Edtechcraft: investigating the global emergence of edtech testbeds

Educational technologies (edtech) are omnipresent in schools and classrooms nowadays. However, it has been regularly argued by critical scholarship, but also by the edtech field itself, that many edtech applications operate without appropriate evidence of their actual impact. In response, recent years have seen a worldwide upsurge of edtech testbeds. Edtech testbeds can be defined as settings of edtech testing and/or (re-)design in which developers, educational practitioners, and researchers participate in order to collaboratively investigate edtech impact from their different perspectives. Drawing on central insights in the field of critical edtech studies, the present article employs three analytical lenses to scrutinize, and outline a further research agenda about, the testbed phenomenon: the complexity and transformation of edtech actor and governance constellations; the understandings and multidimensionality of edtech impact; and the proliferation of participatory forms of knowledge creation around edtech design and usage. Based on an exploratory analysis of various testbed manifestations around the globe, we outline the concept of edtechcraft as a conceptual tool to capture the complex interplay of these three dimensions, stressing that edtech making always constitutes specific ways of making educational practices visible, legible, manageable, and – ultimately – actionable.