All over the world, education is undergoing substantial changes in the wake of rapid technological developments. As our world is becoming ever more digitized, the educational sector is increasingly infused with digital games, apps, websites, social media, and learning environments. The Covid-19 pandemic, and associated measures of social distancing and school closures all over the world, have accelerated this digitization, triggering an urgent need for critical, up-close scrutiny of how this digitization is reshaping the worlds of education. The focus of this Special Issue is especially on digital education platforms. Over the last years, such platforms have become progressively prevalent, and both global and local technology companies have become omnipresent providers of such platforms, in private as well as in in public education (Van Dijck et al., 2018). From platforms tailored to primary and secondary schools to platforms specifically constructed for the field of higher education; from digital environments designed to manage pupils' learning to environments focused on the monitoring of their behavior; and from digital spaces bundling a variety of functionalities to interfaces with a more singular function: no matter the focus, there seems to exist a corresponding digital platform used within (and often especially made for) the educational field (Hillman et al., 2020; Robertson, 2019; Williamson, 2019). Furthermore, the worldwide growth and ubiquity of digital education platforms has greatly accelerated since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated newly emerging 'emergency pedagogies' that needed to be devised, often with help of both existing and newly developed digital education platforms (Williamson et al., 2020). In that sense, and in line with related scholarship on how education is taking-and changing-dedicated shapes, we advance the general thesis here that, under the influence of digital platforms, educational practices are gradually changing form (e.g., Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020; Lewis, 2020b). Despite the steady rise and ubiquity of digital education platforms, however, educational research that adopts a critical gaze vis-à-vis such platforms is still surprisingly limited (

Over the last few years, different sociomaterial research orientations have emerged. In this article, we argue that most of these orientations are relying on a relational mode of thinking, that is, a way of conceiving of educational practices in terms of the relations between the different actors present in these particular practices. In doing so, these various sociomaterial studies share many of their theoretical assumptions with social topology, an approach inspired by the mathematical field of topology. In educational research, however, this connection between sociomaterial and sociotopological accounts is not commonly made. Therefore, this article calls for a more intricate interweaving of topological thinking with better-known sociomaterial approaches. Furthermore, we assert that using visualisations might play a crucial role in this respect. To that effect, we introduce the Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of the diagram. This notion of the diagram, as the technique that brings the orders of the visual and the articulable together, is conceived as a promising technique in order to investigate different aspects of educational practices. In a concluding section, the article offers some suggestions as to what the general potential of adopting such relational studies in the field of education might be.

This article presents a qualitative research method, Visual Network Analysis (VNA), which is theoretically situated within the relational turn, and more particularly within sociomaterial and sociotopological approaches. Both approaches consider both human and nonhuman entities in social practices, and adopt a relational perspective in order to study these practices. VNA provides innovative tools for qualitatively analyzing social situations by constructing, analyzing and interpreting visual networks based on tailored observatory and/or interview techniques. To that effect, VNA adopts the notion ‘network’ as a method (rather than as a structural representation of social life) that allows to trace the complex entanglements by means of which specific practices are constituted. The article presents the process of conducting VNA by focusing on four key steps: collecting and coding relational data; visualizing network diagrams through software; analyzing the form of these diagrams; and interpreting the resulting visualizations by offering narrative readings of these forms (focused on the effects they generate). The article concludes with some reflections on the assets and potential of the method proposed.

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

This paper offers a methodological framework to research data practices in education critically. Data practices are understood in the generic sense of the word here, i.e., as the actions, performances, and the resulting consequences, of introducing data-producing technologies in everyday educational situations. The paper first distinguishes between data infrastructures, datafication and data points as three distinct, yet interrelated, phenomena. In order to investigate their concrete doings and specificities, the paper proposes a topological methodology that allows disentangling the relational nature and interwovenness of data practices. Based on this methodology, the paper proceeds with outlining a methodical toolbox that can be employed in studying data practices. Starting from nascent work on digital education platforms as a worked example, the toolbox allows researchers to investigate data practices as consisting of four unique topological dimensions: the Interface of a data practice, its actual Usage, its concrete Design, and its Ecological embeddedness - IUDE.