IS “DIGITAL EDUCATION” THE RIGHT WAY FORWARD? – OR IS, MAYBE, POSTDIGITAL EDUCATION WHAT IS NEEDED!

The use of “digital tools” have usually played an important role in the transformation to “emergency remote teaching” during the pandemic. However, even before the pandemic there has been a strong pressure that education should become more “digital”. Nevertheless, we see several problems associated with the present discourse related to “digitalisation” of education. 1) It often unclear what is meant with “digital education”, 2) very narrow view of “digital tools” too mainly be tools for information and communication neglecting other uses of digital technology, 3) unbalanced focus on “digital tools” there other tools are either neglected or seen as inherently inferior and “old-fashioned”, 4) conflation between “digital” and “distance”, 5) adherence to either a technological determinism or a pedagogical determinism (technology is a neutral tool). Engineering students’ courses of action have been videorecorded in design projects and in electronics labs at two universities. It can bee seen that students’ use a wealth of bodily-material resources that are an integral and seamless part of students’ interactions. They use bodily resources, concrete materials, “low-tech” inscriptions as well as “high-tech” (“digital”) inscription devices. Our results challenge that by hand – by computer and analogue tools – digital tools should be seen as dichotomies. Our empirical evidence suggests that students should be trained to not only be trained to work with “digital” tools but with a multitude of tools and resources. We, thus, advocate that a postdigital perspective should be taken in education where the digital makes up part of an integrated totality.