Conference Program

This contribution centralizes ‘the student’ and their aims and experiences, by using the pragmatic concept of ‘transaction’ to research the reciprocal relationship between students and digital educational technology (edtech). Contemporary edtech is part of complex (platform) ecosystems, with embedded platform logics (e.g. datafication) and connection to Big Tech (Van der Vlist, 2022). From a student perspective, ‘edtech’ includes not only school-initiated technologies but also digital platforms like YouTube and WhatsApp that support learning, communication, and educational logistics (Noteboom, 2025), thereby extending inquiry beyond the educational institution.

The ecosystem too provides conceptual room to research student-edtech-relationship as a Darwinian ‘struggle’ between the many actors (biotic) and artefacts (abiotic), that give and take (Elliott-Graves, 2024). This creates possibilities to connect student perspectives with evolutionary inspired philosophies of technologies that focus on user-technology interactions, dynamics, and reciprocal shaping and being shaped. Fields such as the Niche Construction Theory (Sterelny, 2010) approach a subject always in combination withs it, in which it consider technologies as value-laden, that steers or certain behavior—whether for good or bad. Recently, Dewey’s pragmatism has regained renewed attention in these fields as a way to research these complex interactions (Kivinen & Piiroinen, 2020).

I argue that Dewey’s well-known philosophy of education and his lesser-know philosophy of technology together offer a rich conceptual framework to study students’ perspectives and agency amid the ongoing platformisation and datafication of education. His philosophy of education provides a normative lens to assess what constitutes “good” education and what this implies for students. For example on how Deweyan concepts such as inquiry and experience foster growth, and why education in democratic societies should remain open-ended without fixed end-goals (Dewey, 1916). His philosophy of technology enables an analysis of how contemporary edtech–student relationships unfold transactionally within a broader ecosystem of actors and technologies, and whether these dynamics align with educational ideals (Dewey & Bentley, 1960). Together, these perspectives form a normative framework for interpreting and critically examining today’s datafied and platformised educational environments. It shift focus from individual entities, such as students or technologies, to the reciprocal transactions that continually shape each other, for better or worse.