Goal Setting and Problem Solving in The Tech Enhanced Classroom

Goal-Setting and
Problem-Solving in
the Tech-Enhanced
Classroom
Goal-Setting and Problem-Solving in the Tech-Enhanced Classroom explores how

educators can use technology to create opportunities for more immersive
and rewarding learning. As child-age students demonstrate increasing com-
petence with digital tools, and investment in learning technologies contin-
ues to climb, teachers need grounded, pedagogically attentive insights to
help them leverage these devices and platforms in their profession. This
book offers a variety of ideas for how pre- and in-service teachers can suc-
cessfully deploy today’s educational technology platforms to serve confi-
dent, meaningful teaching and learning. Each chapter includes a concrete
learning goal or problem, a narrative of an instructional experience with a
specific technology, relevant theoretical and empirical underpinnings, and
practical recommendations.
Pete Atherton is Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education at Liverpool John

Moores University, UK, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Goal-Setting and
Problem-Solving in
the Tech-Enhanced
Classroom
A Teaching and Learning Reboot
PETE ATHERTON
Designed cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Pete Atherton
The right of Pete Atherton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Atherton, Pete, author.
Title: Goal-setting and problem-solving in the tech-enhanced classroom : a
teaching and learning reboot / Pete Atherton.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022041901 (print) | LCCN 2022041902 (ebook) | ISBN
9781032113258 (Hardback) | ISBN 9781032117614 (Paperback) | ISBN
9781003221401 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Educational technology. | Computer-assisted instruction. |
Teaching--Aids and devices. | Internet in education. | Motivation
(Psychology) in children. | Problem solving in children. |
Teachers--In-service training.
Classification: LCC LB1028.3 .A844 2023 (print) | LCC LB1028.3 (ebook) |
DDC 371.33--dc23/eng/20221206
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041901
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022041902
ISBN: 978-1-032-11325-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-11761-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-22140-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401
Typeset in Dante and Avenir
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
Contents
List of illustrations vii
1 Introducing the chasm 1
2 March of the robots? AI in practice 9
3 Virtual insanity? Is virtual reality still the future of education? 35
4 Hooked on dopamine? Learning through failure in

game design 50
5 Search smarter? Leveraging Pinterest for learning 64
6 The tip of the iceberg? Social media in education 84
7 What is your edtech journey? Autoethnography and

the importance of learning journeys 98
8 Blockchain, edtech and learning communities 112
9 Rhizomatic learning: Pearltrees and online curation tools 134
10 Podcasting in education 149

vi Contents
11 Edpuzzle: Online video for learning – questioning and

online assessment 168
12 Conclusions: Edtech and education – moving forward together 183
Index 202
Illustrations
Figures
2.1 FirstPass being used at Bolton College, UK 10
2.2 Bolton College and Ada 29
3.1 Google Cardboard 43
3.2 Infographic – VR in the classroom 45
4.1 We Are Human 52
5.1 Pinterest infographic 77
6.1 Flyer for Edtech Thought Leaders 91
7.1 A meme created by me to be used as qualitative data 104
7.2 Creation of a social media persona – edtech double agent 105
10.1 Logo for Edtech Innovators podcast 150
10.2 Podcasting for teachers 163
11.1 Edpuzzle in the classroom 179
Tables
5.1 Questions posed to the sample70
5.2 In vivo coding of responses72
6.1 Twitter analytics – quantitative91
6.2 Page impressions and conventions of tweets92
11.1 Traditional vs ‘flipped classroom’172
Introducing the chasm 1
Teaching and learning problem
There is a significant disconnect between the preponderance of edtech plat-

forms and their leverage in education. There is also very little coherence or
momentum in the policies that support development of edtech or in the
research that is conducted around it.
Introduction
This book will be different from most academic and practitioner books. It
will exist at an intersection between pedagogy and practice and academic
research and theory. The theories that I will explore will be applied to spe-
cific edtech tools in a way that will be transferable to other platforms in
similar categories. For this reason, the book will be designed to have a long
shelf life.
Since COVID-19, the teaching profession has faced an existential cri-
sis. Teachers neither own all of the knowledge nor have all the answers
(Dhawan, 2020; Watermeyer et al., 2020). As schools, colleges and univer-
sities were forced by the pandemic to move their learning online, there was
sometimes an assumption that students were in possession of digital skills.
Moreover, increasing social and economic inequalities have widened the dig-
ital divide (Allier-Gagneur, McBurnie, Chuang & Haßler, 2020).
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-1
2 Introducing the chasm
Themes
This book will begin to contextualise how educators are using technology to
create opportunities for more immersive and rewarding learning. This book
aims to inhabit the increasingly crowded but no less popular space of edtech.
Though there may be a movement towards proving the impact of specific
edtech platforms (Luckin, 2018; Luckin & Kent, 2019), this book will aim to
place more emphasis on how educators can become more adept at teaching
with the assistance of technology. In this way, the book will be adopting a
critical platform gaze, through which edtech platforms may be viewed less as
ideologically neutral but more as socio-technical assemblages that are bringing
about change in education (Decuypere, Grimaldi & Landri, 2021, pp. 1–2).
Both technology and the culture of learning are in a period of swift
change and marked transition. Children are demonstrating competence
around technology at an increasingly young age, yet schools and colleges
frequently bear no resemblance to their connected homes or the high-tech
outside world. Educational opportunities are frequently located outside the
traditional boundaries of space and time. At the same time, an increasing
amount of money is supposedly being spent on edtech. For example, the
Department for Education in the UK recently announced a £10 million
investment in edtech, to help promote inclusivity, prosperity and efficiency.
From a global perspective, expenditure on edtech is likely to increase from
$152 billion, or 2.6% of total education spend in 2015, to $342 billion, or
4.4% by 2025 (Edtech in 10 Charts, 2022, Source: Holon IQ). What we don’t
yet know is the amount of money that might be spent on supporting and
training staff to be adept at deploying these new technologies in a way that
helps students. There is an ongoing concern regarding a perceived prepon-
derance of low-value use of technology in the classroom (Magaña, 2017;
Mouza & Lavigne, 2013). While technology for learning points to an undiffer-
entiated learning culture, technology for learners is student-centred and allows
students the autonomy to create their own learning goals (Halverson &
Smith, 2010, cited in Mouza & Lavigne, 2013). These tensions are a central
theme of this book.
Despite these developments, education continues to play catch-up with
the needs of employers in the private sector. Many of the skills and much of
the knowledge required to work in the modern workplace are only acquired
at undergraduate and postgraduate level. In many ways, competence in
technology is seen as separate from and in opposition to traditional learning
and literacies (Magaña, 2017).
Literature and practical applications
The book will explore and contextualise some ideas for how each edtech
platform is and can be deployed successfully in schools and colleges.
Furthermore, the book’s discussion of the literature will naturally help
interrogate debates around edtech and pedagogy. Conversely, the book aims
to explode some assumptions about edtech and teaching. The book will be
useful to practitioners but will also help inform debates about technology
and communication in the 2020s.
Education is a sector in which technology and learning can sometimes
be separated, as if the technologies themselves create the learning (Luckin,
2018). This book attempts to address this disconnect between education
and technology (Atherton, 2018a, 2019). The context of this book spans
Secondary/High School to postgraduate student teachers. To what extent do
children start to acquire the skills and mindset necessary to thrive in the post-
industrial digital economy? How might those who are training to become
teachers build their confidence around edtech, so that it is deployed as a mean-
ingful way of enhancing and supporting learning? In addition to this, how
can student teachers avoid de-skilling their students’ traditional literacies?
This book focuses on a variety of edtech platforms, from online assess-
ment and quizzes to social media platforms and social curation tools. Each
chapter will address these overarching themes through a specific theoretical
model and a piece of original research. Through this, the book will con-
tribute to the ongoing debate about what to do with edtech in the 2020s.
This book is a significant development from Atherton (2018a) in which I
examined the role of the teacher educator amid a technology landscape
that changes when we think we are close to it (Atherton, 2018a, b; Koehler,
Mishra & Cain, 2013). The following extract frames the extended metaphor
of a chasm in the book.
Extract from Atherton (2018a). 50 Ways to Use

Technology Enhanced Learning in the Classroom:
As an experienced teacher, it started to occur to me in the mid-nough-

ties that learners were developing skills that were neither recognised nor
celebrated by their teachers at any level – including me. Initially I would
rail against the practice of students Googling simple answers, without
checking the results, instead of sticking to tried and tested methods. I
eventually realised that I was fighting a losing battle: these old methods
(Continued)
had been tried and tested but seemed to have little or no place in the
modern world.
That led many teachers to a crisis of confidence: if the teacher’s role is
no longer the keeper of the gates of knowledge, then what are teachers
for? By the start of the 2010s I realised that a quiet revolution had taken
place. The unspoken rules of teaching and learning had been rejected
and dismantled by learners but apparently reinforced by policymakers,
to whom teachers were under ever more pressure to comply. In the mid-
dle were edtech providers, who were improvising, innovating, building
brand equity and engaging in dialogue with educators, institutions and
sometimes politicians.
Atherton (2018a, p. 6)
The research questions and the findings suggest a disconnect between the
worlds of technology and the lived experience of students and educators.
This chasm represents how educators and edtech innovators may be in a
liminal, transitional space. This idea of between-ness has helped create an
extended metaphor for the entire body of work – a chasm, which the author
is trying to bridge. Moreover, the chasm metaphor has become a worthy
companion to the iterative journeys of each edtech product and of the
researcher. The chapters in this book will analyse the ideas that have resided
in the metaphorical chasm between the following:
• edtech on either side of the pandemic.

• what edtech can do and how it helps in reality.
• teacher identity vs teacher educator and early career researcher.
• technology use in schools vs the outside world.
• the inner self vs the performative social self.
I am entangled in this selective interrogation of edtech and am positioned

in the chasm (O’Keeffe, 2019). One of the ways in which I try to bridge the
chasm (Atherton, 2019) is by acknowledging my own positionality vis-à-vis
edtech and education. The autoethnographic aspects of the book achieve
this in a focused and rigorous manner (Atherton, 2020b).
Researching the chasm
The research that contributed towards this book was conducted in two uni-
versities in the North of England and straddled the pandemic. The work
precipitated further questions about the effects of the pandemic on teach-

ers’ identity and the role of edtech in the classroom, though it was impor-
tant for these debates not to overpower the others.
As a body of work, the book helps develop debates about the following
issues:
• the importance of narrative writing in developing reflective.

• the role of the researcher in the production of research.
• the usefulness of autoethnography in producing rigorous research and
how qualitative inquiry can help teacher educators construct a coherent
identity.
• the emerging skills teacher educators need as they support their students
in their use of technology.
• mixed research methods.
• how teacher educators form their identities in relation to technology.
• how the ‘chasm’ has been a space of both creative opportunities and
challenges in shaping the researcher’s academic identity.
Goal-Setting and Problem-Solving in the Tech-Enhanced Classroom: A Teaching

and Learning Reboot adopts a variety of research methods, which are listed
below:
Chapter 1 Introducing the chasm

Autoethnography
This introduction provides the narrative background to the author’s interest
and the process of starting to answer the research questions.
Chapter 2 March of the robots? AI in practice

Systematic review and case study
This develops Atherton (2020a) into a complete systematic review on
chatbots in education. This helped structure and formalised the liter-
ature reviews in the other chapters and addressed the overall research
questions.
Chapter 3 Virtual insanity? Is virtual reality still the future of education?

A narrative review
Building on the rigour of the systematic review in Chapter 2, this narrative
review contextualises VR in education.
Chapter 4 Hooked on dopamine? Learning through failure in game design

This is a viewpoint piece, which incorporates a narrative review.
Chapter 5 Search smarter? Leveraging Pinterest for learning

This chapter uses thematic analysis to report on qualitative and quantitative
data.
Chapter 6 The tip of the iceberg? Social media in education

The use of an instrumental case study.
Chapter 7 What is your edtech journey? Autoethnography and the importance

of learning journeys
This chapter draws together the grounded theory and thematic analysis
used to analyse the qualitative data in Atherton (2020a) and (2022).
Chapter 8 Blockchain, edtech and learning communities

This reviews the literature on blockchain in education, then provides a case
study of two learning communities.
Chapter 9 Rhizomatic learning: Pearltrees and online curation tools

This is a theoretical piece about Pearltrees and rhizomatic learning.
Chapter 10 Podcasting in education

This is a narrative review and preliminary findings.
Chapter 11 Edpuzzle: Online video for learning – questioning and online

assessment
Narrative review and case study of Edpuzzle.
Chapter 12 Conclusions: Edtech and education – moving forward together

Bringing together the themes, methods and conclusions.
Structure of each chapter
The basic structure of each chapter will be as follows:
• abstract.
• teaching/learning goal/problem.
• narrative account of the author’s experiences of each issue and relevant
edtech tools.
• empirical data: could be my own data, data collected in collaboration,
a narrative account (autoethnographic), a systematic review or a case
study/opinion piece.
• recommendations for use in the classroom.

• emerging tech in this field.
Each chapter will be roughly 5000 words. There may be some variation in
the length and structure, for example where I include a transcription of a
podcast interview.
The first of the chapters – March of the robots? – assesses the role of arti-
ficial intelligence (AI) in education.
References
Allier-Gagneur, Z., McBurnie, C., Chuang, R., & Haßler, B. (2020). Characteristics
of effective teacher education in low- and middle-income Countries. What are
they and what role can EdTech play? (EdTech Hub Helpdesk Response No.
10B). doi:10.5281/zenodo.4762301. Available from: docs.edtechhub.org/lib/
R9VVKUH5. Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International,
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Atherton, P. (2018a). 50 ways to use technology enhanced learning in the classroom. 1st
ed. Exeter: Learning Matters.
Atherton, P. (2018b). More than just a quiz: How Kahoot! Can help trainee teachers
understand the learning process. TEAN Journal, 10(2), pp. 29–39.
Atherton, P. (2019). Bridging the chasm – A study of the realities of edtech use
among trainee teachers. TEAN Journal, 11(4), pp. 80–95.
Atherton, P. (2020a). March of the Robots? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is part of the main-
stream in UK education. but why should anyone care? 12th International Conference
on Education and New Learning Technologies, 06 Jul 2020–08 Jul 2020.
EDULEARN Proceedings, IATED, Jul 2020. doi:10.21125/edulearn.2020.0152
Atherton, P. (2020b). My social autoethnography: How one teacher educator
used digital communication to help tell his own stories. TEAN Journal, 12(1),
pp. 48–64.
Atherton, P. (2022). Leaving the chasm behind? Autoethnography, creativity and
the search for identity in academia. Accepted for publication by Prism Journal
19/1/22.
Decuypere, M., Grimaldi, E., & Landri, P. (2021). Introduction: Critical studies of
digital education platforms. Critical Studies in Education, 62(1), pp. 1–16. doi:10.1
080/17508487.2020.1866050
Dhawan, S. (2020). Online learning: A Panacea in the time of COVID-19 crisis. Journal
of Educational Technology Systems, 49(1), pp. 5–22. doi:10.1177/0047239520934018
EdTech in 10 Charts. (2022). Retrieved from https://www.holoniq.com/edtech-in-
10-charts
Koehler, M., Mishra, P., & Cain, W. (2013). What is technological pedagog-
ical content knowledge (TPACK)? Journal of Education, 193(3), pp. 13–19.
doi:10.1177/002205741319300303
Luckin, R. (2018). Enhancing learning and teaching with technology. London: UCL
Institute of Education Press.
Luckin, R., & Kent, C. (2019). Why teachers must learn to interrogate AI’s algo-
rithms. TES. Available at: https://www.tes.com/news/why-teachers-must-
learn-interrogate-ais-algorithms
Magaña, S. (2017). Disruptive classroom technologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Mouza, C., & Lavigne, N. (2013). Emerging technologies for the classroom. New York:
Springer.
O’Keeffe, P. (2019). PhD by Publication: Innovative approach to social science
research, or operationalisation of the doctoral student … or both?. Higher
Education Research & Development, 39(2), pp. 288–301. doi:10.1080/07294360.
2019.1666258
Watermeyer, R., Crick, T., Knight, C., & Goodall, J. (2020). COVID-19 and digital
disruption in UK universities: Afflictions and affordances of emergency online
migration. Higher Education, 81(3), pp. 623–641. doi:10.1007/s10734-020-00561-y
March of the robots? 2
AI in practice
The driver for this chapter was Ada, a campus digital assistant that can help
students with college-related questions in a way that spares students the
embarrassment of asking strangers confidential questions within earshot
of their peers. Ada will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter. The
question that I want to consider here through this review is how the litera-
ture has explored chatbots in the context of education and wellbeing.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-2
10 March of the robots?
Figure 2.1 FirstPass being used at Bolton College, UK

Source: Reprinted by permission Hussain (2021)
Narrative account of the author’s experience and

reflections
My earliest dalliance with AI in education was at a conference near

London in 2017. Some of the world’s foremost authorities on AI from the
Institute of Education (IOE) at University College London (UCL) were

talking about ‘Colin’. Colin was a prototype artificial intelligence (AI)
teaching assistant that was programmed to free up the time that teach-
ers spend on repetitive tasks. The thinking was that if AI crunches the
numbers, teacher would be freed up to spend time developing soft skills,
like empathy and assisting pupils to develop high-order thinking and
mastery (Atherton, 2018; Holmes, Duffy, Luckin & Forcier, 2017; Luckin,
Holmes, Griffiths & Forcier, 2016). Though the audience were teachers
and academics, there were some questions about AI that were taken from
the kind of knee-jerk reactions that people may have drawn from science
fiction (Atherton, 2018). There was palpable fear in the room and a sense
that the distinguished academics from the IOE were being very patient
about people’s misconceptions about AI, notably that AI will eventually
replace teachers.
Another misconception that manifested itself was linked to what
became a common theme of this book, that of problematical definitions.
When apps and programs become part of the mainstream, they are no
longer referred to as AI (Luckin, Holmes, Griffiths & Forcier, 2016). AI,
therefore, is always emerging, evolving, threatening, deepening.
Since then, AI has become a selling point for mainstream edtech solu-
tions, for example CENTURY Tech, which has had a prominent stand at
The Bett Show for several years. But how many teachers understand AI,
what it is doing, what it can do and what it should do? The exciting thing
for me is that everyone is in a state of learning – whoever declares them-
selves an expert in AI one day could be discredited the next. One thing is
and should be certain in the coming years any debates about AI in edu-
cation will be surrounded by questions about what is worth having and
what it replaces; how it can help with ongoing educational challenges;
and the preponderance, ubiquity and perceived neutrality of data and the
ethics of data collection, storage, infringement and misuse (Atherton &
Pratt, 2022; Luckin et al., 2022).
Wellbeing has become increasingly prominent in the culture of educa-
tion at K-12 and, indeed, everywhere else. While educators have tried to
teach as best they can, a mental health time bomb has been ticking louder
than ever and this is backed up by the sharp spike in mental health-related
internet searches.
One of the easy ways in which this book attempts to bridge the chasm
is to focus on specific examples of edtech platforms at a micro level.
At the same time, the book wants to combine the need to review and
(Continued)
contextualise recent and emerging thinking with deconstructing the

work of the author. The reason for this is that I propose that the lived
experience of the user and research participant can help improve the clar-
ity and rigour of edtech research.
Chatbots
The next chapter will provide a case study of two AI platforms from the
stable – Ada and FirstPass – created in the UK by Aftab Hussain from
Bolton College. I wanted to focus on chatbots because I’m fascinated by
their evolution from Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing’s pioneering work to
a series of potentially revolutionary yet misunderstood manifestations.
Autoethnography
I am approaching AI through the lens of the lived experience of one team

in the North of England which is innovating in a way that lays bare the
exhilaration of discovery and logistical and technical challenges. In the
next chapter, you will see a transcript of an interview from my podcast
with Aftab Hussain – ‘Edtech Innovators’ – which adds valuable knowl-
edge to the field of edtech because it’s about real people trying to make
a difference in education. The podcast is partly about my journey as a
researcher, but to provide rigour to the qualitative data generated by
podcasts, I need to consider appropriate methodologies, for example
grounded theory and thematic analysis.
Grounded theory vs thematic analysis
I am drawn towards grounded theory in this chapter and in Atherton

(2020b) because it enables me to maintain a sense of objectivity and avoid
accusations of researcher bias or indulgence. Grounded theory also pro-
vides a framework for this literature review, which should be easy for
others to adopt. This has been very useful in my early autoethnographic
work, for example Atherton (2020b), as it has helped me navigate a poten-
tially amorphous dataset (Atherton, 2020b; Wolfswinkel, Furtmueller &
Wilderom, 2013).
Review of relevant literature and findings
Historical context
Before discussing the literature and the methodology that I used to gather,
review and analyse the literature and the attendant issues, I’d like to intro-
duce a little historical context. Chatbots can be viewed as inspired by the
Turing Test of 1950 (Turing, 1950), designed to determine if a computer
could fool participants into believing that they were communicating with a
human. Furthermore, the annual Loebner Prize, in which contenders were
given the task of mimicking human interaction, was viewed as a continua-
tion of the Turing Test by some – and a corruption of it by others (Bradesko
& Mladenic, 2012). Indeed, many would argue that we are not even close to
passing the Turing Test. Though the first chatbot, named ELIZA, was made
as early as 1966, progress in this area had arguably been slow (Bradesko &
Mladenic, 2012; Weizenbaum, 1983). More recently, chatbots in an educa-
tional context have been examined in relation to their status as conversa-
tional agents (Bradesko and Mladenic, 2012; Smutny & Schreiberova, 2020),
the design of their natural language processing, and their role in educational
assessment, especially as intelligent tutors (Torrance, 2011). Despite the
increasing discussion if chatbots in education in the literature since 2016,
some researchers have recognised the necessity of a more targeted focus on
the taxonomies of chatbots and broader forms of AI.
Research questions
The chapter established the following research questions, which develop

Atherton (2020a): What are the challenges regarding the classification of
chatbots? What is a campus digital assistant? What are the proposed benefits
of deploying campus digital assistants in schools and colleges? What issues
are emerging from this systematic review and what are the strengths, lim-
itations and suggestions for future research? In terms of what this chapter
adds to the body of knowledge, it provides the following contributions to
the international debate on chatbots in education:
• a continuation of recommendations to focus on the design of edtech,

not just evidence that it works (Luckin et al., 2016).
• implications for practice and/or policy.
• clarity of the taxonomies of chatbots in education.
• reference points for navigating recent literature when exploring issues of

wellbeing during and post COVID-19.
• how an examination of the lived experiences of edtech creators and
researchers can make a valid contribution to knowledge.
I will select literature about the broader issue of AI in the Secondary/

High School education, again from 2018. This period reflects an exponen-
tial growth in studies about the topic. A search on the Scopus database for
“Artificial Intelligence or AI Education or Educational” returned only four-
teen results in 2017, after a period of stagnation between 2011 and 2016.
This figure grew to 257 by 2021 (Prahani et al., 2022, pp. 170–172). Though
this is a potentially unwieldy database, I will restrict my review to debates
about AIED (artificial intelligence in education) that have been relevant to
my own research interests in edtech, pedagogy and autoethnography. I will,
therefore, draw conclusions from the literature from the previous chapter,
while also narrowing the focus to include campus digital assistants.
Taxonomies
In terms of categories or taxonomies (Atherton, 2019), the literature refers

to virtual teaching assistants, voice activated AI and coachbots. The issues
surrounding chatbots have been absorbed into broader debates surrounding
the ethics and functionality of AI (Gulz et al., 2011; Anderson and Anderson,
2007). This is sometimes misleading. Though personal digital assistants like
Siri, Cortana and Alexa are all examples of AI insofar as they learn from their
users (Smutny & Schreiberova, 2020), there are many chatbots that deploy
pattern matching or decision trees as their modus operandi (Bradesko and
Mladenic, 2012; Gulz et al., 2011).
A conventional literature review is likely to be structured in a way that
covers the following: what the literature is responding to, the overarching
research questions suggested by the literature, persistent problems in the
field, and the taxonomies or categories of the topic under examination. This
will then address any literature objectives and should propose the extent
to which the review meets or develops the research questions. Since 2012,
the literature has responded to rapid adoption and development of chat-
bots in education. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Department
for Education have funded research into edtech but have preferred ran-
domised control trials and other positivist methodologies. While these may
be deemed more rigorous by some, their preponderance may preclude
research that is not focused on the causal link between what supposedly
works in terms of edtech use and classroom practice (Cukurova, Luckin &
Wilson, 2019).
More recent studies have addressed the issue of AI robot assistants foster-
ing a more personalised and collaborative way of learning (Haiguang et al.,
2020) but the research has been sparse. Some reasons for this issue have been
proposed by Cukurova, Luckin and Wilson (2019), namely that there is a
paucity of systematically reviewed edtech reports and that few members of
the edtech space are able to access the literature, as they operate outside aca-
demia. Furthermore, the academic community does not receive adequate
encouragement from the edtech industry or from policy makers and this
leads to an uncritical approach to research evidence in the sector (Cukurova,
Luckin & Wilson, 2019). This is especially the case in Europe, where there
are very few notable AI applications in education (Renz et al., 2020).
The bulk of the works discussed are in the recent past, but this paper
also looks to the near future, in an attempt to gauge the direction of travel
(Plonsky and Ziegler, 2016). More recent and emerging work on AI has
acknowledged the importance of chatbots in the context of education,
sometimes as a virtual assistant or coachbot. Notably, the emerging studies
have demonstrated innovative methods of data analysis, for example: multi-
ple regression (Chocarro et al., 2021), explorative studies and confirmatory
composite analysis. There has also been a shift in research questions towards
effectiveness of the design or architecture of chatbots (Rejón-Guardia &
Vich-I-Martorell, 2020; Picek, 2020) or chatbots as pedagogical agents (Wang
et al., 2021). What can be inferred from the emerging research questions is
that much of the work taking place is experimental in nature (Picek, 2020).
Furthermore, literature is reflecting the reality that progress in chatbot
development is slow. The systematic review part of this chapter intends to
review the literature, analyse the process of literature review and accept the
author’s positionality (Atherton, 2020a; Enriquez, 2020; Slavin, 2017). The
review may have an element of completeness but can never be viewed as
final, or ‘saturated’ (Wolfswinkel, Furtmueller & Wilderom, 2013, p. 3).
Methodology
This next section will describe the process of selecting keywords, then
making a decision on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Firstly, I conducted
a literature search on the primary studies related to issues of chatbots and
education and, more broadly, AI. It was important to locate the topic of
chatbots within its broader context. The initial search was conducted on the
following bibliographic databases:
1. Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

2. Academic Search Ultimate (EBSCO HOST).
3. Project Muse.
4. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
5. Arts & Humanities Citation Index.
6. Cambridge Core.
7. Linguistics and Language Behaviour Abstract (LLBA).
I used a university database to further narrow my search. I selected the fol-

lowing filters:
• full text online.

