After several months of personal journey towards accepting that the coronavirus pandemic is real (see Jandrić 2020a, b), in early March, it dawned on me that the pandemic does not need only so-called essential workers. Self-quarantined after returning from abroad weeks before the Croatian government locked down the country, I immediately wrote an editorial for Postdigital Science and Education and argued that 'While doctors, nurses, politicians, food suppliers, and many other brave people self-sacrifice to support our daily survival, this editorial argues that academics have a unique opportunity, and a moral duty, to immediately start conducting in-depth studies of current events.' (Jandrić 2020c: 234) I had no idea how to even approach these studies, yet I had a strong feeling that something needed to be done urgently. So, I just did what I know best and issued calls for 3 different types of Covid-19-related material to be published in Postdigital Science and Education: short testimonies, longer commentary articles, and full-length original articles. I had no idea how much material I would receive, what this material would look like, and what I would do with this material. I just had a deep gut feeling that we are witnessing a unique time in human history, a once-in-a-lifetime event, that needs to be recorded as it unfolds. For better or for worse, I decided to follow that feeling. This general vision, without a clear idea of what I was doing, paved a bumpy road for the development of this collection. On 17 March 2020, I shared the Call for Testimonies on Postdigital Science and Education social network sites and I emailed it to the journal's mailing list. Based on my previous experience with similar calls, I expected to receive 10 to 15 contributions and produce a standard-length collective article aiming at postdigital dialogue (Jandrić et al. 2019) about the pandemic. Yet my call went 'viral', at least for academic standards, and a couple of weeks later, I had more than 50,000 words written by more than 80 authors. So how do I make sense of all that material? My dear friend and Associate Editor of Postdigital Science and Education, Sarah Hayes, came to my rescue. We first tried to make sense of the contributions using critical discourse
It is commonly suggested that emerging technologies will revolutionize education. In this paper, two such emerging technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and educational robots (ER), are in focus. The aim of the paper is to explore how teachers, researchers and pedagogical developers critically imagine and reflect upon how AI and robots could be used in education. The empirical data were collected from discussion groups that were part of a symposium. For both AI and ERs, the need for more knowledge about these technologies, how they could preferably be used, and how the emergence of these technologies might affect the role of the teacher and the relationship between teachers and students, were outlined. Many participants saw more potential to use AI for individualization as compared with ERs. However, there were also more concerns, such as ethical issues and economic interests, when discussing AI. While the researchers/developers to a greater extent imagined ideal future technology-rich educational practices, the practitioners were more focused on imaginaries grounded in current practice.
National policies on school digitalisation take shape in their local contexts. Consequently, to understand the outcome of national policy, the local translations must be set within a contextual perspective. This article explores how four contextually different municipalities in Sweden translate national school digitalisation policy. It draws on a comparative cross-case study with data gathered from interviews, and over 150 local documents dating from 2018 to 2020. The results show how contextual aspects affects responses to national policy, and that municipalities approach school digitalisation in two distinct ways. The first, general approach, emphasises competitiveness and the creation of an enabling environment for the teachers. This is manifested in the development of special support organisations, and generous access to digital technology. The second, specific approach, emphasises local consensus in policy translations along with unity in policy adherence. Here, critique of national policy is explicit. The two approaches exemplify how translational power may be distributed differently, the former prioritising individual translational precedency for teachers over a unifying policy translation controlled through local governance. The paper suggests that contextual factors matters in the choice of approaches, one in which size matters. The paper concludes that policy makers need to acknowledge contextual dimensions within governance by weighing translational power in relation to translational coherence.
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