Re-assembling the Digital World, or the Public Sociology of Digital Education Platforms

In the contemporary educational landscape, digital technologies have become an obligatory passage point, often appearing neutral, to the extent that they are rarely put under scrutiny and discussion. However, these are necessary steps in order to eventually reimaging them to attune to specific educational discursive frames. This article moves from the assumption that there is a need for educational researchers, educators and other relevant educational subjects to coalesce in a collective mobilisation that brings at the centre of public and policy debate the politics of digital education technology through a work of collective problematisation and reinvention. In order to contribute to this urgency, this article thus presents the theoretical and methodological underpinnings, and the results, of an experiment in what we call a public sociology of educational technology. Drawing on Michael Burawoy's plea for a Public Sociology (2004), our aim was to design and play with a methodology apt to carry out a work of creative and affirmative critique. The experiment was carried out by the L@bed Collective during the second edition of the Reclaim the Tech (RTT) Festival, held in Bologna in May 2024. During the workshop we invited our public to engage in a conversation about the design of the UNICA platform and its performative effects. We did this through a combination of two methods, walkthrough and a/r/tography, aimed respectively to playfully dis- and re-assemble materially the UNICA platform. We present some preliminary considerations on the insights which we gathered from such an experiment in public sociology of educational technology, with a specific reference to both the potential and limits of our methodology and the insights of such a collective work of denaturalisation, problematisation and reinvention.