• peer-reviewed journals.
• open access.
• articles.
• years 2018–2022.
• artificial intelligence.
• students.
• education.
• machine learning.
• conference proceedings.
• books.
Books about AI are in danger of dating quickly, so I ensured that I selected

books that were informed by recent literature and about cutting-edge
research (Luckin et al., 2022; Prahani et al., 2022). These selections returned
33 search results, which would enable me to zoom in on research that was
relevant to this case study. I was mindful of the danger of the literature
conflating AI and machine learning; this chapter will endeavour to draw dis-
tinctions between the two. I reduced the field from 33 texts by de-selecting
all but education-based papers. I also removed research that was not relevant
to Secondary/High School. One of the persistent patterns in the literature
across most of the chapters in this book is the global nature of the studies
selected. Despite the fact that this chapter has narrowed the focus onto a
small selection of studies about chatbots in Secondary/High School educa-
tion, they felt disparate at first.
The search criteria matched those of Chong and Reinders (2020) and
Plonsky and Ziegler (2016) who recommend searching the following: (a)
bibliographic databases (b) using Google Scholar to search for academic
papers in peer-reviewed journals (c) primary data in books, found via Google
Books. I used Discover – a university database – to begin my initial searches.
The first search terms included the terms ‘chatbots’, ‘artificial intelligence’

and ‘wellbeing’. The intention here was to open up some lines of enquiry
that might help direct me to the field of research, its timeline and the broader
research questions. This process was not very focused at first, as the multiple
bibliographic databases returned an unwieldy number of results. The next
step was to use the ‘A-Z Database List’ to try to find databases that might
help narrow my focus. I narrowed this down further by relevance, for exam-
ple Education Research Complete and reputation, for example Proquest and
Springer. The university library provides useful summaries of each biblio-
graphic database. The description of the Education Research Complete is,
as I expected from the title, specific to education. The main benefit of this
would be to exclude texts that relate to science, health and medicine, engi-
neering or any other topic that is not linked to AI and student wellbeing.
Proquest and Springer, by contrast, are multi-disciplinary bibliographic
databases. The benefits of this are the range of potential sources, but
Proquest and Springer necessitate the implementation of a strategy in
terms of search and management of results. It became clear that I should
interrogate the reasons for my search terms. That way, the search terms
might start to clarify the research questions inherent in the literature. To
start, I enclosed the term “artificial intelligence” (within double inverted
commas). That way, the database would return a phrase, not a word.
Adding “AND wellbeing”’ directed the results towards something more spe-
cific and narrower. It was also helpful to add ‘NOT’ to the search terms, in
order to exclude extraneous content or search results that did not help me
understand my research questions including the taxonomies of chatbots
and campus digital assistants, emerging issues and limitations. The most
successful pairings of chatbot and ‘AND’ were with the terms listed below:
“Chatbot” AND:
• Wellbeing
• Mental health
• Education
• Artificial intelligence
• AI
• Resilience
• Conversational agents
• Learning
• Collaboration
• Humanity
• Schools
• Meta-analysis (Hussain et al., 2019)
I made the decision to narrow the searches further by restricting them to

publications post-2015. The reason for this is that AI applications such as
Apple’s Siri and other intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), like Microsoft’s
Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa, became commonplace around this time (Reis
et al., 2018). The thinking here was that the literature would start to interro-
gate contemporaneous manifestations of synthetic intelligence in the con-
text of education. The paucity of meta-analyses precluded the possibility
of conducting a second-order synthesis (Cukurova, Luckin & Wilson, 2019;
Plonsky and Ziegler, 2016).
The next phase of the search necessitated using major UK and interna-
tional peer-reviewed journals (Chong & Reinders, 2020). An examination of
an A-Z of journals though the university database allowed me to select the
following:
International and UK refereed journals
• Artificial Intelligence Journal.

• Artificial Intelligence Review.
• British Journal of Education Technology (BJET).
• Computers & Education.
• Emerald Publishing.
• Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.
• Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering.
• Nature.com.
• Oxford Review of Education.
• Science Direct.
• Sage Journal.
The initial search allowed me to assemble papers from peer-reviewed jour-

nals. I then applied the same search criteria to searches on Google Scholar.
Once I was sure about the texts to examine, I could consider the inclusion
and exclusion criteria.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria
This section delineates the rationale for the inclusion and exclusion crite-
ria of specific academic papers. The process develops aspects of systematic
review discussed by Cohen, Manion, & Morrison (2010) and Glass et al.
(1981). Wolf (1986, cited in Cohen, Manion, & Morrison, 2010) argues that a
rigorous systematic review should select unpublished work in order to coun-

ter assertive claims. This analysis excludes unpublished dissertations and
theses, as it prioritised currency in light of the pace of the development of
digital technologies; selecting dissertations and theses carries a similar time
lag to open access peer-reviewed papers. That said, the paper will be select-
ing soon-to-be published works on chatbots and education. The methodol-
ogy will be partly informed by a structure adopted by Chong and Reinders’s
(2020) meta-analysis of technology-mediated task-based language teaching.
The reason for this is that this analysis communicates its methodology in a
lucid manner, especially with regards to grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014;
Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). This section will also explore the purpose of using
grounded theory as the methodology deployed in order to provide a quali-
tative systematic review (Chong & Reinders, 2020).
Research findings
The application of inclusion and exclusion criteria helped focus the research
away from data that was potentially extraneous to this study. These exclu-
sion criteria narrowed the focus down to topics that represent the aims
of this book and facilitated the process of coding the data, which will be
explored in the section on grounded theory. This study draws on Downes’
(2020) method of using the review data as an interpretive exercise and will
explore trends rather than exclusively quantitative data.
Coding of the literature
This methodology was developed from recommendations by Wolfswinkel,

Furtmueller and Wilderom (2013) that more literature reviews should explic-
itly discuss their methods of gathering relevant literature and analysis of find-
ings. They formulate a Grounded Theory Literature Review Method, which
begins with defining the problem, which leads to search, select, then analyse
and present. The model recommends that the researcher defines, searches,
selects, analyses, then presents their research (Wolfswinkel, Furtmueller &
Wilderom, 2013, p. 2). This structure and improved clarity and transparency
should make this chapter more replicable and rigorous and was preferred
to Charmaz’s (2006) six-stage process of categorisation, initial coding, axial
coding, memo writing and constant comparison (Charmaz, 2014, p. 1). One
of the potential disadvantages of grounded theory is that it is rooted in a
long-established tradition dating back to 1967 (Glaser and Strauss, 1967;

Wolfswinkel, Furtmueller & Wilderom, 2013). This problem is exacerbated
by the truly global nature of the literature on chatbots.
Machine learning in education
Lin et al. (2021) reported on an automated virtual reality (VR) chatbot

counselling system in Taiwan in response to rising suicide attempts among
15–24-year-olds and the pandemic. The next chapter will focus entirely on VR.
AI – broader issues in education
Definitions
AI has been associated with intelligent agents that are capable of voice
recognition, natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, predic-
tive statistics, deep learning, cognitive computing and neural networking
(McDowell et al., 2018, cited in Zanetti, Giseppi & Cassese, 2019, p. 94).
Specifically in education, AI has produced virtual personal tutors for learn-
ing assistants, remote support for collaborative learning and intelligent VR
applications (Luckin et al., 2016; Zanetti, Giseppi & Cassese, 2019). AI appli-
cations are increasingly overlapping with VR and blockchain technologies.
In the top 50 cited articles, frequently used keywords are AI (n=215), edu-
cation (38), machine learning (18), higher education (15), physical education
(13), and technology (12). In terms of aiding a deeper synthesis, these num-
bers were high enough to be representative and low enough to maintain
a sharp focus (Chong & Reinders, 2020). These results may suggest that
researchers can conduct studies on these aspects because they have a high
citation rate and are likely to help create impactful studies (Prahani et al.,
2022, p. 184). The data may also suggest that there is some evidence of
momentum building in the AI in education space, but this has been ham-
pered by the pandemic and is largely restricted to universities (Pantelimon
et al., 2021). An examination of works in progress suggests that this is likely
to change to include a greater emphasis on preliminary findings on the iter-
ative progress of specific programs. It should be acknowledged that one lim-
itation to this study is the aforementioned time lag between when studies
are carried out and when they have been through peer review to publica-
tion. Though blogs posted on Twitter are a rich source of new information,
they lack academic rigour, hence the need to prioritise peer-reviewed papers
to ensure legitimacy (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2010; Wolfswinkel,

Furtmueller & Wilderom, 2013).
The use of grounded theory
Grounded theory has been applied as a research methodology in this chap-

ter. Grounded theory is frequently deployed to organise an unwieldy dataset
but also to provide flexibility (Atherton, 2020b; Charmaz, 2014; Chong &
Reinders, 2020). In contrast to thematic analysis, which is applied in else-
where in the book, grounded theory expects the researcher to acknowledge
how the inductive analysis of the literature in this case enables patterns to
emerge (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss,1967). The researcher may then
formulate their own theories, but the entire process should be achieved
through an iterative process of developing skills, rather than embracing
subjectivities (Wolfswinkel, Furtmueller & Wilderom, 2013). In common
with an overall theme of autoethnography in this book, this chapter will
position the author on the bridge over the chasm between multiple realities
(Atherton, 2019; Charmaz, 2014; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).
Problems: ethics
Though there may be a great deal of enthusiasm towards AI in the litera-

ture, this could be seen as at the expense of studies examining the poten-
tial risks. Though fears about AI were often dismissed as Luddite (Baggaley,
2011), some potential dangers are being pursued. Examples of these are the
potential changes in children’s brain development; questions about the eth-
ics, reliability and neutrality of data (Fuchs, 2017); and even the deviation of
AI into potentially ‘psychopathic’ behaviours (Zanetti, Giseppi & Cassese,
2019, p. 94). The risk of unwitting deception of students by AI is explored in
Sjödén (2020), along with recommendations of how the human interactions
and interventions can adopt more refined conceptual tools and a sense of
‘augmented ethics’ (Sjödén, 2020, p. 291).
Conclusions, limitations and suggestions for further work
Research design and data
Case study – Ada and FirstPass
Why case study? The intention here is to pursue insights that may have
wider implications in examining the ways that chatbots can support student
wellbeing. intelligence. The emphasis will be on the specific, in depth, rela-

tionships and processes; this holistic look at chatbots will be achieved via
mixed research methods, as is the convention of case studies (Denscombe,
2007, p. 37).
Raw data a transcription of an interview with Aftab Hussain, the creator
of ‘Ada’, a wellbeing and information chatbot, and FirstPass, an AI formative
assessment tool (Atherton, 2021).
Pete
So firstly, why Ada, why Ada Lovelace and what is this AI thing called
Ada?
Aftab
Ada is a campus digital assistant. If you’re not aware of it already, we

chose that as a homage to Ada Lovelace. If you’re not familiar with her,
she basically worked with Charles Babbage in the early part of the 19th
century. She helped Charles Babbage read a lot of the mathematical work
to figure out how these calculating machines would support businesses
and the governments.
What is interesting is that when she was first introduced to Charles
Babbage, she was a young teenager and she volunteered to help him out
with his work. Charles had been the typical 19th century male and said,
“You’re a girl. What do you know about mathematics?”
Ada, of course, proved him wrong.
He asked various mathematicians to test her, and she proved her worth
and eventually Charles Babbage agreed to give her a chance.
The future computing devices that she was working on with Charles
Babbage were single purpose devices and would be general purpose com-
puting devices in the future. And she was saying that whatever you desire,
these machines will be able to do on your command. So that’s why we’ve
named our campus additional system as a homage to her. I think she’s a
wonderful role model for boys and girls in schools and colleges and univer-
sities. We always put her image up on the screens at Bolton College. And
we can also pose questions to her about her life. So, a student could say,
‘Who are you?’, ‘Where were you born?’, ‘What did you do?’ … and so on.
Pete
So, Ada answers questions about Ada Lovelace’s life during the 19th cen-
tury. Is Ada a lot more than just an Alexa-type thing? For example, if I’m
17 years old and I’m suffering from anxiety and want to speak to some-
body at reception, that would be really embarrassing, and people would
hear me.
Aftab
In the very early days of the Ada project, we contacted the mental
health teams and our student services department. We established
what our students will be asking about, wellbeing questions and men-
tal health questions. This was back in early 2017. They basically curated
a whole bunch of answers, around wellbeing and mental health. So,
if a student said, I’m feeling depressed, I’m self-harming, Ada comes
up with corresponding answers to these; her answers are tailored to
each student. So, Ada will reply with, ‘Hi, Aftab, here is some infor-
mation, some local contact information and if you’re calling out of
office hours, here are some emergency numbers of helplines that you
can contact while the college is closed.’ But more importantly for the
college and for certain types of questions, the safeguarding team is
informed of those queries.
So, someone says, ‘I’m being bullied’, ‘I’m self-harming’, the safeguard-
ing team of the college has a push notification and we have the student’s
name, ID number, a summary of their query, so we can contact the stu-
dent the following day. We then approach our students and say, ‘How are
things?’ Occasionally the student will be saying ‘I’m okay’. But on other
occasions, this piece of information can be quite valuable because that
student, at the time, needed additional support and guidance.
Pete
I’m assuming that this extends to, say, sexual health and family problems
and other, I mean, diverse issues that young people are experiencing?
(Continued)
Aftab
So, you’ve got issues like people being forced into a marriage that they
don’t want, or a student could be talking about female genital mutilation
(FGM), isolation, of feeling lonely and anxious about exams.
Pete
And so, does that data come from actual questions that students have
asked, or is it coming from Google?
Aftab
When we first started off the project, we asked all the support teams for
the top 20 questions and that all was posed. And that 20 questions soon
turned into 30, 40, 50 questions.
Pete
It’s such a potential game changer, in terms of leading the way in the UK
on this.
Aftab
Bolton as a tertiary college is alone in this regard. A number of univer-

sities have also started to build a campus digital assistant, like Lancaster
and Leeds Beckett Universities. In the USA, Arizona State University is
starting on this journey as well, but sooner or later, I think every child,
every student, every teacher, every member of the support campus sup-
port team will eventually have a campus assistant to support them with
their studies or work. I think that’s inevitable, we take it for granted.
Having Alexa at home to answer our day-to-day queries, to support us
with shopping and internet searches and so on.
Pete
The next section, as I warned you about before, I like to call, ‘Stupid ques-
tion, clever answer’. People often have these questions about AI poten-
tially replacing jobs. Will there only be virtual assistants in schools? What
would you say about that?
Aftab
Well, I like to draw on their history here. I would say services as network
devices grow, and as we connect to more and more databases, the world
suddenly gets more and more complicated, as it is stated that we will
need agents to help us reduce the level of entropy or complexity around
us. And we would actually be conversing with these agents to find a pat-
tern, some uniformity and meaning in all the data that we have around
us. Computers and the servers will disappear into the background; we
won’t necessarily be dealing with a traditional graphical user interface.
The idea of calm technology means that we could actually converse with
our machines to get things done.
And when you converse with machines, you’re relying on them to
help. They’re giving you more power, more autonomy to carry out your
studies or your work.
Pete
Can we imagine a campus assistant like Ada could be helpful in the event
of a snow week, never mind a pandemic, when students can’t actually be
present on campus?
Aftab
All campus digital assistants will allow students to pose questions and get
an immediate response back to queries on behalf of all the teachers and
support teams. And also, when you’re doing online learning answering
an open-ended question. AI services like FirstPass will offer you real-time
feedback to open-ended questions.
(Continued)
Pete
But why bother turning up to the lessons if the support and the feedback
is so sophisticated online?
Aftab
Campuses have always been a social institution, as well as the possible

learning and teaching. More importantly, they are very much a social and
collaboration space, to establish friendships and develop interests with
likeminded people. I know people talk about virtual meeting spaces, and
you’ve got an LMS (learning management system). But you could be in
different continents and I think there’s still something still magical about
being in the same place, a group of your fellow students in the same
classroom on the same campus, because that’s where you get to prob-
lem solve. That’s where you get to question and seek out answers; that’s
where you get to have a bit fun with your fellow teachers and students;
that’s why you grow as a student, as a young adult.
Pete
Yeah, this has really crystallised is one of the big issues: these are such
exciting and scary times at the same time, because it seems like every-
body’s facing these existential questions. So, for example, ‘What are
schools for?’, ‘What is a college for?’, ‘What is a university for?’, ‘What’s
the NHS for?’, ‘What’s Toys R Us for?’ We’re used to going through our
lives without having to answer these questions, but I think that what is
central to the debate is this ambivalence that we have towards technol-
ogy. But how do we enable our students to be lifelong learners, so that
they can always adapt to this new AI-enabled environment when they’re
going into the workplace?
Aftab
As you said, if you’re an accountant, you need some soft skills – you
need to reassure people that you are providing a really valuable service.
They’re referred to as soft skills, but it is really hard to learn empathy
with customers, alongside computers. People do need to understand that

empathy is important; the ability to solve problems is as important.
I think if we teach our students to be problem solvers, to be creatives, to
be imaginative, to be optimistic, then I think we’ve got a good chance of
solving these national and international problems that we face right now.
Pete
You were at the same conference as me in 2020, talking about FirstPass.

Can you tell us about this?
Aftab
FirstPass is a crowdsourcing tool that will support students and teachers

with the formative assessment process. Until FirstPass, a teacher on an
LMS typically posed closed questions to a student, like multiple choice or
yes/no, drag and drop questions. But even though they’re important, it’s
still a very narrow way to assess your students.
Pete
With real-time feedback, can these students write in a more informed

way?
Aftab
We wanted to provide the students with real-time feedback on answers to

open-ended questions. With these formative assessment exercises, we’re
using natural language classification models. We classify what the student
and the teachers are saying on the screen. So, for instance, if you said,
‘How do you mitigate high blood pressure?’ You could say there’s a whole
bunch of answers that relate to exercise, to the environment, to healthy
eating. So, what we do is we help the teacher train the models and then
when the models are being created and those trends have been added to
the model, the computer’s in a good place to support that student.
(Continued)
Pete
Could FirstPass help with summative assessments too?
Aftab
You could use the same technology and get the results by the end of June,
rather than August. But also, for the awarding bodies the costs associated
with running those exams could be reduced significantly because com-
puters will do the bulk of the summative assessment. Hopefully some of
those cost savings could be passed on to the schools and colleges.
Pete
Yeah. And that’s one of those existential issues. For exam boards, as pri-
vate companies, of course, they will have to change their model entirely,
won’t they? Because it’s fair to say that the way that they’re existing at the
moment is a bit like the exterior and interior of a new Tesla car but with
the 1950s Morris Minor engine. Kids are taking these exams exactly the
same as they have for 50 years, 60 years.
We’d like to think that it would make things a bit more equitable and
democratic, wouldn’t we? This problem is universal. Thanks, Aftab, I’m
really, really grateful for you talking so insightfully. So, thank you so
much.
I will view the topics of AI, specifically chatbots, through the lens of the
entangled self, where the lived experience is inseparable from the issue
under examination (Ateljevic et al., 2005). I will allow an edited transcript
from a podcast interview with Aftab Hussain (Atherton, 2021) to act as
qualitative data that explores the always-evolving digital literacies of both
interviewer and interviewee. Digital literacies are manifested through an
interaction between skills, practices and identity (Clark, 2020). Both selves
are entangled in discussion of both the case studies of Ada and FirstPass and
the broader issues (Ateljevic et al., 2005; Enriquez, 2020).
Recommendations and opportunities based on evidence
Figure 2.2 Bolton College and Ada

Source: Adapted from Atherton (2018) Hussain (2021)
Emerging tech in this field
Chatbots/campus digital assistants: AI to support open questions

• CENTURY Tech – an intervention tool that uses AI, learning sciences
and neuroscience to individualise learning and manage meaningful data.
• V4K Pro – an AI-powered visualiser.
• Education AI – automated marking of student coding.
• METIS – (Modern Education Teaching Information System) provides
instant feedback on students’ progress.
Mental health support:

• Woebot, Wysa, X2 and Youper – use AI for training neural networks with
background knowledge related to mental health problems (Lin et al.,
2021).
Limitations of the study
There can be a danger that systematic reviews can lose legitimacy by group-
ing together studies that have redundant similarities, sometimes through a
lack of methodological rigour (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2010). Cohen,
Manion and Morrison use the analogy of placing oil and water in the same
category, under liquids (2010). Another potential weakness of the study has
been that the hypotheses of each selected study has not necessarily been
harmonious and coherent (Morrison, 2001, cited in Cohen, Manion &
Morrison, 2010). In counterpoint to these potential limitations, the study
has attempted to draw strong conclusions from a potentially unwieldy data-
set (Glass et al., 1981, cited in Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2010).
The emerging technology in this field segues snugly into the next section.
Now we have reviewed the literature on chatbots in education, we will go
on to look at two notable AI creations. The first is Ada, a chatbot that is
targeted at students to direct them to information about college courses,
services and wellbeing. The second is FirstPass, an AI platform that helps
both students and teachers with the formative assessment of open-ended
questions.
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Virtual insanity? 3
Is virtual reality still the future of
education?
Teaching/learning goal/problem
VR is very much an umbrella term and, while it is used in mainstream edu-

cation, there is little awareness of the pedagogic potential of:
−
virtual reality.
− mobile mixed reality.
− augmented reality.
− holographic learning.
− virtual reality gameplay.
− blockchain-based 3D open world games.
− Metaverse.
− NFTs (non-fungible tokens) inside VR environments.
There is insufficient space to review, showcase and debate each aspect of VR

Instead, this chapter will conduct a narrative review of VR in the context of
Secondary/High School. In keeping with the other chapters in the book, the
latter sections will offer advice to the educator on using VR.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-3
36 Virtual insanity?
A narrative account of the content and potential

of using VR to learn in K12 and university
At The Bett Show – a giant edtech trade event, located in London, Kuala
Lumpur and Dubai – there is always a strong presence from companies
that have invested in and profit from VR. On some of the stands, for
which the edtech brands pay a small fortune, staff in T-shirts and brightly
coloured sneakers are reeling with potential participants. Their strain-
ing facial muscles beam in my direction and ask me if I would like to
try a VR headset. Like the only sober person at a bacchanalian feast, I
decline. I observe the excited faces of the willing participants. Their arms
are spread, their mouths gaping and they are clutching at what appears to
be imaginary straws with a combination of wonder and suspicion. Could
this be part of an education revolution? At last, could VR help bridge the
gap between how immersive and addictive young people’s experiences
can be outside the classroom and how they learn in school? Alternatively,
is it evidence of the trivialisation, ephemerality and corporatisation of
education and edtech?
This chapter will strive to critique the frequently hyperbolical claims
that using VR accelerates learning and improves engagement and recall
by providing an immersive experience (Atherton, 2018). One of the rea-
sons why VR appeals to me as a topic is its Protean nature – when I think
I understand how to apply individual VR experiences or hardware, the
technology moves on. Another problem is making a decision on which
VR experiences to pursue. There have been many VR platforms that
have failed to catch on over the years, for example Nintendo’s ill-fated
launch of the Virtual Boy in the 1990s, which was withdrawn within a
year (Atherton, 2018; McKalin, 2014).
I relish the challenge of uncovering the taxonomies of the VR land-
scape. For me, this is like dropping anchor in a stormy harbour. As the VR
in education ship bobs and sways, at least the topic may feel static – for a
while at least.
While VR participants want total immersion, augmented reality (AR)
allows interactions with virtual objects (Atherton, 2018; Gudoniene &
Rutkauskiene (2019)). In many ways, the boundaries between each term
are weak, as AR objects seep into VR experiences, as holographic or 3D
images form part of a metaverse. One example of how the metaverse
works is The Sandbox. The Sandbox metaverse is a blockchain gaming
platform, through which users or players can create their own NFTs.
Blockchain is essentially a peer-to-peer structure, a distributed database,
Virtual insanity? 37
that is organised into ordered blocks that form a chain in chronologi-

cal order (Casino, Dassaklis & Patsakis, 2019, p. 55). Chapter 9 places
greater emphasis on blockchain in the context of Sc0lar.io – a learning
community. In The Sandbox metaverse, participants can create and sell
virtual objects as NFTs, unique and tradable units of data that are stored
on a blockchain. I was attracted by how teachers could truly empower
their students through immersive experiences like The Sandbox. In the
metaverse, a teacher could equip their students with a deeper knowledge
of their subject, through active participation and creation. They could
also help them learn about how to make their own income through NFTs.
More of this in Chapter 9.
What we are left with in this chapter is a series of challenges in review-
ing the literature on VR. How important are the distinctions between
elements of VR? What kind of studies are being conducted and in what
context? Moreover, how useful is a literature review about VR, when
some of the emerging thinking may lay outside peer reviewed journals
and conference proceedings?
There is little doubt that VR can help students feel more engaged
in their learning. What is less certain, however, is the extent to which
advancements in VR are sufficiently connected to an infrastructure that
will give it the momentum it needs to make a difference. At the end of
the process of reviewing the literature, how can we be confident that VR
will become mainstream in education and form part of an accessible,
equitable learning experience? Or, in another universe, might we be sub-
jected to more beaming presentations at trade shows while the hardware
that is now out of date gathers dust in a cupboard?
Background literature
The literature in this field has been characterised by its global nature and
by the diversity of research methods and contexts. The studies cited here
span five continents, sometimes within the same paper (Dwivedi et al.,
2022). In keeping with the book as a whole, this chapter will prioritise stud-
ies that relate to VR in the context of Secondary/High School education. I
have made the decision to only select writing from 2015 onwards, though
there has been a significant increase in studies about VR systems since 2012
(Oyelere et al., 2020). The reason for this is that adoption of head-mounted
displays (HMDs), like Oculus Rift, became more commonplace at this time,
perhaps after Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus in 2014. Subsequently, have
deselected the important meta-analyses conducted by Merchant, Goetz,
Cifuentes, Keeney-Kennicutt and Davis (2014) about VR – and Radu (2014)

about AR – because the technology to which they refer is pre-2014.
What kind of reality?
The literature is both enriched and obfuscated by the status of VR as one

of several exponential technologies whose speed of evolution and mass
adoption can lead to overlapping definitions and common traits (Atherton,
2022; Mystakidis, 2022). A typical example of the way in which the literature
strives for clarity and precision is Oleyere et al. (2020), who make the follow-
ing taxonomical distinction related to the term, ‘VR’:
… the experience in which a user is fully immersed into either a vir-

tual environment using head-mounted displays (headsets) or projec-
tion-based displays…This functionality differs from 3D enironments
visualised using headsets.
(Oyelere et al., 2020, p. 2.)
The extent to which these distinctions matter, of course, is a moot point.

