About the project

The Covid 19 pandemic accelerated the digitalization of the school system, not leat in the ed-tech sector which is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. Technology is never neutral, and this ongoing transformation of public education is a matter of ideology and futurology. But although ed tech can be described as a global industry, the imaginaries underpinning the development of ed tech differs between national contexts. To understand this dynamic between geo-historical setting, compulsory education, and media development, this project propose a comparative study between the ed-tech sector in two digitally advanced countries in the Nordic/Baltic region, namely Estonia and Sweden, and how actors in these settings design, market and test products, services and systems that are part of the creation of the future of education and “the future classroom”. The theoretical starting point for this project is “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) that underpins the development of educational technology, in relation to dominant ideologies, regarding a preferred futures, within and across different national contexts. The study is performed as a multisited ethnography, by combining participatory observation, interviews with representatives from companies and industry organizations, as well as collection and analysis of visual material. We also use participatory and co-creative methods such as future workshops.