Digital spaces and language learning

In this commentary, I consider contributions to the special issue on Challenges and Affordances in Digital Spaces. The contributions both build on well-established areas of interest in language learning and technology (like digital multimodal composing, for example) and attend to relatively new frontiers in the digital domain (like AI and platformization). I comment on three inter-related themes that are raised in the special issue: (1) process and distributed agency, (2) criticality and creativity, (3) power, platforms and legitimacy. I close with a call for more research to better understand how language and literacy educators can rise to meet increasing challenges in ways that promote active and critical learning, meaningful activity, and individual agency.