Similarly, Pellas, Kazanidis and Palaigeorgiou (2021) were at pains in their
systematic review to distinguish between VR (virtual reality), AR (aug-
mented reality) and MR (mixed reality). While VR immerses people into
a computer-assisted virtual environment, AR places images or animations
onto real-world objects via the users’ own devices. MR, merges virtual and
real-world content (Pellas, Kazanidis & Palaigeorgiou, 2020).
The metaverse
The metaverse was, at the time of writing, a slippery term, with multiple
definitions and applications, few of which are relevant to education. The
metaverse, from ‘meta-universe’, is a space in which the real world is aug-
mented by and connected to a VR experience (Kye et al., 2021). Essentially,
the metaverse is a fresh iteration of the web, in which users use avatars
and headsets to immerse themselves in worlds that can blur the distinction
between physical and virtual worlds (Dwivedi et al., 2022). Mystakidis (2022)
makes a bolder definition, viewing the metaverse as a ‘post-reality’ space, in
which there is a convergence of ‘social, immersive VR platforms compatible
with massive multiplayer online video games, open game worlds and AR
collaborative spaces’ (Mystakidis, 2022, p. 486).
The literature is suitably tentative, even hypothetical, about the potential

of the metaverse in education and there has been a paucity of studies in the
Secondary/High School sectors. There have been some potential benefits
proposed. As far back as 2008, an example of this was using the immersion
of the metaverse to aid the development of students’ understanding of sub-
jects like Art, which is characterised by open-ended questions and multiple
interpretations (Ayiter, 2008). While the technologies have developed con-
siderably since then, it appears that there are claims that metaverse may be
transformative in education, though there is a significant degree of caution
(Dwivedi et al., 2022; Mystakidis, 2022).
Performance and engagement
There have been some recent systematic reviews in the field of VR. For
example, Luo, Li, Feng, Yang and Zuo, (2021) and Oyelere et al. (2020) con-
ducted a systematic review of VR games in which they found global adop-
tion of VR games, apart from on the African continent. They also unearthed
significant use of VR games in healthcare, business, finance and other areas
but not education. Some of these inhibitors may relate to the price of the
hardware. Pellas, Mystakidis and Kazanidis (2021) concluded in their sys-
tematic review that there is a need for regulation in the use of the technol-
ogies to help achieve positive outcomes. These documented or predicted
outcomes are persistently tentative, hypothetical or inconclusive. For exam-
ple, in China, Yu’s (2021) meta-analysis revealed modest improvements in
student outcomes and proposed changes to VR learning design. Similarly
inconclusive results were recounted by Shi, Wang and Ding (2019), who
reported on Chinese 7th graders’ mathematics test results and game player
surveys linked to playing experiencing a game-based immersive virtual real-
ity learning environment (GIVRLE). Broadening the research is inhibited by
cost and space issues and the study referred to the now debunked notion of
learning styles (Shi, Wang & Ding, 2019).
Billingsley, Smith and Meritt (2019)’s systematic review of VR in teacher
education in the USA identified significant potential for the future, though
there is a lack of research in this area. A year before this, Jensen & Konradsen
(2018) had reviewed 21 experimental studies, 19 of which were qualitative,
into HMDs. While some studies revealed limited benefits, barriers to use
and negative effects, such as distraction and even motion sickness, some
studies discussed positive effects on cognitive factors. One example of this
is found in a game-based virtual learning environment (VLE) study in the
United Kingdom (Snowdon & Oikonomou, 2018). The comparative study
found that there can be improvements in recall and this could be useful
for students with special educational needs ( Jensen & Konradsen, 2018;
Snowdon & Oikonomou, 2018). These limited benefits echo the findings
in Pellas, Mystakidis and Kazanidis’ (2021) systematic review, in which one
of the conclusions is that there is a great deal of emphasis on the positive
effects of VR on small tasks.
While Pellas, Mystakidis and Kazanidis (2021) found little discussion of
collaborative learning through VR, there is an empirical study from confer-
ence proceedings about how a shared, immersive virtual reality (iVR) used
in the Czech Republic can improve the cognitive and social aspects of collabora-
tion (Šašinka et al., 2019). Though this study employed a theoretical model –
Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) – the literature revealed a
paucity of adequate theoretical underpinnings (Šašinka et al., 2019; Pellas,
Mystakidis & Kazanidis, 2021). This is echoed by Jowallah, Bennett and
Bastedo (2018), who propose through their review and summary of their
research in the Caribbean that VR may be only an emerging modality of
learning at the time of writing. It may become an accepted modality if it is
an enhancement, not a replacement, for the more traditional modalities of
face-to-face, online and blended or hybrid. This notion of VR as an enhance-
ment to existing pedagogies, rather than a pedagogic paradigm shift, is com-
mon throughout the literature.
Experiments and practitioner research
As early as Minocha (2015), practitioner research was reflecting swift progress

in the way that VR can be used as an educational tool. Other positive, but
not transformative, reports include Allcoat and Von Mühlenen (2018), who
demonstrated how VR can help improve engagement, even recall. Though
the sample was recruited in the higher education context, these findings
have potential significance for K-12. Similarly, Chien, Hwang and Siu-Yung
Jong (2019) conducted a hands-on activity using VR to help students learn by
doing. This study, among 10th grade students in Taiwan, utilised computer-
generated simulation innovation and the 6E worldview (Evaluate, Enrich,
Engineer, Explain, Explore and Engage), The findings revealed that all of
the pupils’ learning capacities and hands-on skills had improved, but little
beyond this. Chen et al. (2019) also studied specially created hands-on activ-
ities using VR; Chien et al. (2019) conducted a similar study, this time in the
context of peer assessment. Research into VR, then, is attempting to answer
persistent questions in education. One of these questions is how technology
can help teach 21st Century skills, such as empathy, computational thinking
and abstract thought (Hu-Au & Lee, 2017). Similarly, Ray and Deb’s (2016,
2017) Indian studies report on questionnaires about K-12 students’ engage-
ment while viewing VR via a smartphone mounted on Google Cardboard.
The study is sourced from conference proceedings; its conclusions are, like
many practitioner studies and reviews, tentative and rudimentary.
Cheng and Tsai (2019) demonstrated in the USA that immersive VR field
trips could reduce exam anxiety. Though this was carried out in the elemen-
tary classroom, it has been included in this review as it posits the view that
there has been a paucity of insightful research into VR, especially through
HMDs. Fransson, Holmberg and Westelius (2020) examined the challenges
of using head-mounted VR in K-12 schools from a teacher perspective via
interviews, observing teachers using HMDs and informal conversations.
In the context of pupils in Saudi Arabia, Chamekh and Amin-Hammami
(2020) concluded through a theoretical and quantitative method that VR can
help special educational needs students learn new skills and improve their
self-esteem.
Theoretical models and metaphor
This section will provide a brief account of theoretical models and proposed
metaphors related to VR in education. From 2022, the literature started to
make recommendations for a post-pandemic world, though the pandemic
was far from over at the time. What is significant is that long-established
theories persist, for example a Korean study in which the conclusion was
that the metaverse can be part of a constructivist learning culture, where
students construct new knowledge from their experiences (Woong, 2022).
Again, drawing from older studies, Majid and Shamsudin (2019) applied
the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to a quantitative study of VR in
the classroom. They concluded that students benefit from positive attitudes
towards VR; they recommended that external agencies assist teachers in
developing a more positive mindset about the perceived usefulness of VR
(2019).
Some of the more influential literature on digital learning is not exclusive
to VR but lends itself to it. A body of literature reviews VR and other digital
technologies through the metaphors of the chalkface, interface and screen-
face. Here, the chalkface is the traditional role of the teacher, the interface
the mediating screen. The central metaphor of the screenface represents
the interactive environments, linked to interactions with the body but
with layers of dissociation from it (Ruth, 2012; Maas, 2020; McKalin, 2014;
Stretton, Cochrane & Narayan, 2018; Vasilevski & Birt, 2020). Metaphors
can be contested and negated by their overlapping nature (Ruth, 2012).

This is further problematised by the contested terms that are used to define
and debate edtech more broadly (Atherton, 2022). One of these theoretical
terms –connectivism – is a loose thread that connects this book as a whole.
VR is relevant to the notion of connectivism, as its use is inextricable from
the realities of the fluidity of knowledge (Atherton, 2018; 2019; Shukie,
2019). When VR is used in the K-12 or Secondary classroom, it is often an
augmentation of a prescriptive curriculum. If VR helps children learn, it is
not through transmission or acquisition but through helping them navigate,
experience and connect facts, ideas and concepts (Atherton, 2018; Brown,
2005; Donnelly, 2010; Siemens, 2005). The digital cultures of which VR is
a part are sometimes viewed as lacking purpose and cohesion (Atherton,
2018; Shukie, 2019). This amorphous, anarchic learning culture could be
viewed as diametrically opposed to the increasingly prescriptive, centralised
design of school curricula (Tillin, 2021; Atherton, 2019). The lack of consist-
ency in the literature about VR could also be perceived as a microcosm for
the impossibility of imposing a standardised, monolithic education system.
Conclusions from the literature
The research into VR does not yet possess consistency and remains a niche
undertaking. Indeed, Kavanagh, Luxton-Reilly, Wuensche and Plimmer’s
(2017)’s systematic review of VR in education emphasised that a small num-
ber of institutions were responsible for a large number of studies into VR
and that VR is frequently successful in improving students’ intrinsic moti-
vation. There is a paucity of literature on broader outcomes, for example
examination grades, and this is likely to relegate research into VR into inter-
rogating potential or very specific benefits to student engagement.
There is a risk that the literature conflates augmented and virtual real-
ity (Liou, Yang, Chen & Tarng, 2017; Maas & Hughes, 2020). Despite pro-
posed boundaries, the desire for distinctions reflects how studies into VR
and the technologies themselves, are very much in their infancy. In common
with several areas of edtech, some useful thinking is derived from the blo-
gosphere. Though blogs are not peer reviewed, their speed of publication
(and therefore currency) can make some hard to ignore when reviewing the
literature. In light of an absence of academic rigour, this chapter will not
prioritise blogs about VR, though there will be some references to a small
number of them.
Recommendations for use in the classroom
The metaverse – a digital landscape, in which users can create and custom-
ise their own virtual environments – is teeming with potential. As school
curricula aim for greater geographical, cultural, temporal and logistical flex-
ibility, students can create their own visual and tactile reality. The graphical
conventions are freed from the prescribed visuals of existing platforms like
Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite.
Google Cardboard (see below)
At the other end of the tech spectrum is Google Cardboard. It is an afforda-

ble and accessible piece of low-tech kit. It allows users to view VR content
on their phones, for example on YouTube VR. To enhance learning, stu-
dents may want to try Google Expeditions or 360 degree videos. For exam-
ple, if teachers use the video platform Edpuzzle, they can create questions
about the VR and the video will stop automatically at the point when the
students should answer the question (Atherton, 2018). Edpuzzle is the focus
of Chapter 13 on video, entitled, Online video for learning – questioning and
online assessment (Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 Google Cardboard

Reproduced under Creative Commons licence https://upload.wikimedia.org/
wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Google-Cardboard.jpg
• MondlyVR
Mondly is a VR modern foreign languages experience.
• Metaverse
There are too many examples of education in the metaverse to cover here.
The metaverse is simply a virtual, interactive social world, in which users
play, learn, buy and sell and interact. One example of how to learn in the
metaverse, though, is Arkycia. Arkycia is a decentralised VR, in which users
can invest in land as an NFT and build a virtual classroom with their col-
leagues or students.
• Roblox
Roblox may be billed as an immersive, user-generated virtual playground
but its appeal transcends age. The VR experience can be provided with a
variety of headsets, for example the Oculus Quest 2. Like many gaming
communities, some users make their living from playing. Could your stu-
dents become solopreneurs through Roblox (Atherton, 2020)?
• Rumii
Rumii is a social, collaborative VR space.
• Fortnite
Hardly emerging tech anymore, but educators should monitor its immer-
siveness and business model. Students spent a lot more time at home during
the pandemic. How different, though, are schools’ online resources from the
immersive, addictive learning in tribes that Fortnite can facilitate (Briscoe,
2021)?
• Class VR
Class VR provides standalone headsets, lesson plans, technical setup and
reports on how to use it in the classroom. At the time of writing, it would
cost around $4300 for one ‘classic’ and 8 regular headsets, an annual licence
and online professional development (Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 Infographic – VR in the classroom

Adapted from Atherton (2018)
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Hooked on dopamine? 4
Learning through failure in game
design
We all enjoy games. How can teachers ensure that games are actually
teaching children something? What happens when the game is the learning
(Farber, 2015, 2021)?
A narrative account of the experiences of observing student

teachers using games to learn in Secondary/High School and
university.
Kahoot! (their exclamation mark) started my edtech journey.

One of the things I loved about my new job was that I was getting
in my car and travelling around the north of England to observe my
student teachers teach. It was truly enlightening to see how each edu-
cational institution was grappling with the demands of the curriculum,
the regulators, the internal politics and the surrounding culture. Most
schools and colleges seemed oblivious to considering other ways of
teaching and learning. I felt freed from the ways in which the insularity
of an institution sometimes views each element of its politics through
a warped mirror. Seeing the teachers of tomorrow out in the field gave
me the satisfaction of supporting them through a challenging course. It
also opened up many new ways of seeing how education works and feels
at the sharp end. Some days I entered seats of learning that were calm
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-4
and orderly. Others were vehemently opposed to all personal devices.

Sometimes pupils were using Snapchat to critique their own artwork,
which was then peer-assessed. There were clear signs outside indicating
that mobiles were being used for educational purposes. In other schools
and colleges, there was an analogue antiquity to the learning, which
appeared to balance the learning objectives of each lesson with the reali-
ties of technology outside the classroom.
On other days, the toxic culture rendered the teachers murmuring
husks as they gathered in small, hushed corners, shaking their heads
and scarring their faces with frowns. On occasions, there was fear and
loathing around mobile phones that led to the banning of their presence:
cyberbullying, upskirting, live streaming, even good old-fashioned clan-
destine texting.
Mobile phones were also being used to attempt to improve engage-
ment in lessons. As I lurched enthusiastically from teacher, to teacher
educator, around 2016, I noticed a strange phenomenon. The teacher
educators had heard about Kahoot!, they knew how to use it, so were
keen to encourage their student teachers to try it. Student teachers loved
using Kahoot! too! It felt like an easy win for them.
The kids that the student teachers were teaching got excited when
they heard the ‘boom bip bip … bip’ music because they felt they were
about to be treated to some fun. Sometimes they demonstrated impres-
sive recall, sometimes they became anxious and disengaged. Sometimes
the class collapsed into chaos and there was no way back. The kids
begged the student teachers, ‘Can we have a Kahoot! Quiz?’ Sometimes
these students were as old as eighteen.
The student teachers would usually relax their classroom management
as the kids would relax into their comfort zone, their beloved cell phones
ready for action. It was usually a teacher-centred activity: the student
teacher was standing next to a whiteboard and trying to be heard above
the raucous behaviour, as they saw their irreverent or esoteric nicknames
on the screen. There was a ‘whoosh’ sound that dominated the room as
time ran out after students had tapped in their answers to each question.
I tried to mentally play along but I found it hard to process the questions
under pressure. If I was in the students’ modish sneakers, I may have
become disengaged quite quickly. I later found out that Kahoot!’s algo-
rithm gives a higher score to participants who answer the most quickly.
The extent to which Kahoot! helped the learning process was debata-
ble. The sounds, structure and graphics were creating a rhythm, a pattern
to the quiz. This pattern was already familiar to the significant proportion
(Continued)
52 Hooked on dopamine?
of students who were gamers. At the same time, and in combination

with the revelation of the successful respondents and leader boards,
Kahoot! was regulating the pupils’ dopamine hits. There were no bar-
riers to the spread of Kahoot! Within a short space of time, the virality
of Kahoot! manifested itself through teacher advocacy, even evangelism,
from eager social sharing and concordant subversion by students through
memes. Why were the students so excited (Atherton, 2018a)? Because
they were on board. They wanted to tell their friends and family and they
had quickly become confident that they could create their own quizzes.
They could play and share these fun quizzes anywhere; they had control
and anyone could play. It was free to use, easy to operate and customisa-
ble. The rewards for users were quick and impactful. Learning could go
beyond the classroom and infiltrate any area of the users’ lives.
Since then, Kahoot! and We Are Human are distancing themselves
from the term ‘gamification’, preferring terms like ‘intrinsic rewards’ and
‘transformative behaviours’. Figure 4.1 shows the thinking that led to the
phenomenon of Kahoot!
I wanted to investigate the cult of Kahoot! I reached out to one of the
co-founders, Jamie Brooker, who also created We Are Human, an ethical
investment company. By 2017, Jamie had left Kahoot! Jamie talked about
how game thinking had helped Kahoot! acquire 50 million active monthly
Figure 4.1 We Are Human: “How Kahoot! grew to 7 billion players by designing
for behaviour — a product-market fit case study” (2022) Medium. Product
Market Fit Academy, 23 February. Available at: https://medium.com/
@EmergePMFAcademy/how-kahoot-grew-to-7-billion-users-by-designing-
for-behaviour-a-product-market-fit-case-study-667cc4504f14.
Reproduced by permission
users. In March 2022, Jamie spoke at a Product Market Fit Academy Open
Seminar and reflected on Kahoot!’s success and influence on edtech, or
learning tech. The framework was derived from the thinking behind We
Are Human, whose existence preceded that of Kahoot! This game think-
ing would be driven by what drives humans’ behaviour: the heart, the
hand and the mind. The heart feeds on and craves dopamine hits to stay
engaged. The hand takes pleasure from holding an object that feels prac-
tical and powerful. The mind is satisfied when an activity is achievable
and sequential but with an element of serendipity. The platform targeted
universal desires for instant gratification by providing intrinsic rewards
that help individuals feel included and help them take control of their
own learning. The purpose is building on existing social dynamics to
develop new, transformative behaviours.
Viewpoint piece incorporating background literature
This section will develop the narrative account into a viewpoint piece. At
the time of writing in 2022, there is still considerable interest in pursuing
research about gamification. To give you an idea of the scale of the interest, I
attended a virtual edtech conference in March 2022. Of the papers presented,
21 were about gamification. One general edtech conference, 21 papers about
gamification. The interest in gamified learning was clearly considerable at
this time. Before this, Wang (2015) reviewed 93 quantitative and qualitative
studies on Kahoot! Wang’s (2015) conclusions from his extensive review
echo the conclusions here. The breadth of available literature presented a
challenge to me in terms of selection and de-selection. This chapter is not a
systematic review, and, in any case, the literature base is too vast to be accom-
modated into a chapter of this length. This review of the literature will focus
on themes that are relevant to the broader themes of the book as a whole
and will not be constrained by numerical judgements (Downes, 2020; Cohen
et al., 2002). I have made the active choice to de-select anything that was not
relevant to Secondary/High School education. I have also de-selected artifi-
cial intelligence (AI)-based games, as they will belong in the chapter on AI.
Why learn by playing? Literacies and skills
Now we’ve established that, at the time of writing, gamification was still
being extensively written about, it would be judicious to consider why. One
way into this debate might be by examining the notion of changing litera-
cies. The digital age and cultural shifts have rendered obsolete the primacy
of traditional literacies. A report from the UK National Literacy Trust

(2020) found many areas of alignment between students’ own views on how
video games help them learn and contemporary literature. The students
responded that gaming improved their imagination, creative skills and level
of immersion into stories (National Literacy Trust, 2020). This evidence
was similar to international policy literature, such as the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2015, cited in National
Literacy Trust, 2020), who found that video games also improved oracy and
a sense of co-creation of meaning.
These emerging concepts of literacy may be called multimodal literacies
(Atherton, 2018a, 2019; Ingle and Duckworth, 2013) or multiliteracies (Cope
and Kalantzis, 2015). If literacies are multiple, then the acts of teaching and
learning will follow suit:
Meaning is made in ways that are increasingly multimodal – in which

written, linguistic modes of meaning interface with oral, visual, audio,
gestural, tactile, and spatial patterns of meaning.
(Cope & Kalantzis, 2015, p. 3)
An additional element to these multiliteracies could be emotional literacy.

