations rather than describing the whole reality. With such a large and diverse group hacking at it, it was very hard to come up with something that we all agreed with but, rather than get rid of them, Aras moved the more aspirational and prescriptive parts of it to the end. My words are in it but it’s a committee definition, and definitely not one I would write myself. I think I’d currently go with something like “the organization of stuff for learning and accreditation” though educational systems are complex and concerned with far more than just learning and credentials, so I might refine it a little further.

Here is the definition we actually came up with, in all its slightly awkward glory:

Educational technology, as a field of inquiry and practice, encompasses the research, understanding, design, orchestration, and evaluation of entangled human-technological systems — spanning analog, digital, organizational, social, and agentic dimensions — through which learning and meaning-making are enabled, mediated, supported, and transformed.

The field brings together researchers, practitioners, educators, communities, and institutions in ongoing efforts to study and improve educational experiences across formal, non-formal, and informal contexts.

The field holds as a core commitment that its theory, research and practice should be ethically grounded and critically reflexive — attending to the societal implications of technological integration, with particular concern for equity and the distribution of agency among all participants in educational processes. These commitments describe what the field aspires to, not a guarantee of how all its practice is enacted.

One important limitation: despite the large number of people from across the world involved, we are not perfectly representative of the field as a whole. I don’t think we had anyone from the training or corporate learning industry; the authorship was skewed towards researchers from relatively developed countries; we didn’t have many edtech geeks; there was not a lot of K-12 focus; women only accounted for less than a third of the authors; we were a little light on the informal and non-formal aspects; and we shared some non-universal attitudes, notably in having above average positive feelings towards openness. I don’t think many (if any) of us are involved with AECT, and that matters because the AECT plays a large role as a primary source of earlier definitions we respond to. In particular, I and my fellow co-authors are all part of a large but not ubiquitous community that would recognize complexivist accounts (e.g. Connectivism, entanglement theory, rhizomatic learning, networks of practice) as the most significant pedagogical models of our time, while AECT, even in its most recent definition, has never formally acknowledged their existence. The AECT definition also seems remarkably quiet about AI, even in its most recent, post-ChatGPT incarnation. I don’t know whether this is because it members move in different and more conservative educational circles than us, or whether it is a deliberate policy decision to ignore anything less than 10 or 20 years old, but not knowing is exactly why it is troublesome. I think that this makes a compelling case that our paper should be read as at least a counterbalance to theirs, but that there’s a future paper yet to be written that brings the many branches of the field together. And that is the point: not to create a definition that stands forever, but to be part of the ongoing conversation about what we do and why we do it, to capture a snapshot of what we think we are doing, and to allow it to be challenged and developed further. I’m very pleased to have had the chance to be a part of this. In a very real sense we were walking the talk, enacting and engaging in the kind of learning that we think edtech should support and enable. Aras is a real star for making this happen.

Finally, a personal reflection. One of my own papers is cited flatteringly often in the paper, but not by me, which was quite a novel thing for me to have to deal with. It put me in a slightly awkward position of wanting to explain and sometimes to defend it, while really wishing to cite some of my more recent papers and a whole book that represent a more developed view, yet feeling slightly apologetic and (in the company of many more significant researchers) not at all confident about pushing my views even more than they were already being pushed. It was a weird mix of feeling privileged, feeling proud, knowing that (having written a whole book on it, not to mention a lot of other papers) I should think of myself as something of an expert, but feeling very much like an imposter in the midst of all these smart people, not worthy of the attention. In the end I did chip in some clarifications and expansions, and I argued a few cases (mainly where my own theory was in agreement with others) but I consciously self-censored and there are still a couple of places where the interpretation is not quite what I meant when I wrote it. The soft/hard distinction, in particular, makes me a bit uneasy because, though my own views are represented, a different and (I believe) fundamentally incoherent definition (the classic business/accounting model of immaterial vs material) is partially spliced onto it. However, as I had to keep reminding myself, the paper appears in the text not because I promoted it but because others saw it as significant, so their understanding of it matters more than mine. There’s something self-referential in that, speaking to one of the core messages about the entangled, intertwined, complex, and distributed nature of knowledge that our new definition emphasizes.  It was an odd feeling, though, to see what has become of my baby now it has left home and had to fend for itself.

Abstract

Educational technologists have not settled on a fixed definition of the field and likely never will. However, attempting to define the field helps to understand the epistemological meanings that shape what the field sees, values, and considers worth pursuing. Through a critical historical review spanning over a century, alongside theoretical engagement with the concepts of entanglement and distributed agency, this paper identifies three key insufficiencies in current educational technology frameworks. These are the persistence of an instrumental-facilitative paradigm that treats technology as a resource deployed by human agents; the theoretical dissolution of the pedagogy-technology dichotomy that existing definitions have not absorbed; and the near-total silence on generative and agentic artificial intelligence, systems that now function not as tools but as active co-participants in educational processes. In response, we propose a new definition: Educational technology, as a field of inquiry and practice, encompasses the research, understanding, design, orchestration, and evaluation of entangled human-technological systems — spanning analog, digital, organizational, social, and agentic dimensions — through which learning and meaning-making are enabled, mediated, supported, and transformed. The field brings together researchers, practitioners, educators, communities, and institutions in ongoing efforts to study and improve educational experiences across formal, non-formal, and informal contexts. The field holds as a core commitment that its theory, research and practice should be ethically grounded and critically reflexive — attending to the societal implications of technological integration, with particular concern for equity and the distribution of agency among all participants in educational processes. These commitments describe what the field aspires to, not a guarantee of how all its practice is enacted. This definition is offered not as a resolution but as a basis for ongoing discussion, as it is best understood as a living definition. The field’s task is not to settle on a definition, but to keep it constantly evolving.

Reference

Bozkurt, A., Crompton, H., Farrow, R., Kukulska-Hulme, A., Dron, J., West, R., Palalas, A. (Aga) ., Bower, M., Xiao, J., Tlili, A., Henriksen, D., Pazurek, A., Huijser, H., Chiu, T.K.F., Jandrić, P., Jordan, K., Curry, J., Kimmons, R., Cukurova, M., Reeves, T., Hwang, G.-J., Shea, P., Lodge, J., Weller, M., Ng, D. and Asino, T.I. (2026) ‘Redefining Educational Technology: A Critical Collaborative Inquiry’, <i>Open Praxis</i>, 18(2), p. 192–211. Available at: https://doi.org/10.55982/openpraxis.18.2.1117.