Tracing technological obstinacies in critical educational platform design

Big Tech platforms, and their largely proprietary logics, have been scrutinised within the field of critical edtech studies as bringing forth an increase in surveillance and inequality in education. There has therefore been a rising call to apply critical, participatory and speculative design approaches to develop alternative platform infrastructures that correspond with values such as communality. However, as research on public-oriented approaches to educational platform design has shown, also those technologies oftentimes mimic the constraints of proprietary platforms. One reason for this is the technical elements constituting those platforms and pre-existing their design. Due to specific operating mechanisms, they cannot be freely adapted in software development but entail certain obstinacies. However, there is limited research concerning the role of such technical elements in educational platform design, especially when aiming for pedagogical plurality. This contribution focusses on such specific technical elements that co-constituted the design process of a digitality-oriented, transnational school development platform. Applying a technogenetic perspective, we analyse two vignettes from the design process and show how certain technical elements genealogically become obstinate in semantic and operational ways. Technical obstinacies therefore produce an architectural lock-in that has implications for what it means to critically design alternative platform architectures.