Recent studies have found that game-based virtual worlds can help players
adopt another’s perspective and improve their sense of empathy (Farber, 2021;
Walker & Venker Weidenbenner, 2019). Though this research is at odds with
some policy documents, such as the English National Curriculum (DfE, 2014)
and the UK Research review for English (Ofsted, 2022), there are some areas
of alignment, though these are practical rather than ideological. For example,
the Ofsted Research Review (Ofsted, 2022) emphasises the role of spoken lan-
guage in improving social mobility and promoting good mental health. UK
Government policy may be prescriptive and arguably reductionist (Tillin, 2021),
but at least some of their recommendations match the 21st century skills that
have been identified through the literature since the 2010s. Examples of these
skills that can be developed both through gaming and traditional literacy are
creativity, divergent and critical thinking, cultural awareness and accountability
(Chalkiadaki, 2018, p. 6; National Literacy Trust, 2020). A further skill, recog-
nised as a pattern in Chalkiadaki’s (2018) systematic review, was autonomy.
Autonomous learning
When I initially saw student teachers using Kahoot! in a teacher-centred

way, it made me think about its potential to develop knowledge, skills and
behaviours beyond recall and low-order thinking. In Atherton (2018b), I

examined how student teachers could use Kahoot! to develop metacognition
and a sense of agency over their learning. If students are likely to achieve
autonomy over their learning, some of the recent literature suggests that
they could build on strategies to navigate digital pedagogy. For example,
Di Cerbo (2022) related self-regulated learning to the metacognitive skills
of planning and self-evaluation, the cognitive skills for retrieval and prob-
lem-solving and the motivation to achieve self-efficacy (Atherton, 2018b; Di
Cerbo, 2022).
Game-based learning methods
Some of the literature has attended to the design of game-based learn-

ing. One example is the notion of playful design, which is described by
Mystakidis (2020) as follows:
Playful design is the application of a curiosity-driven disposition based

on humour, imagination, spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, and
joy.
(Mystakidis, 2020, p. 3)
This world of serendipity and gameful design is distinct from the established
concept of gamification. Gamification is about providing a structured game,
with rules and rewards, whose intention is to follow the educator’s learning
objectives. Like much edtech-related terminology, gamification, is contested
semantically (Atherton, 2019; Bayne, 2015), epistemologically (Atherton,
2019; Bell, 2011; Goldie, 2016) and morally and philosophically (Azevedo,
Guerra & Azevedo, 2022). The more gamified learning platforms infiltrate
mainstream education, the more the literature is reflecting concerns over
how private tech companies are gathering, storing and exploiting users’ data
(Atherton, 2018a; Azevedo, Guerra & Azevedo, 2022).
Learning and playing games are inextricable and are often most effective
when players (or students) are so absorbed in the game that they forget that
they are engaged in an educational activity (Atherton, 2018a; Wang, 2015).
The appeal of learning through play has ebbed and flowed since the pan-
demic, as educators and students of all ages have had no choice but to learn
how to teach themselves online. In the absence of a consensus on how to
use gamified learning successfully, the literature has continued to explore
manifestations of gamified or game-based learning and related theoretical
models.
Much of the literature on gamification from the 2010s onwards examines

the concept of gamification in terms of its practical applications (Anderson
et al., 2015; Atherton, 2018a; Featherstone, 2015; Wang, 2015). There are risks
discussed, for example student anxiety about competitive and potentially divi-
sive league tables (Atherton, 2018b; Kocadere, 2015; Kocadere & Çağlar, 2018).
In addition to this risk, there is also a danger of the class experiencing dimin-
ishing returns, or a wearout effect from game-based edtech (Wang, 2015).
The next section of this chapter will situate game-based learning or gami-
fication among the broader perspectives on edtech, which are relevant to the
literature on game-based learning.
Edtech as an enabler?
Some of the literature reviewed in Atherton (2018b) was focused on theo-

retical perspectives, derived from perspective or viewpoint papers. Hamilton
and Friesen (2013) argued for less evangelical and more nuanced philosoph-
ical perspectives on technology. I shall avoid debates about whether edtech
even exists as a concept.
While we know that edtech is also known as ‘elearning’ and ‘Technology
Enhanced Learning’ (TEL), there is little consensus on or evidence about
the extent to which the technology contributes to or accelerates the learn-
ing (Atherton, 2018b; Hamilton & Friesen, 2013; Kirkwood & Price, 2013).
Indeed, numerous disadvantages have been discussed, for example digital
dependency (Atherton, 2018a,b; Romero and Remon, 2022). Any assertion
that any technology brings about improvements in pedagogical outcomes is
in danger of being viewed as simplistic, disingenuous or debunked like the
‘digital natives’ debates (Prensky, 2001, 2012). Edtech has been framed by a
number of conceptual frameworks, such as connectivism – a network learn-
ing theory – which attempts to explain how the internet necessitated new
and emerging ways of navigating knowledge (Goldie, 2016).
Connectivism
When I became a teacher educator, I was drawn to the notion of how stu-
dents are acquiring and navigating apparently infinite knowledge, and this
required new ways of operating and even thinking for both students and
their teachers (Donnelly, 2010; Siemens, 2005). I was so drawn to the possi-
bilities that these may present yet frustrated by an apparent chasm opening
up between how the outside world uses technology and how it was being
deployed in the classroom (Atherton, 2019). I could see that digital technol-
ogies were being used to teach in outdated ways. For example, Kahoot! was
initially conceived as a teacher-centred game show, with the teacher as the
host (Wang, 2015). At the same time, students were struggling with what
to do with infinite information, much of which is irrelevant, incorrect or
even irresponsible. The notion of connectivism was formulated in the early
noughties to try to explain this phenomenon and I was initially seduced by
it as a way of helping students make the information age feel more finite
(Downes, 2020).
If the teacher was helping develop students’ problem-solving and the
‘navigation around seemingly limitless swaths of knowledge’ (Atherton,
2018b, p. 29; Donnelly, 2010), this would require a more flexible classroom
layout and a more innovative approach to pedagogy. Furthermore, connec-
tivism can also be viewed as a form of resistance to corporate power in
education. One way in which this can happen is if connectivism is viewed
as a means to find order in chaos (Shukie, 2019). I have more recently ques-
tioned the usefulness of the term on a practical level vis-à-vis a prescrip-
tive, standardised curriculum (Atherton, 2019; Tillin, 2021). The extent to
which connectivism achieves a sense of order is debatable, though the ways
in which games like Kahoot! may thrive as part of a connectivist learning
culture will be discussed in the section entitled, Small-scale research project in
Atherton (2018b).
Critics of the concept of connectivism argue that it is not underpinned
by empirical evidence (Goldie, 2016), though Downes (2020) addresses its
potential empirical validation. Indeed, much of the criticism of connectiv-
ism arises from conceptual papers about, for example game theory.
Game theory develops from the thinking on gamification. Game theory
can be viewed as the mechanics and ‘theoretical structure that comes with
situating players within a social setting that requires some kind of strategy
and smart decision-making’ (Montebello & Saini, 2022, p. 4638). Game the-
ory has recently been studied in the context of VLEs in higher education,
particularly those designed to provide deeper engagement and improve
self-determination, self-regulation and performance, but not competition
(Di Cerbo, 2022; Montebello & Saini, 2022).
Empirical data – small-scale research project in Atherton

(2018b)
Atherton (2018b) evaluates the way in which using Kahoot! may help trainee
teachers develop the skills required to question and assess their students.
Kahoot! is an online game-based response system. This paper posed ques-

tions about how one edtech tool can help trainee teachers develop their
questioning skills. Kahoot! quizzes are frequently focused on recall and
low-order thinking.
The objectives of this small-scale research project were to critically apply
the notion of connectivism to some practitioner research on Kahoot! with
Secondary student teachers in the Secondary or K-12 sector. The sample
were asked to participate in a Kahoot! quiz about English grammar in ‘Ghost
Mode’, which allows players to play again in order to improve on their orig-
inal score (Atherton, 2018b). The student teachers were asked to reflect on
the reasons for giving certain answers, then a smaller sample answered a
questionnaire about how the process had helped them learn.
Some respondents reported that playing Kahoot! in a team helped them
gain confidence by supporting each other’s thinking processes. The sample
initially took a ‘Blind Kahoot!’, which is often characterised by answers that
the students will find difficult. Some felt that the ‘Blind Kahoot!’ may work
as a diagnostic test, to identify support needs and interventions. Perhaps the
most positive feedback was that answering incorrectly in a ‘Blind Kahoot!’
played in ‘Ghost Mode’ forces the player to think in a more abstract way,
to sometimes make serendipitous neural connections, and this improves
self-efficacy (Atherton, 2018b). This backs up the notion of the connectivist
classroom, which transcends the binary ideas of right and wrong towards
multiple right answers, the means to always seek connections between
knowledge and ideas, a diversity of opinion and the importance of deci-
sion-making (Atherton, 2018a, 2018b, p. 36; 2019; Downes, 2020; Goldie,
2016; Siemens, 2005).
There are some limitations of Kahoot! identified in Atherton (2018b)
and around the notion of connectivism. As with all edtech, game-based
response systems like Kahoot! reside in a transitory and fluid ecosystem,
with problematical and overlapping classifications (Atherton, 2018b, 2019;
Bayne, 2015; Hamilton & Friesen, 2013; Ingle & Duckworth 2013; Kirkwood
& Price, 2013; Passey, 2014; Burton and Bartlett, 2009). The limitations of
Kahoot! identified in Atherton (2018b) were the risk of players viewing com-
petition as more important than learning, the anxiety of answering quickly
and the danger of a lack of accountability and transparency when in ‘Team’
mode. These risks are aligned with broader criticisms of connectivism, for
example that activities should be aligned to the design of specific edtech
platforms and teachers’ learning objectives (Baume and Scanlon, 2018, cited
in Luckin, 2018; Atherton, 2018a, b).
Since the Kahoot! project (Atherton, 2018b), the platform has been updated
several times:
• Asynchronous quizzes from 2022, enable participants to view questions

and answers on their own devices.
• The Read aloud game option helps players learn at their own pace. This
had been conceived with differentiation or adaptive learning in mind.
• Slides. A free teacher account grants access to slides, which can help
introduce new material, visual aids, and information about related tasks,
e.g. in text books, as well as explanations of answers. That way, the
Kahoot! does not dominate each learning episode.
• Gimkit
Described as like Kahoot! on steroids (Valle, 2018), students join by entering
a code and win (or lose) virtual money for their answers.
• The Sandbox
A metaverse entity, where players can do what they can in the real world but
in the form of an avatar. Though there is a great deal of money to be spent
or earned through buying and selling land as NFTs, it is also being explored
as a means of creating immersive learning experiences.
• Trivia Crack
A multiplayer trivia game like Kahoot!
• Quizizz
Gamified, device-agnostic learning platform with analytics.
• Quizlet
Revision flashcards. If you upgrade to Quizlet Plus, you have access to an AI
learning assistant to personalise your learning.
• WordMaster Game
Make your own Wordle-style game, from Flippity.net.
• Sketchy
Based on the ancient loci memory technique and compared to Egyptian
hieroglyphics, Sketchy is a virtual universe aimed at medical students. Is it
actually VR? Not if the definition is restricted to viewing via a headset or
projection. Sketchy is one to watch, as it is an immersive alternative uni-
verse which is expanding quickly and investing heavily in their animation.
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Search smarter? 5
Leveraging Pinterest for learning
Students routinely use social media. How, then, can they develop the skills to
enable themselves to use social platforms like Pinterest to help them search
more judiciously and create and curate useful resources?
Narrative account of the author’s experience and

reflections
Pinterest (derived from ‘pin’ and ‘interest’) is an online pinboard on

which users are invited to pin and repin images and videos. The plat-
form removed the risk of infringing intellectual property (Atherton,
2018). I have been drawn to Pinterest for many reasons. I like the ease
of functionality. The speed with which I can access high quality visual
content led me to consider its pedagogic potential. In addition to this, I
see Pinterest as a potential platform through which students may develop
their digital literacies. Ideas such as these will be developed in the final
section of this chapter.
At the time of writing, social media were (I prefer the plural) in their
infancy in terms of their impact and spread, their functionality, their rep-
utation and, more pointedly, users’ social literacies. I will address each of
these factors in turn, so that we can view Pinterest in the context of other
social media.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-5
Search smarter? 65
Impact and spread
The rapid spread of social media may be well-documented, but it is

also remarkable. Instagram only took 18 months to acquire 50 million
users. Radio needed 38 years to reach a similar audience, and television
13 years (Atherton, 2018; Vaynerchuk, 2013). Pinterest users grew from
128 million in 2016 to 459 million in 2020 (Statista, 2022). These statistics,
however, make sense on closer examination. Social media platforms are
lightweight in terms of data – they are acquired by way of the simple
download of an app to the users’ portable device. The rapidity of the
spread of social media platforms reveals a branch of the communication
industry that is free of gatekeepers, and cumbersome and incompatible
technologies. Social media platform content is user-generated, which
removes barriers such as the need to source and pay for content creation
and the glacial progress of intellectual property rights.
The frequent virality of social media content can be explained by the
idea that social platforms are essentially user-friendly affinity spaces in
which the act of ‘liking’ is cognitively and kinaesthetically straightfor-
ward (Atherton, 2018; Barber, 2016).
Functionality
What users can actually do on social platforms can be explained by com-

paring them to traditional forms of communication. Anyone can pub-
lish on social media: as text, like an ebook, or as multimedia content like
radio, newspapers, magazines, television or cinema. It could be argued,
therefore, that the user is the publisher. It can be viewed as empowering
that children can create, edit and disseminate their own content, either
alone or in collaboration with their peers. This notion of the democrati-
sation of communication, however, has been challenged in many ways,
for example by the arresting of Iranian Instagrammers for their alleged
immorality, or Twitter’s removal of Donald Trump after repeated incen-
diary remarks and disputed claims. The ease with which users can pub-
lish carries many risks, one of which is reputational damage.
Reputation
Moving forward beyond the 2020s, how will schools and educators view
social media? Might they see social media from a position of acceptance
(Continued)
66 Search smarter?
and understanding? Fake news, online hate speech and cyberbullying are
unlikely to disappear without severely restricting the freedoms that made
them so popular in the first place. That said, will younger users be able
to understand that what they post is a public message that cannot be
retracted and is open to misinterpretation and decontextualization?
If social media are to be harnessed as aids to learning, both students and
teachers may need to acquire a whole new set of skills and literacies.
Social literacies
What are social literacies? What lexical, semantic, syntactical, visual and
symbolic codes do we need to use social media to help us learn? How
necessary are these skills in terms of what young people need in order to
thrive in their future work and to what extent do social media effectively
de-skill their users?
This chapter seeks more specific definitions and applications of the
term ‘social media’ and focuses on Pinterest. Though Pinterest is gen-
erally placed in the same category of other social media platforms, this
chapter examines its uses as a social search engine in the context of
Secondary School teaching and social media.
Since the commencement of this study, the impact of COVID-19 has
limited the opportunities available to social science researchers and pre-
sented what Roy and Uekusa (2020) call ‘scholarly challenges’ (2020, p.
384) in terms of access to participants. The original data for this study
had gone no further than remote data collection, with a small sample
of face-to-face questionnaires – all pre-COVID-19. The next logical step
was to develop this study in a way that offers potential value to those
involved in initial teacher education (ITE) and also to other scholars
and students who seek a way to contribute work that has depth, in the
absence of opportunities for traditional qualitative research methods
(Roy & Uekusa, 2020).
Social media platforms like Twitter and Pinterest did not gain mass global
appeal until the 2010s, hence the need to prioritise literature from after
this period. There are a number of recent case studies of specific social
Search smarter? 67
platforms, but they are frequently located outside Europe and in the under-
graduate sector. These may be relevant but could risk losing focus. Similarly,
this review will place Pinterest in the context of the literature on the broader
topic of social media.
Most research into Pinterest has not been relevant to Secondary/High
School teaching or teacher education. That said, some studies are concerned
with Pinterest and nurse education, medical disinformation, image analysis,
elementary/primary school or computing.
Defining social media in the context of education
The term social media refers to a ‘widespread sharing of multimedia con-

tent and refined functionality’; whether the phrase ‘social media’ should be
debated in the same context as edtech is debatable (Atherton & Pratt, 2022,
p. 1). What is also debatable is whether the term is at all useful, as it can be
viewed as, ‘over-stuffed with promise, hyperbole, marketing and innovation’
(Brabazon, 2019, p. 1).
The literature on social media wrestles with problems of definition that
are similar to those of edtech per se. One of these contested definitions
is technology enhanced learning. If technology enhances learning, might this
assume that the education system needs only its teaching and learning
augmented by hardware and software (Bayne, 2015; Hamilton & Friesen,
2013; Kirkwood & Price, 2014; Cukurova et al., 2018)? In the late 2010s,
there was debate surrounding the legitimacy of edtech research designed to
demonstrate that edtech works (Cukurova et al., 2018). At times, research-
ers created frameworks to demonstrate the efficacy of edtech platforms
(Atherton, 2019; King et al., 2016). This rejection of technological determin-
ism, though, has not achieved the desired clarity (Atherton, 2019; Kirkwood
& Price, 2014). Furthermore, part of the problem may be the performativ-
ity, linguistic conservatism and perceived ideological neutrality of the lan-
guage surrounding education and technology (Atherton, 2020a; Atherton &
Pratt, 2022; Bayne, 2015; Clark, 2020; James & Pollard, 2012). This has been
viewed by some as a barrier to impactful research in these areas (Bayne,
2015; Selwyn et al., 2020). As early as 2015, it was hard to create a cohesive
review on social media (Ngai, Tao & Moon, 2015). Moreover, the fluidity of
the fast-changing technologies is mirrored by new and emerging attempts
to develop critical theoretical frameworks or pursue social justice (Atherton,
2020b; Atherton & Pratt, 2022; Bayne, 2015; Guidry et al., 2018; Schroeder,
Curcio & Lundgren, 2019; Selwyn et al., 2020).
68 Search smarter?
Informal learning
Some recent practitioner research has discussed social media as informal

learning (Carpenter, 2015; Greenhow & Lewin, 2016; Krutka et al., 2017).
Some studies have considered the role of teachers themselves, as they use
social media to create affinity spaces, explore their professional identities
or position themselves as teacherpreneurs (Carpenter et al., 2020). There has
sometimes been a social justice angle to the research, for example in the con-
text of the power and influence that social media companies have (Selwyn
et al., 2020) or the potential for social media to empower students to col-
laborate (Carpenter, 2015; Greenhow, Sonnevend & Agur, 2016). Significant
swathes of research in the field of social media and pedagogy, however,
reflect the aforementioned lack of consensus and coherence. There is a pau-
city of studies specifically about Pinterest and a theme of fear and indiffer-
ence from schools (Atherton, 2018, 2019; Atherton & Pratt, 2022; Greenhow
& Lewin, 2016; Schroeder, Curcio & Lundgren, 2019), There are some stud-
ies on Pinterest as a pedagogic tool that can potentially improve student par-
ticipation and develop digital and social literacies (Atherton, 2019; Bruguera
et al., 2019; Carpenter, 2015; Gallagher, Swalwell & Bellows, 2018; Pittard,
2016; Schroeder, Curcio & Lundgren, 2019). The next section will focus on
the literature surrounding the development of digital literacies.
Skills and digital literacies
Some of the related work is located in the Secondary/High School context

in the USA. There have been a number of think pieces in peer-reviewed jour-
nals about the benefits of social media in schools (Krutka & Carpenter, 2016).
Schroeder, Curcio and Lundgren (2019) conducted an exploratory qualitative
study of the use of Pinterest in elementary-level preservice and elementa-
ry-level in-service teachers and called for further research into teacher educa-
tion. Leading on from this, Carpenter et al. (2019a, 2019b) analysed Twitter
data from K-12 students, whereas Gleason (2015) assessed new and emerg-
ing literacies among teenagers using Twitter. Some of the recent American
literature has a theoretical basis, for example Gruzd et al. (2016), who ana-
lysed social media and uses and gratifications in a higher education context.
Similarly, Pittard (2016) conducted a longitudinal study of teachers’ use of
Pinterest, through the lenses of neoliberalism and feminism. Despite the pre-
ponderance of studies from the USA, there have been systematic reviews
from a global perspective such as Bruguera et al. (2019) and Luo et al. (2020)
who both selected literature linked to professional development in higher
Search smarter? 69
education. Practitioner books lag behind in terms of their currency, though

Poore (2016) social media best practice guide offers ideas on how students
may improve their participation in society by ‘…thinking with and about the
technology.’ (Poore, 2016, p. 71). There are many reviews of social media use
in the health or nursing sector, but these are not relevant to this study.
Conclusions
Studies into social media can be seen as a moving target within a moving
target. The swiftness of change has more recently been accompanied by
swift social change. Hence, existing paradigms and definitions have been
challenged. Bayne (2015) suggested that the fluidity and hybridity of the
technologies should be matched by the theoretical frameworks that analyse
them. Though some clear gaps in the literature have been identified, for
example the personal identity of teachers versus their professional persona
(Carpenter et al., 2020), it could conversely be argued that the academics can
learn lessons from the speed with which some medical studies were being
published during COVID-19. At times, the speed of thinking about social
media in academia can be surpassed by bloggers and social influencers, who
are not part of this chapter (Atherton & Pratt, 2022). While there are pockets
of researchers conducting new or ongoing studies into social media in edu-
cation, they may need to be part of continuous research culture, employing
diverse research methods (Kimmons et al., 2018; Greenhow & Lewin, 2016;
Krutka et al., 2017). As we enter Web 3.0, in which meaningful collaboration
is key, we may wish to place greater emphasis on the role of people, not
technology (Atherton, 2019; Kirkwood & Price, 2014; Salmon, 2019). We
may also wish to think small and not be distracted by substantial, contradic-
tory data and concepts (Atherton, 2019; Colleoni, Rozza & Arvidsson, 2014;
Fuchs, 2017).
Empirical data
This chapter refers to a study of student teachers’ use of Pinterest in the

classroom. The sample is composed of Secondary/High School student
teachers. The study can be summarised in the following way:
1) online questionnaires on Surveyhero.com about using Pinterest for

learning.
2) main study – face-to-face interviews.
70 Search smarter?
Table 5.1 Questions posed to the sample
What was good and bad about using Pinterest for learning?
What does it reveal to you about the broader context of learning through social
media?
If you have an opportunity to use Pinterest for learning again, what might you do
differently?
The chief challenges of the research design would be to combine the lived
experiences of researchers and participants with the necessary gravitas and
dimensionality of empirical research (Greene, 2008; Rorty, 1982, cited in
Gruzd et al., 2016). The response to this challenge will be to place the focus
on the language of individuals as qualitative data which will provide a testi-
mony to lived experiences (Rorty, 1982, cited in Gruzd et al., 2016). At the
same time, the study needed to be ‘explicit and replicable’ (Bruguera et al.,
2019, p. 2). In terms of the main schools of epistemology, this study eschews
positivism’s pursuit of objective truths through empirical data and claims of
universal truths (Ellis et al., 2011; Struthers, 2014) (Table 5.1).
Data collection and analysis
The raw data was processed in the following order:
1) the text from the SurveyHero online questionnaire was fed into a word
cloud generator (Wordle.com) to identify dominant words and phrases.
Word clouds analyse text and present the most frequently used words
in pictorial form. This pictorial representation (Ramlo, 2011) helped
me familiarise myself with the data and open up initial lines of inquiry
(Braun & Clarke, 2019). Through the use of thematic analysis, I identi-
fied and analysed semantic and latent codes (Braun & Clarke, 2019). The
main advantage of this was to help minimise redundant data and narrow
the focus (Atherton & Pratt, 2022; Braun & Clarke, 2019; Denscombe,
2007; Punch, 2014).
2) in vivo coding: the data was pasted onto a Word file. I then placed each
comment in a column, to help me analyse the actual words used by par-
ticipants. I created codes to help me categorise the raw data. I could then
go through the data line by line to help me identify themes (Saldaña &
Omasta, 2016).
Search smarter? 71
3) line-by-line coding: this enabled me to drill down into the themes that
I had organised, and identify patterns and subtexts (Cohen, Manion &
Morrison, 2010).
4) potential limitations of the research were the relatively small sample
and, perhaps more tellingly, the contradictory nature of some of the
data. This will be examined in the following ‘research findings’ chapter.
Analysis
I will now identify and interrogate surface and latent codes in the context
of the literature (Atherton & Pratt, 2022; Braun & Clarke, 2019; Rolfe et
al., 2001). This inductive method was intended to sharpen the focus of the
research and minimise researcher bias (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Denscombe,
2007; Punch, 2014). I was mindful of my inclusion and exclusion criteria for
the literature and the data that I foregrounded; there was always a danger
that the amplification of specific findings could be a product of the preju-
dices and assumptions of the researcher. I am hopeful that the careful cod-
ing helped minimise this risk (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2010; Saldaña
& Omasta, 2016). Despite the desire for rigour and empiricism, this section
will be mindful of the notion that generalisations and theories, far from aris-
ing organically, are often created by the subjective thinking of the researcher
and their own agendas (Atherton, 2020a; Braun & Clarke, 2019).
The online questionnaires were conducted as an optional plenary to a
university seminar. Once I had created the table in Word, I pasted the data
into Excel so I could use the ‘Data sort’ function to place the codes in alpha-
betical order. That way, I could use an additional column to identify sub
themes. The initial codes that I created are summarised in the bullet points
below:
• R=RESOURCES
• IMAGES
• INSP=INSPIRING
• ALT=ALTERNATIVE
• CAT=CATEGORIES
• CREA=CREATIVE
• DIS=DISTRACTING
• IRR=IRRELEVANT
72 Search smarter?
Analysis of responses
In vivo coding on an Excel spreadsheet helped develop a more granular

approach to the data. In order to do this, I created an extra column, with
more specific codes, based on a deeper familiarisation with the qualitative
data. These codes are summarised in Table 5.2 below:
In vivo coding made some of the more negative comments much more
prominent. The reason for this appears to be that the negatives were usually
subordinate to the positive point. Perhaps this was out of politeness. Some
of the less prominent comments were only made by one participant but
they could provide rich sources for further practitioner research:
• memes that generate humour allow pupils to engage with the text.
• I found lots of resources and helpful tips for my placement.
• those images that did have a form of educational benefit were not from
an educational source and therefore could potentially be misleading.
• I found it distracting being on my phone as I hopped back into the habit
of checking my messages.
The data revealed that Pinterest can help student teachers categorise infor-
mation but, at the same time, these categories can provide distractions. The
participants liked the easy access to visual resources, though 12% found
Pinterest distracting or providing irrelevant search results. The dataset
revealed that student teachers benefit from reflection and can use their own
perspectives to help their own development (Braun & Clarke, 2019). It was
Table 5.2 In vivo coding of responses
Code identified % Summary of comments

SS=SUBJECT SPECIFIC 21 Boards could help pupils structure English essays;
literacy for KS2 and Early Years resource;
categorised and shared Politics resources
INC=INCLUSIVITY 5 Could help scaffold materials and support SEND
pupils
FT=FEAR OF TECH 7 Couldn’t make sense of it, hard to use
TI=TEACHING IDEAS 36 Infographics, classroom displays; could inspire
students and provide student teachers ideas for
lesson plans
QC=QUALITY 26 A great deal of content was inappropriate for
CONTROL students, unhelpful to student teachers or
distracting
Search smarter? 73
only the act of reflection that enabled the participants to open themselves
to the creative potential of Pinterest in lessons or be specific about potential
pedagogic incidents or limitations. The benefits of their reflection further
manifested themselves in their feelings about Pinterest and its potential for
pedagogy, collaboration, creativity and inclusivity. They also expressed per-
ceptive ideas about potential exclusion from the benefits of edtech and the
barriers to effective use of Pinterest; most participants had positive ideas
about the pedagogic benefits of Pinterest but were aware of the many inhib-
itors (Atherton, 2018; Krutka & Carpenter, 2016). Notably, they talked about
the potential for collaboration between teachers and between pupils but said
nothing of the ways in which Pinterest could help develop the skills that are
necessary in the contemporary workplace (Baume & Scanlon, 2018, cited in
Luckin, 2018; Kolb, 2017).
In terms of the broader context of learning with social media, individual
comments offered a more insightful response and enabled the data to be
further categorised. I have summarised the comments below in categories
that represent the emerging issue that they raise.
• Pedagogy
Individual teachers have unique teaching styles and using Pinterest reveals
how learning resources have few boundaries.
• Encouraging collaboration
Social media encourage the andragogical (or adult-friendly) sharing of ideas,
articles and media.
• Developing teachers’ creativity

Pinterest requires teachers to think creatively about how to use it to broaden
the learning landscape.
• Promoting inclusivity and participation

Pinterest helps teachers move with the times, encourage participation, inter-
activity and engage students with a familiar platform.
• Reinforcing social exclusion

