Contradictory directionalities of digital learning technology and its implications for the scope of imaginable possibilities for collaborating

Contradictory learning directionalities are immanent to digital learning technology: Any technology suggests a limited multiplicity of situated uses in a learning practice, of understandings of how to learn and of what learning should be about. Herewith any technology offers a scope of imaginable possibilities for acting through it. Sociomaterially maintained learning directionalities – among others through the intended uses of learning technology in educational arrangements – afford the enactment of a delimited ensemble of experiential modes, sensualities, epistemologies, knowledges, and future hopes. Next to offering opportunities to expand the learners’ scope of possibilities for transforming these learning directionalities together, digital learning technology thus also promotes the taken for grantedness of particular understandings of (most often instrumental) learning. They may consequently also undermine the possibility of imagining alternative learning collaborations and transforming learning practices according to situated needs and hopes, thereby potentially furthering the standardization of learning directionalities across contexts.
Drawing on a conceptual framework in which the learning human being and her_his challenges and struggles in a situated practice are the point of departure of any investigation of meaningful digital technology enactments, I will argue that also the question of what learning technology is requires a clarification of what contradictory understandings and directionalities of learning it is promoting. Building on a productive critique of Jean Lave’s (1996) learning theory, I analytically differentiate between a learning scene’s situatedly enacted telos, its subject-world relation and its learning mechanisms. I illustrate how this could be helpful for the study of young children’s learning processes by relating the proposed concepts to conflictual learning scenes from a pedagogical technology project enacting projected digital photographs in a daycare institution. The aim is to substantiate the claim that technology-enhanced learning requires a situated conflictual collaboration among all learners-teachers so as to meaningfully renegotiate the purposeful future enactment of digital learning technology.