Social media could exclude students without phones or connectivity.
Barriers to using social media
Pinterest can be an effective tool but is subject dependent; in some areas

there is no alternative to teaching to the test. Also, it could require additional
74 Search smarter?
scaffolding and behaviour management strategies, such as monitoring stu-

dents’ screens. Though there were concerns about safeguarding and cyber-
bullying, these were not based on direct experience of using Pinterest in a
classroom.
The latent, or underlying, codes (Braun & Clarke, 2019; Rolfe et al., 2001)
helped me identify something of a chasm between the social media use of
student teachers and their pupils outside lessons and access to technology in
general (Atherton, 2020b). This chasm presented itself through inconsisten-
cies in access and connectivity. Emerging and future research will, of course,
explore the digital divide and digital literacies in the context of COVID-19
(Atherton & Pratt, 2022). Yet, what may be missing from this debate, could
be the extent to which social media are one group of many technological
tools and therefore deemed ideologically neutral, a tool to perform a task
(Bayne, 2015; Lanclos, 2016; Selwyn, 2014). This instrumentalism could be
viewed as an inhibitor to epistemological questions about digital communi-
cation, social exclusion or society’s values in relation to education and the
end user’s lived experience (Atherton, 2019, 2020b; Atherton & Pratt, 2022;
James & Pollard, 2012; Josselson and Liebech, 1995; Richardson, 1997; Rorty,
1982; Selwyn et al., 2020). The evidence for this in this study was the partic-
ipants’ calls for more teaching about social media or their recognition of the
need for ground rules regarding digital literacy and responsibility (Gleason,
2015; Krutka et al., 2017). Part of this arose from disparities in the pupils’ and
their own digital literacies and the risks of cyberbullying (Atherton, 2019;
Greenhow and Lewin, 2016; Poore, 2016). One example of this confusion
is a lack of agreed phraseology in relation to taxonomies of social media; is
WhatsApp social media when it is encrypted? Is YouTube social media or a
hybrid? Is Twitter also a media company and Facebook a content producer
(Atherton, 2018; Bayne, 2015)?
In terms of moving forwards, participants engaged with the follow-
ing pieces of practical advice for people considering using Pinterest in a
classroom.
Examples of these are:

• the need for ground rules.
• learning goals and other aspects of the structure of lessons.
• search skills and other examples of digital literacy.
• the need for preliminary research.
This raw quantitative data reveals a great deal of enthusiasm towards using
Pinterest and other social media in a classroom but there was also scepticism
and fear. 46% of respondents were not willing to say that they would con-
sider using social media in a classroom.
Search smarter? 75
Though there is a little experience or knowledge of and competence with

social media in schools, there are clearly many barriers. Connectivity, safe-
guarding concerns, lack of digital literacy are all notable inhibitors, despite
the participants’ recognition of how Pinterest can encourage creativity.
Most of the data was collected quickly and easily; the anonymity guar-
anteed by the questionnaire design and ethical approval could have created
a much larger project (BERA, 2011), though there was a more manageable
and meaningful dataset. This targeted approach could be viewed as a move
away from digital positivism. Here, quantitative data is given greater prom-
inence and endowed with higher significance than qualitative (Atherton,
2019; Daniel, 2017; Fuchs, 2017). Indeed, this preponderance of big data
can sometimes be seen to obfuscate, not elucidate. Sprawling, often con-
tradictory, data could be seen as a symptom of an echo chamber effect, in
which multiple contributors shout loudly but few are really heard (Colleoni,
Rozza & Arvidsson, 2014). When the data is more focused, the researcher
can attend to the micro, not the macro (Atherton, 2019; Fuchs, 2017).
Furthermore, analysing smaller datasets can mitigate the risk of digital
dependency, where an over reliance on empirical data can be at the expense
of the need for analysis (Gardner & Davis, 2014). To facilitate a move away
from digital positivism, Fuchs (2017) calls for an alternative paradigm,
which consists of critical digital research (Atherton, 2019; Fuchs, 2017).
This notion is explored in more detail in Chapter 7. One of the benefits of
this approach could be a greater acceptance of the problematical nature
of social metrics and fluidity of social identities, profiles and multimodal
communication (McCosker, 2017). The Conclusions section will state the
case for collaborative autoethnography as a way to build on this focus on
drilling down into individual stories to explore ontological truths (Roy &
Uekusa, 2020). Indeed, the fact that social media are, at the time of writing,
in their infancy may begin to explain the enmity towards them; is it possi-
ble to answer ontological questions when the subject is on shifting sands
(Atherton, 2018; Babbie, 2013)?
Conclusions, limitations and suggestions for further Work
In terms of the initial research questions, the data and literature have helped
direct the initial research questions in the following ways:
• the taxonomies, definitions of social media vis-à-vis edtech are still prob-
lematic and contested semantically, ontologically and ideologically.
• there needs to be ongoing practitioner research into specific social plat-
forms, preferably in the context of Secondary Initial Teacher Education.
76 Search smarter?
• it could be argued that the data reveals something else about the student
teachers’ exclusion from, hostility towards or ignorance of how to use
Pinterest in their teaching. A great deal of the data was reflecting on
the school or college-wide rules on and feelings towards social media in
lessons. Perhaps this ideological neutrality is not extended towards social
platforms like Pinterest (Atherton & Pratt, 2022; Bayne, 2020; Selwyn
et al., 2020).
Strengths, limitations and suggestions for further research
Further research could attempt to define these specific literacies, though

such research is likely to be ephemeral in nature, as such knowledge bases
are characterised by their fluidity (Atherton, 2018; Shukie, 2019; Siemens,
2005). In terms of research methods for further research, there is evidence
that the mixed methods approach could benefit from incorporating a greater
proportion of narrative writing, to amplify the complementary empirical
data (Greene, 2008; Culshaw, 2019; Sidebottom, 2019).
In terms of the focus of my own body of research, the pandemic has
clearly increased a feeling of isolation among student teachers and teacher
educators. That said, the ongoing lockdowns have provided opportunities
for researchers to develop their constructivist or interactionist theoretical
perspectives (Roy & Uekusa, 2020), This study builds on the use of reflexiv-
ity through narrative writing and autoethnography in Atherton (2020b) and
Atherton and Pratt (2022).
Educators may want to be part of a school’s work on digital literacy and

even cyberbullying, despite the associated risks, complexities and fluidity
(Atherton, 2018; Bayne, 2015; Poore, 2016; Shukie, 2019; Siemens, 2005).
Cyberbullying is an online extension of the power imbalances, and exclu-
sionary practices associated with any bullying. As with conventional bully-
ing, the parental figure is usually absent while cyberbullying is taking place
(Poore, 2016). With matters as serious as these, educators will always need
to consult senior managers about the legal, ethical and practical implications
of entering into a project involving Pinterest with children (Bruguera et al.,
2019; Luo et al., 2020).
Search smarter? 77
In terms of initial activities, student teachers could encourage their

students to take ownership over creating their own ‘student contract’.
Discussion of this contract could enable children to discuss the complexities
and inconsistencies associated with the notion of cyberbullying. If the learn-
ing culture is inclusive and responsible, there are likely to be fewer hiding
places for potential cyberbullying (Figure 5.1). At the same time, educators
Figure 5.1 Pinterest infographic

Adapted from Atherton (2018)
78 Search smarter?
are advised to make it clear that it is unacceptable in the eyes of the school
and the law. Educators would be wise to have an ongoing appetite for knowl-
edge of the ongoing issues surrounding cyberbullying in the social media
space; this could help address the disparities between the pupils’ and teach-
ers’ digital literacy (Atherton, 2018, 2019; Bruguera et al., 2019; Greenhow
& Lewin, 2016; Luo et al., 2020; Poore, 2016).
Emerging technology in this field
• Buffer and Pallyy

Teachers can schedule pins in bulk. For example, if you schedule useful sub-
ject-related content for a certain time every day, your students could access
it via a secret board.
• Pinstamatic
Create a pin out of pretty much anything.
• Canva
Image-making tool for high quality infographics, charts, social posts and
much more.
• Octi
A new augmented reality (AR) social media platform.
The next chapter will provide a case study of how a range of edtech-re-
lated events were planned and disseminated on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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The tip of the iceberg? 6
Social media in education
Teachers are sometimes forbidden from having their own social media pro-
files. How can they start to understand the opportunities that social media
can offer to them in terms of analysis of data, organisation of events and
networking?
A narrative account of the experiences of each issue

and relevant edtech tools.
Throughout my academic journey, I have had a somewhat ambivalent

attitude towards social media.
I had learned how to create, sustain and monitor page impressions and
engagement on Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. It
is exhilarating to teach yourself a new set of skills. Teaching others to do
the same is even better. As a portfolio careerist around 2018, I made part
of my living showing small business owners how they could become a
brand leader if they saw their company as a media company. They might
move away from one-way content creation to dialogic content curation
and recycle the multimodal content across different platforms and con-
texts (Vaynerchuk, 2013).
Social media literacy starts as a lurker, a voyeur. I noticed that, in
academia, those who used social media effectively were positioning
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-6
themselves as a thought leader in their field. Successful academics on

social media were curating, thanking, bigging up their peers but when the
time was right, promoting their own work or events. I built a respectable
following of over 20,000 and a significantly above-average engagement
rate. Yet each time I became distracted from my work by Twitter and
LinkedIn; in 2020 and 2021 my energy was drained by the ways which
users were shouting vitriol into an increasingly noisy cave. The pandemic
had magnified how toxic the discourse had become.
For me, as an educator, social media is an exercise in self-awareness.
This awareness, of course, can be drawn from either both positive or
negative emotions that can arise from the application of neologisms or
new words.
Social neologisms mask a body of emerging evidence that cannot be
accommodated into this chapter. For example, there has been a prolifera-
tion of new terms related to Brexit, COVID-19, gender, sexual and racial
politics, celebrity culture and so on. But I’m always fascinated by the shift-
ing sands of language, by lexical and morphological innovations that ride
or even crystallise the zeitgeist (Würschinger, 2021; Würschinger et al.,
2016). On one hand, I am fascinated by the organic nimbleness of social
media neologisms; on the other hand, the implications of these words
can corrode the soul of the user. One example is the word ‘doomscroll-
ing’, which is the endless scrolling through social media in search of neg-
ative content. I have been spending too long letting my thumbs and eyes
uncover everything that is wrong with humankind. When I notice my
fuzzy headedness, feel my ennui and see my scarring frown in the mirror,
I know it’s time to stop.
The toxic combination of social media phenomena can lead to group
polarisation and a tendency to adopt more extreme views (Cinelli et al.,
2021, pp. 1–2). But I’m an optimist, hence my ambivalence towards social
media, indeed, I have posted on LinkedIn about how it presents ways in
which students can learn more immersively and how social tools and data
can be harnessed, but only if users develop their own social literacies. An
extract from one post is below:
Many schools and teachers are rightly scared of cyberbullying and covert
filming, scarred by unpleasant incidents and irritated by kids being umbilically
attached to their devices.
These devices are weapons, facilitators of mischievous or even malevolent
acts.
Yet harnessing the potential of their phones could be transformative for many
young people.
(Continued)
86 The tip of the iceberg?
I’m off to do some work now and not be distracted by social media, with
all its bigotry, virtue-signalling, pile-ons, cancellations, horror, identity politics,
gaslighting, energy vampirism, and misinformation. And its news, unfiltered by
gatekeepers with vested interests and ideological opposition, its fun, freshness,
immediacy, heart-stopping, must-share realism and humour; its communities
of support and best practice, the transition from social friends to real friends,
its collaboration, its democracy, its inclusion, its creative zeal – its hope for an
uncertain future.
This extract from 50 Ways to Use Technology Enhanced Learning in the
Classroom (Atherton, 2018a) helps clarify why social media has remained
of interest to my work in education.
Learning by participating
Social media helps people participate and can remove a feeling of being excluded.
It is clear that teens at the end of the 2000s were beginning to feel empowered by
the removal of many ‘gatekeepers’ to expression and communication: podcasting
and blogging (later vlogging or video blogging) were emerging not only as part of
many people’s flow of information and entertainment but as a viable entry into
the world of work.
(Atherton, 2018a, pp. 1–4)
Social media, then, has been part of a quiet revolution about empow-
erment and participation. One of the ways in which this has benefitted
teachers is by enabling them to create their own persona, their own brand
identity, perhaps as a researcher, which incorporates the hustle of being
a micropreneur or teacherpreneur (Atherton, 2020). Teachers at any level
are increasingly expected to be involved in academic research, yet social
media platforms are often viewed as separate from this.
The good news is that all this ambivalence towards social is essentially
a sense of self-reflexivity. This will inform some of the mixed methods
data collection and analysis that I will discuss in this viewpoint piece.
Viewpoint piece, incorporating relevant literature and

research
One of the broader aims of this viewpoint piece will be to try to bridge a
chasm between instrumentalist views of educational technology (Bayne, 2015;
Lanclos, 2016; Selwyn, 2014) and the realities of the end user, which were
explored in Atherton (2019a). To address this problem, this review will select
literature that helps develop my proposal that rigorous self-reflexivity can offer
a way to bridge the chasm between the realities of social media use in a class-
room and social media outside the education space (Atherton & Pratt, 2022;
Braun & Clarke, 2019). Much of the literature from the previous chapter – Search
smarter? Leveraging Pinterest for Learning – is also relevant to this chapter. Only a
small selection of the literature from Chapter 5 will be included here. The next
section will examine the key issues surrounding critical studies and digital liter-
acy. This will contextualise the discussion of the literature on social media and
education and help narrow the focus later in the literature review. Furthermore,
the review will underpin and add rigour to the qualitative findings.
The neutrality of data?
Social media analytics have been hitherto under exploited, both in Secondary/
High School and university. Against this, there is a warning of how exces-
sive datafication can pose a threat to civil liberties and social cohesion (Tracy
& Carmichael, 2017). A great deal of research into social media has been
quantitative and the data collected through questionnaires (Bruguera et al.,
2019). While data collection about social media and education poses its own
challenges, others have addressed this by creating frameworks, for example
Krutka et al.’s PLN (professional learning network) Enrichment Framework
(2016). The framework went through multiple iterations but would need con-
siderable adaptation for each user; Krutka et al. (2016) did acknowledge this
and added that having a PLN could help educators magnify their voice. This,
along with a greater focus on the lived experience of the researcher, could
address the reservations about an instrumentalist notion of the neutrality of
social media data (Atherton, 2018a, 2020; Bayne, 2015; Lanclos, 2016; Selwyn,
2014). This issue is magnified when the data is voluminous, as argued below:
This shared sense of starting with data often leads to an unnoticed

assumption that data are transparent, that information is self-evident,
the fundamental stuff of truth itself. If we’re not careful … our zeal for
more and more data can become a faith in their neutrality and auton-
omy, their objectivity.
(Gitelman, 2013, p. 3)
Moreover, a closer – and therefore deeper – focus on individual or group

experiences and the formation of identities through social media may be nec-
essary to challenge the potential tyranny of big data (Atay, 2020; Atherton,
2018a, 2020; Fuchs, 2017).
Big data vs small data
The intention in this chapter will be to challenge the tyranny of big data and
focus on smaller, potentially more meaningful data (Atherton, 2018a; Fuchs,
2017). In a similar way to Chapter 5, this chapter will be flexible in terms of
data collection and analysis. That way, the findings may feel more organic and
avoid confirming a set of judgements (Gruzd, Paulin & Haythornthwaite,
2016). This methodological flexibility, I propose, may avoid analysing a cha-
otic, confusing or contradictory dataset (Bruguera et al., 2019). One of the
effects of infinite access to information on social media is the echo chamber
effect. In a metaphorical echo chamber, users retreat to their own affinity
spaces, and this has been shown to lead to selective exposure and confirma-
tion bias (Atherton, 2019b; Cinelli et al., 2021; Fuchs, 2017). To what extent,
then, is it possible to debate these political issues objectively?
Big data vs small data digital positivism
A further issue in the pursuit of big data in education is that the data is usually
gathered through navigating free social platforms. A by-product of this poten-
tially blind acceptance of the neutrality of data can be an unwitting vulner-
ability to the mining of personal and institutional data. In the words of Sean
Sheppard, digital entrepreneur speaking on the Edtech Innovators podcast,
If the product is free – you are the product (Edtech Innovators, 2021). At the
same time, participants may be actively involved in empirical research, but
they are still subject to propagandist ways in which big data and cognitive
psychology attempt to manipulate emotions (Boler, 2019).
Theoretical models
This chapter, therefore, supports challenges to the notion of digital positiv-

ism (Colleoni et al., 2014; Fuchs, 2017; Wyly, 2014). Digital positivism relates
to positivist practices where big data analytics are deployed with an igno-
rance of the role of human interpretation. In this administrative culture,
there can be an excessive emphasis on quantitative data (Fuchs, 2017).
Big data analytics’ trouble is that it often does not connect statistical
and computational research results to a broader analysis of human
meanings, interpretations, experiences, attitudes, moral values, ethical
dilemmas, uses, contradictions and macro-sociological implications of

social media.
(Fuchs, 2017, p. 3)
Furthermore, Fuchs (2017) proposes the deployment of critical digital

methods (p6), building on traditional data collection but adding creative
tasks that place the participant at the centre. An example of this might be
asking participants to create multimodal posts on social media (Atherton,
2020; Fuchs, 2017).
This chapter will propose an emerging notion of social postpositivism.
I propose that social postpositivism will recognise the role of the partici-
pant and the researcher in the production of ‘emotion and affect’ (Boler,
2019, p. 187). This idea of the entangled self draws on the autoethnographic
approach to examining the performative aspects of being an academic
within the neoliberal context (Ateljevic et al., 2005; O’Keeffe, 2019). To
explore this notion of social postpositivism further, I will examine my own
role as a researcher of edtech in a university and out on social media in the
context of neoliberalism.
The neoliberal academic
On one hand, the pervasive power of neoliberalism makes staff responsible

for maximising their efficiency in a competitive, marketised ‘human capi-
tal formation.’ Connell (2013, p. 104; Miller & Rose, 2008; O’Keeffe, 2019).
This commodification of knowledge places emphasis on benchmarking and
quantitative measurement, for example the number of papers published and
citations achieved. This leads to an internalisation of institutional demands
which shifts the sense of self to an interrogation of the perceived morality
of what is ‘right’. The performative academic is not oppressed but the key
performance indicators (KPIs) present opportunities to demonstrate growth
to achieve progression but within a competitive framework (O’Keeffe, 2019).
Data, findings and discussion
It is within this context that I will discuss my own positionality as I immersed

myself in social media analytics in the context of events. The first event was
Edtech Expo, which was held in Liverpool, England, in 2018. The second
event was an academic conference at which I spoke about social media tools
and data in the context of academia. The third is another edtech event –
Edtech Thought Leaders – this time held online.
Edtech Expo, Liverpool 2018
The thinking behind this event was my feeling that edtech companies need
to have meaningful conversations about learning with educators. This was
inspired after multiple visits to Bett and other trade shows, at which edtech
companies could often be seen demonstrating what a product could do.
There appeared to be a disconnect between this and the end users – teachers
and their students.
I focused my social strategy on LinkedIn and Twitter. Over the course
of the marketing of the event, I received around 500,000 page impressions
across social media, including Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram.
LinkedIn
I used to follow potential sponsors or influencers. I would sometimes com-

ment on their posts if what they were saying was of value to me. If they
looked like potential sponsors, I would then DM (direct message) them and
ask if they would like to attend. If the answer was yes, I would ask if they
wanted to see a sponsor pack. It worked like a simple decision tree, which
would culminate in a phone call with the potential sponsor. They would
then be tagged in any future posts about the event.
Twitter
Twitter was an effective way to build a sense of a parallel event. The strat-
egy would focus on a teaser poster several months in advance. This was fol-
lowed by regular participation in debates about edtech, liking and retweeting
relevant content. I established a PLN by following some of the followers of
my followers and parachuting into their debates (Figure 6.1). Only about 20%
of my posts would be promoting the event. Twitter Analytics revealed that
my level of engagement was significantly above average, usually around 7%.
My engagement rate on Twitter has now grown to 10%, as I am much more
selective and targeted with my tweets. While these qualitative metrics and
those Tables 6.1 and 6.2 below provide useful empirical data, I was also using
my social media profiles to help build my digital persona. This also provided
Figure 6.1 Flyer for Edtech Thought Leaders
Table 6.1 Twitter analytics – quantitative
Month Total page Total tweets Top tweets by page

impressions impressions
Jan 2020 43,000 173 4,526
Dec 2019 19,000 70 4,192
Nov 22,000 66 7,739
Oct 20,000 57 4,006
Sept 6,600 25 272
Aug 6,200 26 1,054
July 32,000 71 9,412
Source: Adapted from Atherton (2020 pp 55).
Table 6.2 Page impressions and conventions of tweets
Month Total page Top tweets by page Conventions of tweets

impressions impressions
Jan 2020 43,400 4,588 High volume of tweets (157).
Tagging of influencers
(that is, people who are
influential on Twitter).
Counterintuitive, playful
images
3 hashtags: #education
#edutwitter #teaching
Dec 2019 18,300 4,192 Provocative, autobiographical
images from my PPT.
Tagging of influencers.
Nov 26,900 7,739 Counterintuitive, playful
image
#TuesdayThoughts #puns
Oct 19,600 4,006 Tagging of a conference I
was speaking at. 3 emojis.
Informal tone.
#conference #edtech
#mondaythoughts
Sept 5,910 272 Message about lying low.
1 emoji. #mondaythoughts
#unplug #Focus
Aug 6,524 1,054 Photo of me and the person
I had met. Tagging of a
large organisation and the
person I had met.
3 emojis.
#edtech #teaching
July 31,600 9,412 Video of me, tagging the
organisation that I was
visiting. 3 emojis.
#getintoteaching #NQT
Source: Atherton, 2020, p. 56.
qualitative data for the digital narratology and autoethnographic material in

the next chapter – What is your edtech journey? Autoethnography and the impor-
tance of learning journeys.
The next grid from Atherton (2020) displays page impressions and decon-
structed the conventions of each tweet:
In Atherton (2020), I analysed this social activity in the following way:
In Table 6.1, the disparities between the volume of my Twitter activ-

ity is reflected through metrics such as total page impressions for
each month, number of tweets and top tweets by page impressions
(or number of people who view each tweet). The next stage of cat-
egorising the Twitter Analytics was to link the numbers to the con-
ventions of tweets, for example: images, video, emojis used, tagging,
mentioning in pictures and links. This could help me triangulate the
data from both Twitter and the narrative writing, and also the lit-
erature. These categories not only helped me understand why cer-
tain tweets were more engaging than others but also how this social
media activity was a representation of my emotions and social situa-
tion. The details in the right-hand column of Table 6.2 denote some
self-evident details about the conventions of the more successful of
my tweets, notably that the use of thoughtful hashtags helps improve
visibility and engagement. What the number of tweets in Table 6.1
and all of the data in Table 6.2 reflect, is the level of confidence and
belonging that I was feeling at the date of my Twitter activity. My
narrative writing effectively provides field notes that match the con-
fidence and optimism that I felt through a sense of belonging in
January 2020 and July 2019. That confidence empowered me to reach
out to influencers and be playful with visual and verbal language.
When my work situation was making me feel vulnerable and iso-
lated, my Twitter activity writing reflected this, but my social media
profile was significantly lower.
(Atherton, 2020, pp. 54–57)
Edtech Thought Leaders, online, 2020, Remo
This virtual event was a successful development from Edtech Expo. The
event would develop the ways in which edtech companies, experts, policy-
makers and practitioners could communicate in a democratic space, free
from sales pitches and product demonstrations. The event was on Remo, an
online events platform that simulates the experience of attending a face-to-
face conference. Participants can virtually walk around, sit at round tables
to brainstorm or listen to talks from experts in their field. It is not cheap
but the $700 at the time of writing may be clawed back from sponsors and
paying attendees.
The event was publicised in a similar way to Edtech Expo but with some
differences. For example, potential attendees were invited via LinkedIn,
which provided useful quantitative data for potential sponsors.
Remo does not make it easy for attendees to post live on social media.
In fact, much of the social interaction is confined to Remo’s own chat func-
tions and virtual tables. Though Remo is not a social media platform, its
ability to make a virtual event feel social should be noted.
Conclusions
The next chapter explores my involvement in edtech through an autoeth-

nographic lens. These conclusions will be informed by thematic analyses
of some of the flyers for events and conferences that I had created between
2018 and 2021. I will also draw conclusions from analyses of narrative writ-
ing and visual narratology, which are drawn from Atherton (2020).

• educators may wish to consider using closed Facebook groups or secret
Pinterest boards to create PLNs, peer assess work or teach social media
literacy.
• trusted students could be employed to manage a designated social pro-
file, though they would need to risk assess this with senior leaders.
Online events
• Remo
• Mozilla
Social media analytics

• Sprout Social
• Audiense (their spelling)
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What is your edtech 7
journey?
Autoethnography and the
importance of learning journeys
To what extent can teachers benefit from telling their own stories? Is
autoethnography a rigorous methodology to help people understand their
lived experience with edtech?
Narrative account of the author’s experience and reflections
What is an academic with a research interest in edtech? As a sessional

lecturer for several years, I once had the luxury of viewing academia as
an outsider. During this period of uncertainty, my disparate work as a
portfolio careerist and a burgeoning academic had created a fractured
sense of self and a complex professional identity. Now I am a full-time
university lecturer, life is much better and I now understand that academ-
ics are all portfolio careerists.
We hustle to attract funding streams and outside speakers for events
that we organise, we post on social to promote our research and show
that we are thought leaders but real people underneath. We look to diver-
sify our roles, to attract more lucrative or satisfying work. We write, we
sometimes take bruising feedback, we rewrite. We study. We publish. We
are part of a large organisation, yet we usually work alone, in splendid
isolation because we need to concentrate, to think. We battle imposter
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-7
What is your edtech journey? 99
syndrome and entrenched privilege – what does an academic look like?

Not like us?
We travel so we can present and hustle some more. Oh, and we lec-
ture, we teach, we tutor, we assess, we support, we listen; we mop up
tears, we champion causes and individuals. The only difference is the con-
tract has changed.
The best thing about being a full-time academic was that writing
was actually part of my job. Now I was a legitimate member of staff,
I shouldn’t have felt like an outsider. But I did and this helped drive my
writing. The reason why I still felt on the outside looking in was because
of my research interest exploring my emerging specialism in edtech
through autoethnography. This helps fuel my creative fire because I am a
very experienced educator but my specialism is English – not computing.
I am not a learning technologist, which means my preoccupation with
edtech focuses on the end user, how the tech can help and whether it is
necessary at all.
To explore these issues, I will be using my own work – and therefore
my own edtech journey – as data. The context of how my academic writ-
ing had transitioned from analysing edtech in education as an outsider to
examining my subject position through autoethnography can be summa-
rised in the extract from Atherton (2020b):
My reflexive self
I have been a teacher of English but also of media studies and
film studies for over 20 years. I will always define myself as an
English teacher. Yet, for the past ten years, external circumstances
have led me to redefine myself, which has been invigorating at best
and distressing at worst. How I define myself is similarly complex
and changes from one day to the next. I am an author, a lecturer,
a researcher; a personal tutor, a teacher trainer; a blogger, a web
designer, a podcaster, a vlogger, a social media and education con-
sultant, an events organiser; a community expert, an edtech expert;
a manager, a quality officer.
In my case, the purpose of this autoethnography is to try to make
sense of my situation – to find a voice – and hope it contributes
to others understanding their own situation in a more measured
way (Ellis & Flaherty, 1992). To answer questions about the self, I
will need to convey what it was and is really like so I can focus on
some appropriate routes to enlightenment (Ellis & Flaherty, 1992;
(Continued)
100 What is your edtech journey?
Hughes & Pennington, 2017). The communication of memories

and feelings are likely to be given objectivity when they are in har-
mony with theory (Anderson, 2006; Chang, 2008).
(Atherton, 2020c, p. 48)
The aim of Atherton (2020b) was to use narrative writing and visual nar-
ratology to unpick and locate the researcher’s skillset in a period of swift
change and marked transition. The study found that using grounded the-
ory as a research methodology helped arrive at potentially illuminating
theories and self-knowledge. These were limited, however, by the under-
lying risk of indulgence, subjective autobiographical writing and partic-
ipant bias. The paper also has potential value as a way of helping early
career teachers explore critical incidents.
Main research questions
How might my post-pandemic work embrace autoethnographic pedagogy,

with its use of narrative writing, reflexivity and ‘autobiographical sharing’
(Atherton, 2019; Denzin, 2003; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Pennington, 2007)?
Why autoethnography?
Autoethnography is a qualitative research method, in which the author is

frequently placed at the centre of the research in order to interrogate social
phenomena (Atherton, 2019). The literature reflects its iconoclastic appeal
(Atherton, 2019; Wall, 2008), its academic validity (Anderson, 2006; Denzin
& Lincoln, 2011; Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2008), its diversity of form and
its fluidity.
Centring the author
As an embodied, embedded author, the autoethnography lays themself

bare and places them in a potentially vulnerable position (Atherton, 2019,
2020b; Atkinson, Coffey & Delamont, 2003; Ellis & Bochner, 2006). Their
subjective reflections are coded and analysed systematically, in order that
they can formulate analytical insights (Anderson, 2006, Atherton, 2022;
Ellis et al., 2011). Though the coding and analysis often adopt traditional
methods, the analysis is frequently an iterative, meandering process. The
author can be engaged in a form of cartography, mapping their personal
or professional self through a sometimes performative persona (Atherton,
2020a, 2022; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Spry, 2000).
Diversity and academic validity
The form of autoethnography attracts a diverse range of topics as there are

identities and their attendant issues. This category of scholars’ own diverse
subject positions is matched by the creative lassitude that autoethnogra-
phy allows (Atherton, 2020b, 2022; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011; Wall, 2008).
Moreover, this freedom permits the use of the author’s life, career, position-
ality, identity or even body as part of their narrative writing (Atherton, 2020c,
2022; Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011; Spry, 2000; Wall, 2008). Narrating the
arguably augmented self can produce engaging texts, though the purpose is
for the texts to resonate beyond the self when they are combined with rig-
orous research design and theory (Anderson, 2006; Atherton, 2020c, 2022;
Chang, 2008; Duncan, 2004; Wilkinson, 2020). Furthermore, the voices of
individuals and their lived experiences can be amplified this way; through
this, the global body of knowledge may be enriched (Atherton, 2020c, 2022;
Ellis & Flaherty, 1992; Fuchs, 2017). Some autoethnography views the reader
as a co-creator of the text (Atherton, 2020c, 2022; Campbell, 2017; Denzin &
Lincoln, 2011; Ellis & Bochner, 2010; McIlveen, 2008; Rorty, 1982).
Iconoclasm and innovation
The influence of postmodernism has emboldened autoethnography to chal-

lenge the perceived hegemony of conventional social science (Wall, 2008).
Autoethnography also questions the positivist view of the nature of knowl-
edge (Atherton, 2020c, 2022; Ellis et al., 2011). This challenge to positivist
notions of universal truths means that the researcher as participant is more
transparent about their own values and subject position (Atherton, 2019,
2022; Bochner, 2012; Wall, 2008). If the researcher can transcend the fixed,
essentialist self, therefore, they might attain greater awareness of their con-
texts and positionality through a form of phenomenological sense-making,
which may help the cause of social justice (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2008;
Atherton, 2020c, 2022; Doloriert & Sambrook, 2012; Hylton & Long, 2017).
Though autoethnographers are empowered by creative freedoms, their
method of inquiry can be viewed as chaotic and unruly (Atherton, 2020c,

2022; Ellis & Bochner, 2006, p. 433).
Critique
Though the proponents and champions of autoethnography are manifold,

there are some in academia who deride it. Autoethnography has contested
definitions with weak boundaries (Atherton, 2020c, 2022; Stahlke Wall,
2016). Its hybrid nature draws on autobiography and ethnography.
The literature explores how autoethnographers are often freed from sin-
gle research methodologies, which can make the findings and analysis lack
focus or generalisability (Atherton, 2019, 2020b; Stahlke Wall, 2016). This
perceived absence of discipline can risk accusations of transgressive indul-
gence (Atherton, 2019, 2022; Campbell, 2017; Stahlke Wall, 2016). Indeed,
the virtues of autoethnography are frequently perceived as residing solely
in the mind of the autoethnographer. Autoethnographers are sometimes
viewed as indulgent navel-gazers (Campbell, 2017) and their work lacking in
academic rigour to the detriment of academia (Anderson, 2006; Campbell,
2017; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).
Research design
The initial research questions were as follows: Who am I? Do I exist? (Ellis

& Bochner, 2010). The theoretical concept explored was that of the social
bricoleur, who constructs a new identity from disparate elements of social
media (Atay, 2020; Hebdige, 1979).
The dataset was from a selection of narrative writing of my own experi-
ences in the form of a mock novel ‘Confessions of a portfolio careerist’ and
also my Twitter posts over a transformative six-month period. The intention
was to reflect on and chronicle my emerging digital literacy and positional-
ity (Clark, 2020).
The fractured nature of my work helped me gather the following sources
of data in a short space of time:
• blogs about edtech.

• vlogs about being an Early Career Teacher.
• books and book chapters that I had written.
• academic journal papers.
• podcasts – audio of interviews with me.
• my podcast interviews with people in edtech.

• transcripts of interviews with me.
• social media posts (tweets and LinkedIn posts and articles).
• PowerPoint presentations from conferences and events.
• narrative writing of experiences and a positivist critique of the useful-
ness of memories (Fuchs, 2017).
• narrative writing as a legitimate way of making sense of the nonsensical
(Sparkes, 2000).
This created a potentially rich but unwieldy dataset, from which I had to
make decisions about what to select and what to omit. The dataset is con-
strained by the length of the publication to which it is targeted, in this case,
a book chapter of 5,000 words.
In terms of originality, this chapter develops Atherton (2020a) and
Atherton (2022) by interrogating methods of data collection, which is a
convention of autoethnographic qualitative research. The data collection
methods gleaned quantitative data, which was drawn from my own Twitter
Analytics and qualitative data derived from narrative writing (see Chapter
6 for details of these). The use of thematic analysis adds legitimacy, rigour
and focus to both the narrative writing and quantitative data. The paper
developed the themes of edtech use in initial teacher education (ITE) but
this time, the findings pointed towards the potential benefits of deploying
autoethnographic methods as reflection tools. My findings are innovative
in the field of teacher education. I developed the idea that the digital per-
sona can help us understand our own journey. The digital and social self,
therefore, becomes our perception of ourselves. The mixed methods helped
maintain a sense of rigour, as there were quantitative metrics from Twitter
Analytics and qualitative data from narrative writing. Furthermore, the pro-
ject aimed to adopt Le Roux’s (2017) criteria for academic rigour in qual-
itative research, namely: ‘a worthy topic, rich rigour, sincerity, credibility,
resonance, significant contribution, ethical, meaningful coherence.’ (Le
Roux, 2017, p. 197).
Findings and analysis
This section builds on and makes reference to Chapter 6 and Atherton

(2020b, 2022). As an academic in the gig economy (which I have termed ‘gig-
ademia’), the pervasive neoliberalist culture in higher education could be
seen to suppress skills. The academic is disenfranchised and deskilled. At the
same time, I had also felt the thrill of being multi-skilled and empowered,
Figure 7.1 A meme created by me to be used as qualitative data
as my professional and personal mindset are inextricable (Greene, 1994).

Neoliberalist culture, of course, privileges the rational individual over the
potentially anarchic collective (Ellis, 2016; Strom & Martin, 2017). I have
benefitted from this by creating my own niche, much of which is entre-
preneurial and individual. In that sense, I had become a micropreneur, who
thrives on creating and growing a personal brand that depends on trust, rela-
tionships and, of course, outcomes. I am an exemplar of new work patterns,
which are polarised, atomised and thrive on uncertainty and risk (Atherton,
2020c, 2022; Hall, 2016) (Figure 7.1).
My own attendance edtech events – academic conferences
I presented at several events between 2020 and 2021, around which my

social strategy was to create a persona. This persona worked as a provoca-
tion around the content of my presentations – autoethnography and social
media tools and data (Figure 7.2).
Thematic analysis of promotional materials for events and

social media activity
This section draws on Atherton (2020a) and Atherton (2022). Again, I

employed thematic coding to enable me to deconstruct feelings, dis-
cern themes and subtexts, and essentially address the question, ‘So what?’
Figure 7.2 Creation of a social media persona – edtech double agent
(Atherton, 2020a; Rolfe et al., 2011). This method may have an advantage
over the quantitative metrics that are readily available through social media
analytics. An analysis of qualitative content, by contrast, moves data from
an amorphous, two-dimensional dataset to a ‘three-dimensional narrative
inquiry space’ (Atherton, 2020a; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 131).
The next of my autoethnographic papers (Atherton, 2022) developed the
theme of narrative writing and focused on research methods to examine
how a teacher educator can explore their experiences using autoethnogra-
phy. This paper examined visual narratology as a way of presenting qual-
itative primary data. The paper was an autoethnographic study with the
overall goal of helping teacher educators understand their digital literacies
in a time of uncertainty and flux (Atherton, 2022). The researcher deployed
thematic analysis as the organising methodological framework. This per-
formative autoethnographic method provided creative freedom and the sat-
isfaction of a renewed perspective for the author ( Jay & Johnson, 2002). This
primary qualitative data was given legitimacy and structure by the use of
thematic analysis as a methodology.
This paper developed the structure and methodology in Atherton (2020b).

Atherton (2022), however, placed greater emphasis on narrative writing as
qualitative data. While the former used grounded theory as a methodology,
the latter applied thematic analysis for a greater emphasis on an exploration
of the methods of data collection, and also suggested thematic analysis as
a more methodologically robust and rigorous way of analysing the qualita-
tive data. I applied reflexive thematic analysis to help discriminate between
redundant and relevant data, restrict the lines of inquiry, then attempt to
make generalisations (Braun & Clarke, 2019). The ongoing theme of a bridge
over a chasm is developed in this paper. Gibbs’ (1988) model of reflection is
used as a bridge between trainees’ experiences and their individual stories,
which will be the subject of the upcoming collaborative autoethnography.
I would like to explore how my public face on social media is both a nar-
rative construction and an imaginative reconstruction. It is necessary to
view this through the lens of the broader issues of digital autoethnogra-
phy. In this way, the research may better reflect the changing ways in which
educators are conducting themselves as they are immersed in digital cul-
ture (Atay, 2020; Dunn & Myers, 2020). In that sense, my social media inter-
actions create a sense of a social bricoleur (Hebdige, 1979). If a bricoleur
reforms meaning from disparate, sometimes incongruous elements, I pro-
pose that the social bricoleur takes this a step further. By chronicling their
working lives partly as a performative autoethnography, the social bricoleur
resists categorisation and imposes meaning (Baker & Nelson, 2005, in Di
Domenico et al., 2010). Subsequently, I am driven to explore the extent to
which these narrative constructions and reconstructions exist in a political
and ideological space.
I am at the beginning of my edtech journey and hope it always feels this

way. With this in mind, I will not provide a short list of edtech platforms
that have inspired me since 2017. To inspire me, edtech needs to be easy
to use and likely to make learning resources, activities or assessment more
effective. It would, of course, be naive to suggest that it is the technology –
not the management of the class, subject knowledge and student feedback –
that are the most powerful influence on learning (Atherton, 2018, 2020c;
Hattie, 2011).
• Canva
Quick and easy, Canva can help teachers and their students create and col-
laborate on a multitude of visual resources.
• Book Creator
Edtech really can help anyone tell their story. Teachers can support chil-
dren’s writing through frequent informal feedback. Classes can create col-
laborative fiction, travelogues, diaries and so on – and actually publish.
• Edpuzzle
There is no hiding place for the students because they know that they are
about to be asked a question about a bite-sized video extract.
• Kahoot!
An obvious choice but always worth watching for its potential to engage
students and what skilled teachers can do with it (Atherton, 2018).
• Anchor
Anchor is not strictly edtech but tech that can be very useful in education to
help develop oracy, confidence, technical skills and entrepreneurship.
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Blockchain, edtech and 8
learning communities
How can students and teachers thrive using collaborative social media within
safe boundaries? How can advances in blockchain technologies improve
these communities?
Instead of talking about my own experiences of and feelings towards

blockchain technologies in education, I’ll let one of my podcast guests
Zoe Griffiths (Atherton, 2020) place these emerging technologies in the
context of coming out of the pandemic. Zoe is the founder of Alchemy of
Learning, and a socially responsible entrepreneur and education futurist:
I’m Zoe Griffiths. As I finish my daily early morning rituals, exercise, med-
itation, I feel the power of awareness and creative control, elevating my hope,
strength and optimism, a counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility
during times of Covid. I have absolute clarity, though, that such radical uncer-
tainty brings an opportunity to change. It welcomes infinite possibilities and an
open door to overcome conventional thinking. A system that enables decision
makers to be responsive real-time by immediate access to data dashboards.
I envisage deploying AI, blockchain and machine learning technology on a
large scale, through a centralised cloud repository and enabling transparent data
to be available on a micro and macro level to create an efficient, responsive, more
agile network-based education system that really addresses disparities.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-8
Blockchain, edtech and learning communities 113
A systems approach to celebrating our learners’ unique talents and a gift of

efficiency, not accountability, for our teachers, enabling them to serve as leaders
of learning with the time, love and care that efficient systems allow. A platform
for leaders and ministers to observe embarked trends and continually create a
purposeful coherent, responsive education system that serves the future. I’m curi-
ous about the return on investment of the financial pedagogical and psychological
costs of formal exams and their application to preparing the future workforces.
There’s a real opportunity here to loosen the disproportionate emphasis on
curriculum-driven exams and more about how learning outcomes defines us as a
lifelong learner on our journey into the labour market. The COVID-19 pandemic
has overwhelmingly driven home the essential interconnectedness of our family,
connecting the community to create the best team around the learner to enable
them to flourish shows a real light on our humanity.
It takes a community to raise a child, a community that nourishes, supports,
provides love and a strong sense of purpose on their journey as a life learner; pre-
paring learners for lives of meaning by helping them make connections between
what they’re learning now and the person they want to become in the future is
all of our responsibility.
These key relationships and partnerships that are formed from birth model
the behaviours, expectations – can have a huge effect upon personal growth, suc-
cess and finding our unique talents. The dream team can include NHS, parents,
learners, friends, teachers, school leaders, and social. I envisage an interconnected
public service ecosystem based on blockchain to keep children safe, empower
health, provide support when challenges arrive and find the unique talents of the
future generation.
And this innovative life learning pathway throughout the school system into
the labour market is equity-centred and takes care of health and wellbeing, is
fun, engaging and celebrates the attributes of a person as well as the learning
outcomes to be achieved. As a former international athlete, I had a big support
team around me to ensure I fulfilled my peak performance.
Let’s create a system like this for us. These ideas led me to be curious about how
we create a society that trusts state usage. Data sovereignty has been challenged
immeasurably during the pandemic with the urgency of rapid access to a broad
range of data, really essential to a timely, effective response to the pandemic.
And intrusion to our privacy has become a matter of public interest and an
exception for COVID-19 and seemingly justified by human rights. Our civil rights
are indeed guaranteed and should hold, even if privacy is weakened, however
there’s never been a greater sense of urgency for data stewardship to build trust.
(Continued)
114 Blockchain, edtech and learning communities
I’m curious about a mechanism and perhaps an overarching branch of the

Office of National Statistics that would assess the role of stewardship to reassure
set standards, build trust, secure our data, provide an ethics advisor and instigate
a positive campaign to the public to wholly understand the benefits of data use.
Covid is a very strong use case for data stewardship. There’s nothing more
apparent than the need to focus on continuous development of wellbeing to
ensure that we are able to flourish; to create a new future. Learning the skills
of wellbeing during adversity at every age of our life learning journey is funda-
mental for our future health, fulfilment and our effectiveness in dealing with the
changing face of the labour market.
The ripple effects of COVID-19 will be with us for some time, and it will
require us to draw upon all of our character strengths in rebuilding our families
and communities. Never has there been a group with a sense of urgency, urgency
for us to do our own self-care to embed positive psychology into our personal
school and professional life.
This would be the game changer in how we are able to manage the disruption
and change that is imminent. Thanks, Pete, for providing a platform for me to
express and share my conscious thoughts. It’s been a real welcome balance with
moments of solitude.
Since this inspirational audio clip, I have been fascinated by real-life
examples of how the rapid adoption of blockchain technologies infil-
trates the world of education.
At the same time, I am eager to follow the progress of recent and
emerging private learning communities. If schools are fearful of social
media, they must acknowledge that students expect to be part of social
learning communities. When those communities are spared the nega-
tivity and anarchy of existing social platforms, they can provide a safe
space to help children and educators thrive. With this in mind, I will also
be providing a case study of GoBubble, a walled-garden Instagram, and
Opogo, a professional community for teachers.
The overarching objective of this review is to position emerging block-

chain technologies in the context of research literature about education
from 2018 to 2022. Though the search terms targeted the Secondary/High
School sector, it was necessary to include some studies that may have not
been conducted in this sector but whose findings and conclusions could be
transferable.
Defining blockchain
Blockchain is generally known as the technology that underpins cryp-

tocurrencies, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin (Arenas & Fernandez, 2018).
Blockchain technology dates back to 2008 when customers of Bitcoin were
empowered to cut, remove intermediaries and make swifter, unmediated,
immutable and transparent financial transactions (Alammary, 2019; Chen
et al., 2018). The appeal of peer-to-peer networked transactions is that they
provide the cryptographic proof of a decentralised chain of transactions
(Chen et al., 2018; Pandey et al., 2022). In the context of education, this
technology can be deployed to securely manage certificates and grades,
student loans, even learning passports (Atherton, 2022; Bdiwi et al., 2018;
Kolvenbach, Ruland & Gräther, 2018; RillaFi, 2021; Verma & Sheel, 2022).
Blockchain is in its infancy
Blockchain technology in education was very much in its infancy at time

of writing; there had been only a few systematic reviews and there was a
general paucity of studies about the phenomenon (Bhaskar, Tiwari & Joshi,
2021; Pandey et al., 2022; Yna et al., 2019). This issue is magnified if we
attempt to restrict the literature to the context of Secondary/High School
education. As a consequence, some of the studies cited here may be adopted
across many or all education sectors but this is not imminent. This is fur-
ther problematised by the fact that systematic reviews become dated very
quickly as the technologies develop and adoption gathers momentum; sim-
ilarly, many studies are drawn from conference proceedings, which could
reflect the iterative yet rapid nature of developments in the blockchain space
(Alammary et al., 2019; Arenas & Fernandez, 2018; Bdiwi et al., 2018; Bore
et al., 2017; Chen et al., 2018; Filva et al., 2018; Gresch et al., 2018; Hillman
& Ganesh, 2019; Srivastava et al., 2018). An example of this is Alammary
(2019), whose systematic review addressed relevant applications’ potential
benefits and challenges of adopting blockchain technologies in education.
The literature, therefore, is suitably fragmentary and decentralised
(Alammary et al., 2019; Pandey et al., 2022). This is further problematised by
the limited query strings that researchers are able to attempt. My searches –
on the university databases and Google Scholar – were limited to “block-
chain AND education”, “blockchain AND teaching” and “blockchain AND
learning”. The search results were likely to return studies that were not rele-
vant to education, especially in the Secondary/High School sector.
A work in progress?
The narrow range of literature specific to Secondary/High School sug-

gests that they are lagging behind universities in the adoption of block-
chain. A significant proportion of the literature is derived from conference
proceedings reporting on proposals, preliminary findings or prototypes.
Examples of these are Arenas, R., & Fernandez’s (2018) proposal for
‘CredenceLedger’, a system that enables secure storage of academic data.
Preliminary conclusions were that CredenceLedger improved efficiency
and facilitated accessibility of data across institutions. A similar develop-
ment was revealed through conference proceedings by Badr et al. (2019)
with a secure system that would allow more student-centred management
of academic records. Some conference proceedings report on projects that
appear niche but could have profound implications if there is international
cooperation and collaboration. For example, Rahman et al. (2018) state
that secure data related to the diagnosis of dyslexia could be easily shared
around the world. The next steps were more clinical trials in other coun-
tries, which could retard the development of the system (Rahman et al.,
2018). Similarly, Bdiwi et al. (2018) described the quest for approval of a
Ubiquitous Learning Environment (ULE) based on the Internet of Things
(IoT). The paper concluded that the proposed decentralised ULE made
improvements to security through its analysis of the extent to which data
is confidential, available or reliable (Bdiwi et al., 2018) – a common theme
in the literature.
Caution and hostility
The literature has not dismissed limitations – even fears – surrounding

blockchain in education. An example of this is identified in Loukil, Abed &
Boukadi’s (2021) systematic review. Blockchain technologies’ de-centralisation
may be explored in the context of improvements in trust and security around
student payments and grades but there are doubts as to whether it will replace
the personalised support from educators (Loukil, Abed & Boukadi, 2021;
Pandey et al., 2022). In addition to these limitations, there is widespread cau-
tion regarding the extent to which blockchain technologies waste electricity
(Pandey et al., 2022). In counterpoint, some studies conclude that blockchain
could rationalise some working practices to the extent that public institu-
tions may soon contribute to UN Sustainability Goals (Hughes et al., 2019).
Emerging systems for data management in education
The literature is increasingly reporting on emerging systems using block-

chain for providing and storing university grades or certificates (Arenas &
Fernandez, 2018; Gresch et al., 2018; & Dimitrov, 2017) and to reflect an
individual learning journey (Bdiwi et al., 2018). Blockchain was beginning
to be discussed in the context of data management in education in the late
2010s and early 2020s (Bdiwi et al., 2018; Bore et al., 2017; Filva et al., 2018;
Hillman & Ganesh, 2019; Liang & Zhao, 2020; Verma & Sheel, 2022; Zhao
et al., 2020). A number of conference proceedings are showcasing proto-
types of blockchain technologies (Prinz et al., 2020).
From Web 3.0 towards Web 4.0?
Zipoy (2022, in Atherton, 2022), places RillaFi.io in the context of Web 3.0,
where the internet has become naturally collaborative and decentralised.
This is explored in much more detail in the transcript of a podcast interview
with Ted Zipoy, later in this chapter. There is significant evidence that many
schools are still in Web 2.0, where information and learning materials are
frequently static entities that have been deposited on virtual learning envi-
ronments (VLEs). Given the rapid adoption that the literature is recognising,
blockchain technologies could accelerate any transition into what Salmon
(2019) terms as Education 4.0. This education-specific Web 4.0 is likely to
be ‘supercharged’ by AI (Salmon, 2019) but there is little consensus on what
this might mean (Atherton, 2019; Luckin, 2018; Luckin & Kent 2019). Some
suggestions are offered by Turcu, Turcu and Chiuchișan, who examine the
potential uses of blockchain in swiftly navigating data from disparate sources
and creating virtual passports for lifelong learning (2019, p. 3).
Conclusions and further research
In terms of research gaps, Loukil, Abed & Boukadi’s (2021) systematic

review recommended the acknowledgement of some notable issues that
were not prominent at the time of writing. One was that the wholesale
adoption of blockchain technology in education will necessitate stakehold-
ers and those involved in policy and research to consider the issues associ-
ated with data protection or GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation,
GDPR, 2016). Steiu (2020) agrees and also refers to the caution with which
school governors approach the adoption of blockchain. In addition to legal

issues, Loukil, Abed & Boukadi (2021) recommended that people consider
how the immutability of blockchain may inhibit legitimate amendments of
data in educational institutions, They also warned about the limits to scala-
bility in light of variable levels of adoption and the permanent removal of
data through private key loss (Loukil, Abed & Boukadi, 2021, p. 5794). There
were few studies into niche blockchain projects in education that could be
easily replicable and made impactful by collaboration across the globe.
The next section moves on to look closely at two learning communities.
The first is a blockchain-powered platform to connect students looking for
loans with potential donors – RillaFi – which claims to be creating a mutu-
ally beneficial community. After this, I will examine Opogo, a social enter-
prise and educational learning community. These case studies will also serve
a bridge to the next chapter.
Empirical data
The data for the first case study will be drawn from an edited transcription
of a semi-structured podcast interview with Ted Zipoy, the Chief Innovation
Officer at RillaFi.io (Atherton, 2022). RillaFi describes itself as follows:
RillaFi seeks to take the student debt crisis head on leveraging the
power of blockchain and de-fi. Our platform enables and connects all
of academia through our native ecosystem, token, and community.
RillaFi allows users to conduct peer-to-peer transactions on digital
platforms to support higher education.
(RillaFi, 2021, p. 1)
Transcript of interview with Ted Zipoy on Edtech Innovators

(Atherton, 2022)
Pete
Hello, it’s Pete here and welcome to Edtech Innovators.

In this episode, we’ll answer the following questions. Number one:
can technology solve the student debt crisis? Number two, what is block-
chain? Number three. What is crypto? And number four. What is de-fi or
decentralised finance? What do all of these have to do with education?
Why should anyone care? Well, this week we had an interview with Ted
Zipoy, the chief innovation officer at scholar.
Please enjoy.
Hello, Ted Zipoy from RillaFi – with a zero, not an ‘O’. You must
explain that if that’s okay.
Ted
Yeah, happy to do so. So, at RillaFi, we like to think that the zero repre-
sents the student that is going to zero, or hopefully more students grad-
uating with less debt. So that’s our mission and vision and our title there.
Pete
Anyway, one of the overarching things and, or developing themes of this

podcast has been what I call the pandemic pivot. Because of Covid, oppor-
tunities have been presented to them and they have, in some cases, really
pivoted their ideas and I suppose really thought on their feet and for the
benefit of the businesses and their customers. So, can you tell us some-
thing about that?
Ted
Absolutely. You know a little bit of context about our project. We have
been existing in what we call Web 2.0, or the web that’s familiar to all
of us. A platform called RillaFi is a scholarship aggregator. So instead of
students searching, you know, far and wide for different solutions – you
know, different kinds of scholarships from different foundations – it’s
all in one place. We like to call it like the dating app for scholarships, fill
out your application once. And by clicking one button, you can apply
to them very quickly. That obviously, you know, has shifted with the
pandemic.
Traditionally, we were focusing on four-year degrees. So, you know, if
you think of university, it’s four years to do your undergrad, some may
pursue post-graduate, but we’ve actually seen a shift away from that in a
few ways, especially in this era of the Covid shift.
(Continued)
The world I live in, call it Web 3.0, call it crypto, blockchain, we’ve seen
a large shift towards what’s called certificate-based learning. So instead of
getting a four-year degree, this is where you might do a coding bootcamp
to kind of get familiar with coding, and then you do a lot of learning on
the job.
So, instead of a four-year degree, you’d be getting these different eight
weeks to traditionally six-month kind of certifications and build your
resume that way. So that’s kind of an exciting shift and we’re excited to
potentially be a scholarship or funding partner for those programs as
nothing exists today for them.
And the other really interesting shift that I’m sure we’ll have some
opportunity to discuss is kind of what does remote education look like?
I think we all have heard the term ‘Zoom university’ and some people
really enjoyed it, but I know there’s a lot of learners that didn’t feel it was
as immersive as they would in a classroom.
Something that’s kind of the happy medium between Zoom university
and a traditional university, is this emerging space called the metaverse or
these different kinds of virtual reality. To define metaverse in the Web
3.0 world, essentially what this is … most people think of it as more so
almost like a video game feel, but it’s a kind of a social network.
So, think of, you know, Facebook meets the SIMS where the other
SIMS in the world are your friends and your peers. But instead of just
having a single dimension or like Facebook where I’m communicating
through texts and images, this is where you would actually have a digital
representation of yourself and interact in a more meaningful way and in
a very free, free world.
So, on Facebook, there are very limited actions you can take, you can
post, you can go on the market. They have a specific user case versus
many others who think that in the metaverse you can interact with dif-
ferent people as you please. And I’m really curious to see how that looks
for education.
Pete
Yeah. More of that later about the potential isolation of the dominance
of it, like the preponderance of technology in education. Before we do
any of that, let’s take a step back if we may just democratise the pro-
cess. So, you’re talking about Web 2.0 vs Web 3.0. So, for people who
aren’t that familiar with terms like these, you said that RillaFi is a Web
3.0 application. So, my question is really when will we know we have

reached Web 3.0?
When we’ve reached Web 4.0, what will that look like?
Ted
It’s a great question. So just to kind of define a couple terms here. So,
Web 1.0, think about the very early, kind of the mid-90s, your very basic
browsers where you’re getting connected to information.
And you’re more so just a kind of a recipient you’re kind of a con-
sumer of the web. When you bring in a few different things, we have Web
2.0, with social connectivity and user generated content. Think about
social media platforms, where you’re actually contributing as well as con-
suming. This is also called the mobile era – everything can be in the palm
of your hand. You can do your shopping, et cetera. We’re building in
Web 3.0, there’s two really big elements that define Web 3.0. First and
foremost, would be decentralisation.
As we think about Web 2.0 today, there are these massive technology
companies – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google – that we all
know that control the majority of the flow of the information. They con-
trol the majority of how you’re consuming it and the roadmap for that.
Decentralisation is kind of an answer in the opposite where the com-
munity is leading the development, where these, what we call protocols
instead of a company, kind of have a mission and a vision, but we’re
building it together. All of it is done in a very democratic process. So, if
we want to build something as a community, we vote on doing that.
And so, the idea is to take away some of that centralised power and
distribute it back to the kind of the community. This has really big impli-
cations for sure. And finance. I think that’s where cryptocurrency is built
from – instead of going to a centralised bank or going to some of these
larger financial institutions.
Now we have a decentralised network of money and vending options.
So instead of going to a bank, I can go to a decentralised tool – what’s
called de-fi or decentralised finance – where we’re rewarding communi-
ties, instead of these larger organisations. As far as Web 4.0 is concerned,
I’m not a hundred percent sure what that will look like. I think we’ve
probably got another five to ten years of innovation here. And once that
the adoption curve is stronger in the metaverse and virtual reality plays, I
think that’ll open the door for even more.
(Continued)
Pete
Yeah, we would expect Web 4.0 to be supercharged by AI and machine

learning. And of course, we’re starting to get there with your proposal
within Web 3.0. To take a step sideways as opposed to backwards, let’s
talk about blockchain again so that everybody’s clear on the relevance of
this to education.
So, can I read it as a definition, for you, a definition of blockchain from
an Indian scholar? So, Pandey (2021) says that blockchain is an immuta-
ble decentralised database, a chain of blocks, which store information
such as transactions, dates, times, amounts and participants. It makes it
very difficult to change previous blocks, thus ensuring immutability and
uniqueness.
So, are you okay with that definition? Is there anything that you would
add or take away?
Ted
I think that’s actually a really all-encompassing view of what blockchain is.

And, for those that are listening, that aren’t super familiar with, some of
that’s very high level. I know we talked about hashes and blocks. What I
would like to do is to encourage people to think that it’s a common ledger.
It’s kind of that trustless and permissionless feeling where we all have a
common database. We’re all looking at the same data and we all agree
that it’s, you know, the truth. So, it’s that ultimate accountability and vis-
ibility, that really, is the biggest difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.
Pete
So, without getting too political or too utopian about the whole process
of what you’re striving for, what are the challenges here? If de-fi is obvi-
ously decentralised, then in what ways is the centralisation of a student
finance a problem?
Ted
If we take a look at today, and I’ll definitely speak from a US-centric

perspective, the majority of student loans are federally guaranteed. So,
the centralisation does a few things. The biggest issue is that it’s kind
of unregulated. There’s not a ton of competition, being that it’s coming
from one source. The second is that the student debt is something that
you take with you to your grave. You know, the only way to get out of it
is by declaring bankruptcy: it still sticks with you, as well as, you know,
the only way out is through death.
And so, it can really put people in a tough spot, since it is tied to your
credit. This actually has people kind of delaying it since it’s tied in with
the government, the centralisation. They’re also the people that do some
of the mortgages and private business loans.
And so, by having the student debt and being delinquent on it, you can
actually set yourself back in terms of growing your family and starting
to buy a home or a business. And so that centralisation kind of gives all
that power there. There is a lack of innovation and competition too; they
have that visibility and connectivity to other elements of your finances.
Our initial focus is actually on scholarships and charitable giving
within academia. In the US, and the majority of countries around the
world, the money that universities use to fund their operations, fund stu-
dents, et cetera, it’s run through an endowment. If we take a look at
these academic endowments, these centralised endowments, there are
a few issues. One: they are very underperforming. So, on average they
return around 5.2%, which in the US is subject to inflation. The other
element is that they also take a very high overhead.
And so, the combination of low performance and high overhead
means that the money that is donated does not go as far as we would
hope it would. The second issue is that this sense is a centralised author-
ity managing the money. They also manage how that money is spent.
Pete
So, would I be right in saying that the whole de-fi system is a lot more
ethical, about the community, that it’s more profitable and stronger if
everybody’s contributing towards that community, as opposed to taking
what they can for themselves?
Ted
Absolutely. And I think, you know, the power of blockchain and the
power of Web 3.0 is what we call peer-to-peer networks where, instead
(Continued)
of engaging through a middleman, engaging through an endowment,

donors in our system can actually connect directly to students, find them
and make that decision for themselves. So, peer-to-peer networks enable
a lot of things. And what we’d like to say is that they’re trustless, mean-
ing I don’t need to trust the middleman since I’m doing a transaction
between me and another person, and that’s really powerful. So, we think
it’s definitely more democratic, more equitable.
And I think that’s the future, as we move forward.
Pete
Excellent. So, let’s take it from the point of view of a student then. So,
if I’m a student and I’m looking for scholarships, how do I get started?
What do I expect? Let’s do a sort of mini SWOT analysis, what their
strengths and weaknesses are, opportunities and threats for me?
Ted
Yeah. Awesome. As a student, traditionally, what it looks like to find a

scholarship is that they may be offered from your university. They may be
offered from private money, and it’s oftentimes really, really hard to actu-
ally track down reliable sources of scholarships to apply to. So, there are
different platforms that serve as kind of aggregators saying, we collect all
the scholarships. You can apply to them in a very simple way.
But right now, that’s not super highly adopted. So that’s kind of where
our original platform was born - RillaFi. There’s around 2,000, 3,000 dif-
ferent scholarships on there that you can fill out your profile, meaning
this is who I am, these are my needs, this is my cultural background, my
academic background, mission and vision. And what we do is essentially
match that to donor-provided scholarships that have those same prices.
Again, I’ll kind of go back to the examples of maybe I am a woman in
STEM seeking scholarships. Well, now there’s a donor on the other side.
And we connect them in that peer-to-peer fashion – that’s a really unique
thing. What we’d like to do is make that scholarship application process
much, much simpler. You only have to fill out your profile once and then
to apply to scholarships. It’s one click and so by doing that one, we save
you a ton of time to get you access to a lot more scholarships. The really
exciting part is that as part of our platform, when you fill out your profile,
you actually do create a cryptocurrency wallet as well. So, we actually

have some of this Web 3.0 education, getting people comfortable and
familiar with what it means to leverage cryptocurrency, leverage block-
chain and digital assets too, so it connects them. As a student that’s multi
beneficial – you have a much better chance of receiving a scholarship in
a much faster way, but you also get kind of immersed into the Web 3.0
world in a really kind of meaningful way. We walk with you instead of
saying here, ‘go learn’. Because it is an intimidating world if you don’t
have that background or passion.
Pete
Yeah. And so, I’m sorry to bring this up. I’m thinking about some parents
who are involved in this process, supporting their children, maybe quite
fearful about crypto. They may be saying that we won’t invest in crypto
because your wallet will disappear or you’ll be hacked. And it’s a very
volatile market. So, what would you say to reassure parents?
Ted
Yeah, I hear those kinds of critiques all the time. And my, my biggest
rebuttal is, you know, looking at the current state of what money means
and some of your money management. You also hear the term like
crypto is sometimes used for nefarious acts, but in fact, the US dollars
are used for even more. If there are any nefarious acts, we can see on the
blockchain and kind of circumvent that. The other thing is that we’re
held to the same exact standards of these large social media platforms.
So, when you trust your data with Facebook, Apple, all these other ones
were held to the same standards, if not higher, from a regulatory and
security standpoint. And then the last piece, the volatility. So that’s also
something that’s on our mind. And as you look at cryptocurrencies,
there certainly is volatility, but at the same time, there are other solutions
within it that are not volatile, something that we use. So, the majority,
you know, what we do is take in funds, supercharge them to make them
go further. We do that using stable coins, meaning that the stable coin
is tied to the US dollar. That asset never goes up or down. And so, you
know, my, my answer is, you know, we take a lot of risk upfront, and a lot
of on the security side to make sure that everything is kosher. And then
(Continued)
on the volatility side, we stay away from volatile assets and try to deliver
high-performing stable assets.
Pete
Excellent. So, assess the students’ side. So, what about the donor side? So,
if I want to become a donor and I’m not Bill Gates or Elon Musk, how
do I get involved?
Ted
We have these different niches, maybe it’s a female studying social

studies. Maybe it’s at a particular alma mater. They have that complete
control over who should be receiving it. We have a ton of criteria and
then use AI to match that to our students and get them a very short,
curated list so they can publish their scholarships. We give them a short
list of the top candidates, which is around ten tips. Typically saying,
these are the top students that have applied to your scholarship. And
then we allow them to choose the winner; once they’ve chosen the win-
ner, we take care of the rest. We essentially take that money out of
their donor advised fund. Originally, we had thought about issuing the
money directly to the student case, to use it for things like rent or cost
of living expenses.
So, a requirement for our students that receive scholarships is that they
do a thank you video to close the loop. The donor feels a lot closer to
the students’ lives that they’re impacting versus in a traditional endow-
ment, where you donate the money, they shake your hand and say thank
you. Donors want to feel closer connected to a social cause and feel like
they’re making a positive impact in the world.
Pete
Very cool. This is so interesting. Honestly, I really appreciate this. Finally,

you’ve had a very interesting trip to Istanbul recently. Can you tell us
about this?
Ted
We were in Istanbul, Turkey, raising money for the project. We have a

really extensive network area so by building this web platform, we’ve
kind of had some global presence understanding where these needs lie.
Traditionally here, the student debt crisis, and everyone thinks that’s
definitely a US-centric problem but unfortunately we’re seeing that trend
grow across the world. We also realised that there’s a lot of opportu-
nity to scale this at a global level, whether that be instituting these, call
it ‘RillaFi Turkey’, where it’s, you know, Turkish students can actually
come in and find scholarships. So, you know, it’s just unfortunate that
that is a global problem, but happy that we have a solution that we can
scale. The last kind of quick comment I’ll make about Turkey is that I
know, in the UK cryptocurrency is still kind of on the fringe. Not every-
one is completely comfortable and familiar. In Turkey, everyone is using
crypto. It’s kind of been their safe haven and actually really empower-
ing and enabling for people there, as their own currency has faced some
kind of volatility as well as they have just a very large mixing of cultures
and kind of financing happening there. So crypto has actually become
the common glue for them financially and been empowering for them.
We’re talking down to the cab driver and kind of shop owners, lever-
aging and accepting crypto as well. So really far along that curve and
adoption.
Pete
Yeah, it’s really interesting. Isn’t it? I think, please correct me if I’m
wrong, but the US and the UK have this myth that their currency is very
stable. Certainly, in the UK we think, oh, the British pound is very stable.
The US dollar is very stable. Of course, that’s partly true, but is it really
true?
Ted
It’s a great question. Before I joined this project, I was working at a large
company in the US with around 30,000 employees, making medical
(Continued)
devices for your brain and your heart, et cetera. And when I made the
jump from that job into this one, into Web 3.0 in a startup, it got a lot
of criticism and saying, crypto’s not reliable, you can’t even hold it in
your hand. It’s not backed by anything. But if you kind of uncover the
logistics of the US dollar, you start to find some of the same tendencies,
the fractional backing and it’s kind of the pot calling the kettle black
sometimes. So, I just really found it really inspiring how liberating it was.
Some of the Ukrainian refugees coming to Turkey, their money is not
necessarily good but when they arrive there with things like Bitcoin and
Ethereum, that’s universally accepted. So, it’s kind of the global cur-
rency that empowers people that would never have access to finances.
You know, the unbanked, refugees, et cetera, it’s really been liberating
and powerful to see that adoption and see how it’s helped. That’s right.
And some people couldn’t actually get their own money out of banks
from Ukraine.
Pete
Wow. Well, thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversa-
tion and what I really love about it is just how these hot button topics,
these buzzwords and buzz phrases like de-fi, crypto, blockchain and
we’re seeing them in action and for the purposes of good, you know,
for something very positive for, for young people and the context of
education.
Ted
So, thank you so much for that inspiration. Absolutely. Thank you for the
opportunity to kind of get the message out and we’re excited to scale and
grow this. So we’re excited. Thank you.
Pete
That was Ted Zipoy – a true tech innovator.

That was pretty mind-blowing! Until next time. See you later. Take
care of yourself.
Other online educational communities - Opogo
The final section of this chapter will describe a case study of Opogo – a learn-
ing community for educators. By way of a contrast, closed learning com-
munities like GoBubble, Twiducate and Opogo are innovative, interactive
entities. While they may not yet use blockchain technologies, they are still
at the cutting edge of online educational communities, within a safe space.
Opogo as a learning community
Opogo is a teacher recruitment company. They recently created an online

community for educators. The community is a social enterprise, which is
motivated by issues regarding the recruitment and retention of teachers.
They describe themselves in the following way on their website:
The Opogo Community is a dynamic, secure online environment where

you can meet, share, engage and be inspired by like-minded people.
(Opogo, 2022)
Opogo has numerous high-profile partners, sponsors and accreditation bod-

ies. Previous iterations of the online community consisted of an app and a
website on which community experts would push out relevant content.
Lockdown and the pandemic pivot
During the first lockdown the company pivoted by placing more empha-
sis on positivity, wellbeing and tailoring content to suit members’ interests
and affinities. The challenge was to create an interactive community and to
avoid a one-way message. The new community will be accessed outside of
the app. Members will have their own homepage on which they will accom-
pany teachers through their careers. A further challenge will be mass adop-
tion and the risk of migration to already popular or dominant platforms.
The new community will be called ‘Learn’. Within the community educa-
tors can receive help on relevant training and resources. community experts
will continue to provide support on common wellbeing issues for teachers
and initiate relevant debates about education. The culture will be positive,
a far cry from the echo chamber of social media and the Times Education
Supplement (TES). Members will be given an ‘Edupass’, which will accom-
pany them through their career journey.
Opogo’s research has revealed that they expect brands to create communi-
ties, but most will prefer not to actively participate. Opogo is conscious that
as we move towards Web 3.0, people expect the user experience to be by
customisable, maybe even immersive. Opogo is learning from the metaverse
and the gaming world, particularly Roblox and Fortnite. The platform will
be gamified in that members will be able to earn Opogo Coins, which will
provide them with access to exclusive or premium content. Like the decen-
tralised gaming world, users will be able to earn from their content.
DiGii Social is an evidence-based digital-life edtech training platform that

safeguards children through interacting in an immersive and interactive
social-media like environment for KS2 students.
DiGii Social is children’s social media specifically for Year 5 and Year 6 stu-
dents in their very vulnerable and formative ‘tween’ years. As children inter-
act with their same year level peers, their content is moderated for profanity,
hate speech, abuse, racism, sexism and inappropriate images using the latest
in AI. Learning is extended through an extensive range of educational ani-
mations that are triggered by the child’s own actions.
Access to DiGii Social at school in the ‘moments in-between’ is enough to
cyber-educate and protect your students.
GoBubble
Originally, like Instagram within a walled garden, GoBubble’s mission is to

nurture online communities in school that challenge toxicity and online abuse.
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Rhizomatic learning 9
Pearltrees and online curation tools
Students have access to a limitless, borderless and often formless and unreg-
ulated range of information. How, then, can university students manage an
unwieldy database and make it work for them in a way that develops their
skills and deepens their knowledge? How can student teachers improve their
subject knowledge using collaborative social curation tools like Pearltrees –
a social curation tool? In a world of infinite information, how can teachers
help students develop the skills to create their own learning spaces? How
can teachers make the transition from a disruptive class to a truly disruptive
way of learning (Magana, 2017)?
A narrative account of my own experience
This chapter is about Pearltrees as an example of an online curation tool,

but we’ll come to that later.
I am happiest with a blank page or a blank screen. With a blank page,
I have the freedom to begin the creative process, with that rush of adren-
aline and ocean of possibilities. With a blank computer screen, I can take
the first stuttering steps to asking questions, fixing problems and com-
pleting tasks.
It all starts with a question. But what is the first question? What will
then be the first search term? What related search terms will I pose once
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-9
I’ve processed the results to the initial ones? What becomes clear after a
short number of searches is that there are multiple answers to multiple
questions, never a singular answer to a singular question. Furthermore,
Googling can only provide simple answers – sometimes to complicated
questions – but it cannot offer answers to complex questions (Cormier,
2011). The infinity at our fingertips may feel daunting at first, but when
we embrace it, we realise that the infinity is human complexity. The
only way to deal with human complexity is to understand each human
(Cormier, 2011). This has been a game changer for me as a teacher edu-
cator: student teachers may have an idea of what they need to learn
and improve on but each of their own students are complex beasts. The
assessment framework belongs to a bygone age when exams were on
paper and results took several months to be made public.
I started my edtech journey by deploying connectivism as a theoret-
ical framework (Atherton, 2018a, 2018b; Donnelly, 2010; Downes, 2007;
Siemens, 2005). Connectivism was a useful way of interrogating how the
information can help produce knowledge if there is an interconnected-
ness between users and networks (Shukie, 2019).
The framework here is more specific. This chapter draws upon an
extended metaphor, derived from botany: a rhizome is a subterranean
stem that flourishes horizontally but also sends out shoots and roots. The
metaphor is useful here, as it mirrors how the internet has changed how
students access and curate information (Cormier, 2008, 2011). To some,
the notion of a rhizome is more of a tool than a metaphor. A rhizome
has neither a beginning nor an end and possesses multiple points of entry.
Connections break and re-form and take multiple shapes. Navigating
information becomes a form of online cartography (Atherton, 2019;
Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
The challenge is, of course, to turn this amorphous, sprawling net-
work of information into learning. The relevance of Pearltrees here is in
its organic, collaborative functionality. Yet, its tidy interface of customis-
able rectangles does not feel sprawling. Indeed, its interface encourages
users to organise their resources in files-within-files. This means that a
single ‘collection’ may contain multiple files, images, web pages, videos
and so on.
Pearltrees enables users to build on basic units of data, or pearls. The
user builds their ‘tree’ from bookmarks of web pages of any kind. They
can then organise and share the files using drag and drop (Licurse &
Cook, 2014). My experience of Pearltrees has been with student teachers
of English. I had already tried, critiqued and contextualised many edtech
(Continued)
136 Rhizomatic learning
tools in my first book 50 Ways to Use Technology Enhanced Learning in the

Classroom (Atherton, 2018). It became clear after a few months of using
Pearltrees that my students were open to multiple ways of finding, stor-
ing and sharing crucial resources for the time-poor student teacher. They
were keen to find good-quality resources quickly and to learn from each
other. From the outset, I was excited by the ways in which Pearltrees
may have offered a solution to a pressing problem. My student teachers
are struggling with classroom management, professional identity, lesson
planning, subject knowledge and much more. The issue of workload
united this perfect storm of professional challenges. My students would
frequently ask me if all the information they need could be found in the
same place. They had my sympathies. So, I thought I’d experiment with
encouraging student teachers to use Pearltrees. I demonstrated some of
its features:
• web clipper, to allow easy storage with a single click.

• ability to add online content of any kind.
• ‘Team Up’ option, for easy collaboration.
• share in a single click.
The extent to which Pearltrees was useful to them was variable, as dis-
cussed in the findings and analysis sections. Part of this chapter will consist
of my own recommendations for how to use Pearltrees in a rhizomatic
way, to help student teachers of English build their subject knowledge.
To be absolutely clear, a rhizome is a plant that sends out shoots and
roots horizontally and in many directions. The relevance of rhizomatic
learning to Pearltrees is not the interface of Pearltrees, which consists of
rectangular thumbnail images that can be dragged and dropped. Instead,
Pearltrees is viewed here as a catalyst to a more immersive and meander-
ing way of learning, that is designed to improve autonomy and deepen
understanding.
Theoretical piece
Introduction
I would like to build on the notion of Deleuzian lines of flight, to ask ques-
tions and suggest future research (Honan & Sellers, 2007, Sellers, 2015).
This is intended to reflect the iterative development of edtech products
and the non-linear progress of becoming a teacher. I will create a piece of
rhizoanalysis, which will manifest itself through frequent asides or ques-

tions that may form part of future research. These will appear in bold italics.
In this rhizoanalytic approach,
‘… process and product is concurrent, becoming the inquiry of the

research’ and is ‘dynamic, changing, in flux’.
(Sellers, 2015, p. 6)
This chapter proposes that Pearltrees and other online curation tools could
help student teachers learn rhizomatically. The appeal of rhizomatic learn-
ing is that this proposed state of becoming is a departure from ‘… the “what”
question of teacher identity, toward the “how and why” of identity construction
… the series of co-constructions that unfold, fold over, and refold in the becom-
ing of a teacher.’ (Strom & Martin, 2017, p. 9). It is this proposed status of
becoming that provides both the inspiration and the challenge for rhizom-
atic teaching.
But where does this belong in a pervasive, neoliberal culture and a stand-
ardised, centralised model of teacher education?
I will address my own entanglement and positionality within social curation

tools like Pearltrees to examine why we teach, how learning and learners can
succeed and how learning should be structured (Cormier, 2011). The review
element of this chapter will need to cast its net more widely than the context
of teaching in Secondary/High School. That said, there are still some limi-
tations, for example a paucity of relevant literature in the English language,
especially relating to Pearltrees. In terms of exclusion criteria from this
review, I have de-selected literature that is extraneous to Secondary/High
School public education, hence rhizomatic learning and MOOCs (massive
open online courses) will not be discussed here. There was a significant body
of literature in languages other than English, hence their de-selection.
Honan and Sellers (2011) identify one of the challenges of accurately
representing rhizomatic thinking. The linear nature of a book chapter is,
perhaps, poorly equipped to truly convey the ‘lines of flight’ that traverse,
penetrate, undercut, or even peter out from the assemblage that constitutes
a body of work (Honan & Sellers, 2011, p. 1). I have conducted a small-scale
research project on student teachers’ use of Pearltrees, so I could contribute
to the body of knowledge on rhizomatic learning. Sometimes I felt that all
I had was contradictory or redundant data and underpinning literature. At
other times, I was surprised by how quickly the students would lose interest
in Pearltrees and seek out more conventional, linear or analogue ways to
organise their subject knowledge resources. Recent studies involving student
teachers had found that their use of Pearltrees was tangential to their overall
self-regulated learning (Perez, Marin & Tur, 2018). Also, I questioned the
efficacy of pursuing the notion of disruptive tech-enhanced practices when
my student teachers’ priorities are very different (Magana, 2017).
I recently played devil’s advocate on my podcast. I said that, if the pan-

demic left education with a need to abandon the acceleration in adop-
tion of edtech, then edtech was never that important in the first place.
I think I may have been missing the point. Rhizomatic learning has no
destination and favours complexity over certainty (Cormier, 2011). This
represents a challenge to Western rational thought, which views profes-
sional development within a ‘linear, hierarchical, causal mono-logic model’
(Sherman & Teemant, 2020). I’d need to think differently about the nature
of knowledge and the negotiation of the learning process. There are influ-
ential voices in academia who argue that conceptual knowledge frames and
structures how student teachers conceive of education ‘through values,
aims, curricula, pedagogy, resources and assessment’ (Orchard & Winch,
2015, p. 16). If encouraging student teachers to use Pearltrees for their sub-
ject knowledge resources is likely to be useful, I will need to be patient and
cautious about how students develop their conceptual knowledge in diverse
and rhizomatic ways.
In the UK, the new model of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) prioritises
children’s substantive, disciplinary and foundational knowledge, devel-
oped through logical sequencing and frequent retrieval tasks.
The topic for analysis draws on Cormier (2008, 2011) and Deleuze and
Guattari (1987). The literature here will be selected in a more promiscu-
ous way, to reflect the multiple entry points to the rhizome. Indeed, this
stylistic flexibility echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) contention that the
rhizome is less of an extended metaphor and more of an analytical tool
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Strom & Martin, 2017). This is conceived not as
a systematic process but more of a continuous change in thinking (Sherman
& Teemant, 2020). Conversely, perhaps a more apt metaphor of orches-
tration is proposed by Hordvik, MacPhail and Ronglan (2019), who advise
teacher educators to acknowledge how the teacher education environment
is uncontrollable, relational and ambiguous (Hordvik, MacPhail & Ronglan,
2019, p. 102969).
But successful educators make the world feel controlled, finite, naviga-
ble, manageable.
Despite this potentially anarchic learning culture, the hope is that rhizo-
matic thinking may lead to a reimagining of the semantic web as a place
where students are not merely consumers, recipients or commodities, but
are active ‘co-researchers and co-producers of knowledge’ (Carmichael &
Tracy, 2018, p. 310).
Rhizomatic learning raises significant epistemological questions and renego-
tiates the learning space. Early literature about rhizomatic learning focused
on knowledge as a social, democratic, negotiated phenomenon (Braidotti,
2012; Cormier, 2008, 2011; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). This was a departure
from traditional notions of top-down, teacher-centred pedagogy (Cormier,
2011). Rhizomatic learning considers education as a multi-structural pro-
cess that lacks a clear-cut beginning or end. Student teachers’ subject knowl-
edge will never and should never reach its destination. Instead, elements of
their subject knowledge will be sourced, negotiated, curated, scaffolded and
shared (Albaiz, 2016; Sidebottom, 2019). In the context of teacher education,
student teachers are assembling their own identities as they navigate the
sometimes tempestuous waters and swirling eddies of student, teacher, sub-
ject expert and burgeoning academic (Atherton, 2020). Though some would
disagree, there is something necessarily nomadic about this existence, as stu-
dent teachers eventually thrive by taking ownership over their own decisions
(Braidotti, 2012; Cormier, 2008, 2011; Sidebottom, 2019). Yet so much of
this process feels outside their control. Perhaps platforms like Pearltrees may
provide a way to temporarily ‘deterritorialise’ academic practice (Charteris,
Nye & Jones, 2020; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Sidebottom, 2019).
And whose territory is academic practice? How equitable, transparent is

this? What are the unwritten rules? Can they be challenged?
Consequently, rhizomatic learning can motivate students to develop their

own understanding, participate in active learning, own the learning process
and make their personal connections. This utopian vision does not neglect
the importance of solid pedagogical foundations (Mbati, 2017). Rhizomatic
learning is a departure from the neoliberal learning culture, which has
drawn on positivist notions of empirical knowledge that can be transmit-
ted into rational minds (Atherton 2020b; Strom & Martin, 2017). A chal-
lenge to such positivist notions seems appropriate when there is a paucity
of studies exploring the interrelationship between teaching and learning
(Hordvik, MacPhail & Ronglan, 2019; Loughran, 2006). Perhaps the practice
of instructional design might provide some guidance.
Ellis (2016) examines creative learning principles (CLPs) of instructional
design drawing on an update of Bloom’s Taxonomy in Anderson and
Krathwohl, Eds. (2001). CLPs require a synthesis of recalled and acquired
knowledge, the process of which is ‘the act of rhizomatic learning’ (Ellis,

2016, p. 128). How, though, can educators encourage a challenge to linear,
neoliberal models of knowledge (Ellis, 2016; Strom & Martin 2017) and the
notion of instruction influenced by Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK)
(Webb, 2005)? How might the act of encouraging students to own, curate,
share and critique their own online spaces help make learning holistic and
non-linear? How, also, may this process lead to the creation of teachers who
are more than merely technicians or craft workers but critical professionals
(Orchard & Winch, 2015)?
To develop the criticality that equips student teachers for a world of
complexity, a significant body of the work on rhizomatic learning builds on
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work on the importance of the exploration
of subjectivities and entanglements (Charteris, Nye & Jones, 2020; Cormier,
2008, 2011; Ellis, 2016). As Ellis (2016) suggests, education experts and educa-
tors have heavily borrowed from Deleuzian philosophy. Therefore, learners
are encouraged to learn freely and creatively without preconceived curricula
that limit the abilities of the learners. Moreover, in Secondary/High School,
students are supported by their teachers to critique, analyse and develop con-
cepts based on their understanding to promote creativity and diverse think-
ing, which are increasingly necessary in the contemporary world of work
(Ellis, 2016, 125). Furthermore, by transcending spaces that were previously
controlled by codes and rules, rhizomatic education becomes pertinent,
self-directed, and co-created for the learners (Ellis, 2016, p. 128). Moreover,
these ‘emergent dynamics of becoming and hybridity’ (Sherman & Teemant,
p. 363) provide a greater sense of urgency and creativity (Ellis, 2016, p. 128;
Sherman & Teemant, 2020). Rhizomatic learning develops new perspectives
in education where students discover concepts that would help in advancing
the evolution of culture globally. A notable example of this is Ibrahim (2017),
who references Deleuze and Guattari (1987) by arguing that the rhizomatic
process of ‘becoming Black’ is a complex, complicated, fluid, multiple, and
multiplying, and forever becoming (Ibrahim, 2017, pp. 513–516).
Is there a danger that this challenge to linear, binary thinking may con-
fuse and obfuscate?
Becoming – the journey to Web 4.0?
This state of becoming, whatever it is, exists alongside the adoption of

technology. Some recognise the use of the posthuman practice of deploying
technological tools to self-consciously mediate our actions (Braidotti, 2016;
Sidebottom, 2019). This mediation by technology is conducted without an

acknowledgment of the context of the development of digital technology
in society. Where does Pearltrees sit in relation to the broader context of
edtech? In the previous chapter (Blockchain, edtech and learning communi-
ties), blockchain technologies were considered in the context of Web 3.0.
Education 2.0 developed from static, text-based information to the effective
use of virtual learning environments (VLEs). The online teaching that came
about during COVID-19 accelerated students’ engagement with VLEs,
but the literature is inconclusive about the overall effect on their learning
(Atherton, 2019; Salmon, 2019). Post-Covid, education entered a liminal
space in which assumptions were made about adoption of technology but
often without foundation or mediated by politics or vested interests. In the
early 2020s, Salmon’s (2019) vision of Education 3.0, where collaboration
is facilitated by technology, and Education 4.0, supercharged by machine
learning, was not part of the mainstream experience for most students
(Almeida, 2017; Atherton, 2019; Luckin, 2018a, 2018b; Salmon, 2019). The
meaning that authors are seeking is a series of moving targets; when we get
close to fully understanding the significance and context of any edtech tool
or platform, it changes, a little like the Myth of Proteus. At the start of my
edtech journey in 2018, I wrote this:
The Myth of Proteus is sometimes invoked as a framing device for the

problems teachers face when trying to keep up with new technologies.
In Greek mythology, Proteus was a sea-god, who had the gift of omnis-
cience. Proteus changed shape, taking an elusive liquid form, which
made him virtually impossible to catch.
(Raffaghelli, Cucchiara & Persico,
2015 cited in Atherton, 2018a, p. 7)
I am energised by my contention that trying to represent an amorphous,

Protean edtech landscape requires promiscuous research methods alongside
intellectual and ethical rigour (Enriquez, 2014; Lapadat, 2017; Postill & Pink,
2012). The reader needs honesty and transparency in this cluttered, adver-
sarial landscape, with its swirling eddies and yawning fissures. The refer-
ences to autoethnography in this book point to an overarching contention:
if the author is woven into their own qualitative data, this can sometimes
lead to something potentially more enlightening and replicable than tradi-
tional research methods. If the qualitative data and writing are engaging
and rigorous, ontology can straddle epistemology (Deleuze, 2006). Taglietti,
Landri and Grimaldi (2021) took this notion further by locating the trend
for blended learning in schools during COVID-19 to create amorphous,
fractured yet omnipresent learning spaces that challenge ontological and

epistemological paradigms.
How might student teachers be woven into their process of being

without adding to their already unwieldy workload?
A challenge to the neoliberal learning culture
At the heart of the paper is a consideration of the relative merits of the

notions of algorithmic culture (Striphas, 2015) and rhizomatic learning
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The notion of rhizomatic learning was con-
ceived before the spread of the internet and is hence worthy of re-eval-
uation in the context of the sprawling, interconnected ways in which
knowledge can be organised and negotiated (Cormier, 2008). There are, of
course, many powerful forces that are likely to challenge the notion of a
more rhizomatic way of learning. Perhaps the greatest threat to embracing
the utopian chaos of the rhizome is not neoliberalism, with its increasingly
centralised power, its belief in a binary casualty, its de-skilling, casualisation,
disenfranchisement, de-collectivism and devaluation of educators (Brenner
et al., 2002; Ellis, 2016, 2018; McNiff, 2016; Metcalfe, 2019; Strom & Martin,
2017). Perhaps the reason why rhizomatic learning through edtech plat-
forms like Pearltrees may not continue to gather momentum is because its
very nature is in a state of becoming, of flux (Strom & Martin, 2017). In a
rhizomatic learning culture, there are multiple exit points, which creates
an agnosticism – even promiscuity – towards specific ways of organising
information.
These issues informed the findings of a small-scale research project, the
participants of which were postgraduate student teachers of English. I will
summarise the project, then make recommendations for how students might
use Pearltrees to develop their subject knowledge in a rhizomatic manner.
Research methods, findings and analysis
The project was granted ethical approval on the basis that the activities
would pose ‘minimal risk’. The sample of twelve student teachers were
initially shown the functions of Pearltrees. They were then invited to set
up their own account and ‘Team Up’ with each other. They were asked if
they would like to complete an online questionnaire via SurveyHero. The
survey in question consists of three open-ended questions. The final part
of the research makes recommendations for ways in which the next cohort
of student teachers might use Pearltrees as part of a rhizomatic learning
experience that may feel logical and sequential because the students will be
in control of it (DfE, 2019, 2021).
I will report on my findings in the form of Deleuzian lines of flight that
are a feature of rhizomatic learning (Cormier, 2008; Honan & Sellers, 2007;
Sellers, 2015). I will summarise the answers to the questions posed to the
participants and also provide a rhizoanalytic summary of and commentary
on their responses.
Small-scale research project with postgraduate student English teachers

from online questionnaires.
1) How are you using Pearltrees to develop your subject knowledge?

• As an organiser for subject knowledge
How might it help you with your subject knowledge? How will you know it has
helped you?
2) What else are you using to help develop your subject knowledge?
• I use YouTube, Google Scholar and Pinterest
What academic papers were you accessing via Scholar? What were your selec-
tion and deselection criteria? Why? Did you verify your sources from Pinterest?
3) What do you like and not like about Pearltrees and its features e.g. ‘Team
Up’?
• I’m not sure what to do
• I’m struggling
• I like how the ‘Team Up’ feature can help you expand on and collab-
orate on a board and I can share ideas
• You can chat and connect with other people and share resources
• You can share from students and teachers between countries
• A lot of the feedback appears hypothetical, about potential uses
instead of tangible results. Might this reflect the chaotic feeling of
becoming a teacher (Hordvik, MacPhail & Ronglan, 2019; Sellers,
2015)
• The interface is intimidating and busy
• The search bar is convoluted
• It’s hard to navigate at first but I’m not good with technology
• I found uploading from social media difficult
What does this mean and how might it reflect your emerging teacher
identity? What did you do when you found the technology difficult?
How might using technology improve your problem-solving skills?
Why might these be important skills for a student teacher? Might this
problem-solving be a collaborative enterprise, where you are in a state
of becoming and where some lines of flight can sometimes dissolve?
(Atherton, 2019; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987;
Honan & Sellers, 2011; Sellers, 2015; Strom & Martin, 2017)
This preliminary data – presented as a rhizoanalysis – draws on the notion of

collaborative self-study, leading to self-regulated learning and collaborative
self-study (Hordvik et al., 2021; Perez, Marin & Tur, 2018). These are espe-
cially important when educating student teachers to create learner-centred
learning episodes, where they can help their own students’ progress from a
simple ‘why?’ to a more complex and nuanced ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ (Strom &
Martin, 2017).
The circum-curriculum
I propose a new model for student teachers to help them with their sub-
ject knowledge. The circum-curriculum – a non-linear, rhizomatic curricu-
lum, would place the focus on the community, but only as an adjunct to the
existing curriculum (Perez, Marin & Tur, 2018; Sherman & Teemant, 2020).
This is a development from the notion that the community is the curric-
ulum and retains Cormier’s (2008) original idea of a learning culture that
is always in a state of becoming. Each learning community would curate
the English National Curriculum (DfE, 2014), examination syllabuses and
recommended teaching resources. As a community of practice, the group
could reflect on their emerging knowledge with a sense of freedom and crit-
icality, using Anchor – the podcasting app. To place podcasting in the context
of edtech, the next chapter will be a narrative review about podcasting.
I have curated some free social curation tools that could be useful to student
teachers and Secondary/High School students.
• Evernote
Save and organise online content; create and store drawings, doodles, writ-
ing from a selection of templates, audio and much more.
• xBrowserSync
XBrowserSync claims that they collect none of their customers’ personal
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Podcasting in education 10
How can podcasting and audio diaries generate valid qualitative data to ena-
ble meaningful reflection on educators’ experiences? How can podcasts be
used as a valid way of gathering data and disseminating research?
In January 2020, I started a podcast, entitled ‘Edtech Innovators’. The

reason why I wanted to do this was that I was energised by the ease of
access that remote communication allows. My podcast sits at the inter-
section of education, technology, innovation and positivity. I was at the
exciting Bett Show in London, the educational technology (or edtech)
trade show at the giant Excel Centre. I decided that I wanted to pur-
sue my research interest in edtech by starting my own podcast, in which
I interview a variety of people in the edtech space. I had downloaded
the Anchor app, which meant that I could interview people from any
part of the world, sometimes asynchronously. I had purchased a profes-
sional and very furry microphone for £40, which I could plug into my
phone. I wandered into the main concourse at The Bett Show and started
recording my observations. I then began buttonholing anyone who took
my interest and interviewed them. Though I am not from a technology
background, I found the Anchor app easy to use and the cheap micro-
phone drowned out background noise while still recording high quality
interviews. It was great fun. It was also simple and enjoyable connecting
(Continued)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-10
150 Podcasting in education
Figure 10.1 Logo for Edtech Innovators podcast
with educators and edtech company professionals from four continents.

I recorded a Zoom call with them and transferred the recording to the
Anchor app, via my laptop. A few amusing sound effects, an intro and
outro and the podcast was ready (Figure 10.1).
I recorded at least one podcast per week and then – it happened.
Despite Covid, I continued to record weekly podcasts. At first, the
interviewees were asked about a specific aspect of edtech. As the pan-
demic worsened and the first lockdown hit, the conversations began to
be much more inspirational, uplifting, creative. Instead of being about
what technology can do, the conversations were about how people are
being agile and creative in order to simply function. Everyone I asked was
happy to participate – people relished the opportunity to talk about them-
selves and I made them aware of the publicity that they would receive
from social sharing, especially on Twitter and LinkedIn. We talked about
boredom, our anxieties, the quest for wellbeing; we tried to predict how
we might come out of all this a little stronger and more efficiently. We
also checked how we were feeling and how our work and family life had
been decimated on some days and enriched on others.
I took a podcast hiatus in the autumn; the stress levels had been rising
and the day job needed extra care in light of the new ways of working.
Another reason for the hiatus, though, was to help me think. I had over
50 hours of recorded material but how could I turn all this content into
meaningful research?
At the end of the process, I am left with some therapeutic pieces of
audio, a successful podcast and a piece of writing that makes a small
contribution to the field of academic debate in Initial Teacher Education

(ITE). In addition to this, the paper is likely to have implications at a more
local level, as teacher educators look to address the challenges that have
been presented by Covid in terms of reflective practice.
My experience of using Anchor led me to the idea of collaborative
autoethnography as a way for student teachers to tell their stories from
the heart. It struck me between 2020 and 2021 that every professional
conversation in education was undercut by participants’ fears and experi-
ences of Covid, the limitations and opportunities of online learning and
their isolation as a result of reduced social interactions.
The initial findings were variable and sometimes extremely revealing.
Some students spoke for as long as six minutes about their experiences of
training to teach during Covid. It was clear that there was still a great deal
of trauma, but their pride and perseverance shone through. Participants
appeared to be significantly more candid and reflective, perhaps because
they were alone and speaking into a familiar device. I then asked the
cohort from 2021–2022 to listen to the recordings from a sample of last
year’s cohort’s audio accounts. The latest cohort would then use either
audio or creative writing to express their experiences as a student teacher
during a pandemic. I wanted to test this further specifically in the context
of an edtech platform. Collaborative autoethnography (CAE) through
podcasting appeared to be the next logical step. I hope that this chapter
will help bring about a more inclusive feel to ITE. Perhaps we can take
the individual voices of student teachers more seriously, add value to
education and empower teacher educators to use technology to improve
reflective practice.
Introduction
The word ‘podcast’ combines the brand name ‘iPod’ – an early portable
media player – with the suffix ‘cast’ from broadcast (Atherton, 2018a). In the
early 2000s, it became possible to have updates of audio content sent directly
to a portable media player, an example of which was an iPod. Once podcasts
could be downloaded onto smartphones and played in cars via Bluetooth in
the late 2010s, podcasting gathered momentum, as they became easier to
produce and distribute (Atherton, 2018a). The rapid adoption of podcast-
ing at the start of the 2000s helped precipitate early studies in an attempt
to explore the opportunities these platforms provide for different activities,

such as reflective practice, pedagogy and professional development.
Literature objectives and search methodology
While there is frequently a disconnect between the utopian dream of

edtech and the realities of real teachers’ experience (Atherton, 2018a, 2018b;
Luckin, 2018), this review aims to close the gap. The study aims to identify
and summarise the ways in which the literature is interrogating the adop-
tion of podcasting in the Secondary/High School and ITE sectors in studies
published between 2016 and 2022. A watershed moment for podcasts was
marked in 2016, with the weekly release of Serial, a crime drama (Brabazon,
2019). A total of 321 articles were selected and analysed from peer-reviewed
journals, conference proceedings and recent academic books. The initial
search used the following databases:
• Proquest
• ABI/Inform
• Factiva
• Education Research Complete
• Ingenta Connect
• Web of Science
• Springer
• Wiley
• Taylor and Francis
• Google Scholar
Initial findings revealed the following themes coming through the literature:
(1) Themes in the research

• A prominence of niche qualitative research.
(2) Research methods
• A preponderance of data collection through practical tasks; creative
mixed methods dominated.
(3) Fields of knowledge/disciplines
• My own focus was Secondary/High School but there was a natural
overlap with teacher education and continuous professional develop-
ment (CPD) for practising teachers.
(4) Contexts
• There is an emerging interest in the study of podcasting in the con-
texts of school and teacher education.
(5) Platforms for podcasts

• There is no dominant platform explored in the literature. Podcasting
is emerging as a viable means of supporting teachers’ professional
development and research interests due to its open, social and flex-
ible nature. Implications of findings for future research are also
discussed.
Reflection and collaboration
I analysed the years, journals, conceptual backgrounds, research method-

ologies, data collection tools, professional disciplines, educational contexts,
types of podcast and characteristics that can serve as reflection tools in edu-
cation. The aforementioned databases initially revealed a paucity of relevant
literature. On closer examination, however, the small number of sources
that matched the search terms were useful for a variety of reasons. For
example, Belfiore et al. (2021) may have conducted their research in the con-
text of social work, but their study found that podcasting helped engender
deeper reflection. Their use of grounded theory illustrated the importance
of organising qualitative data into codes, then themes (Belgrave and Seide,
2019; Charmaz, 2006). This methodology also aligns with my own use of
constructivist grounded theory, which strives to avoid firm generalisations
arising from the data (Atherton, 2020; Braun, Clarke & Weate, 2019; Denzin
& Lincoln, 2011). Other studies about collaborative podcasts were useful on
closer examination. For example, Besser, Blackwell and Saenz (2022) found
that High School students improved their dialogic and collaborative skills
through podcasting. Similarly, Evans, Goering and French’s (2021), collab-
orative multimodal podcast with 9th graders served as an effective reflec-
tion tool in the context of COVID-19. Similarly, Macias (2021) reported on
first-person accounts in the form of podcasts that helped future teachers
understand intersectionality and nuanced LGBTQI+ identities. Indeed, if
there are multiple ways of being seen, should this multiplicity apply to being
heard too (Knight, 2019 in Brabazon, 2019)? This will be developed later in
this chapter; I will summarise my progress with a collaborative autoethnog-
raphy, using audio diaries (Atherton, 2022; Roy & Uekusa, 2020).
Research methods and student confidence
Google Scholar returned some studies that would be useful, in terms of

methodology and findings. Student teachers have developed a more acute
sense of agency and learned dialogically through making their own podcasts
(Carson, Hontvedt & Lund 2021). Elsewhere, podcasting has enabled

Secondary/High School students to develop improved oracy, confidence
and multimodal literacy (Atherton, 2018a; Hackett-Hill, 2022; Hauger,
2019). Studies into podcasting employ largely mixed methods, for example
Weimer’s (2021) intrinsic case study (Stake, 2005), which collected data via
semi-structured interviews and reflected on podcast episodes using thematic
analysis. A great deal of the evidence around this area is non-empirical, for
example Cain’s (2020) research into a studycast among 7th graders, which
revealed improved high-order thinking, collaboration and motivation.
Now that I had reviewed the literature on podcasting in Secondary/
High School, Education and ITE, I pursued recent studies using or about
collaborative autoethnography. This would underpin the next phase of the
research, which is proposed in the sections on Research design and Conclusions
and further work.
Autoethnography
During the first Covid lockdown, I was exploring autoethnography as a legit-

imate form of qualitative inquiry. The attractions of this methodology are
explored in an earlier chapter – What is your edtech journey? Autoethnography
and the importance of learning journeys. One of the limitations for me as a
researcher was the ongoing risk of being not just subjective, biased, indul-
gent but also insular. Though the lived experience of one researcher-as-par-
ticipant can resonate and illuminate (Ellis et al., 1992; Josselson & Liebech,
1995; Richardson, 1997), I felt that a logical next step might be to broaden
the database. In ITE, student teachers are encouraged to practise using a
variety of models of reflection. These are discussed in Atherton and Pratt
(2022) and in this chapter’s literature review. The chief limitations of these
long-established models of reflection are the way they are often abandoned,
approached and discussed in a superficial way (Pratt & Tynan, 2019). Though
a structure can facilitate illuminating reflections (Atherton & Pratt, 2022;
Gibbs, 1988), a model of reflection can often feel perfunctory and generic.
There is an argument, therefore, for a more individualised but collective
body of qualitative data, that reflects each lived experience but is unencum-
bered by rigid structures that can often lead to similar results.
Podcasting is viewed as dialogic practitioner research with students
to develop the application of theoretical concepts to practice (Lowe et al.,
2021). The purpose of this can be to co-construct new theoretical knowledge
through an ensemble performance of shared experience (Chang, Ngunjiri &
Hernandez, 2013, pp. 10–11; Killean & Summerville, 2020; Lowe et al., 2021).
Exploratory dialogue
Podcasting may be a form of exploratory dialogue, which can reframe the

process of examining lived experiences (Lowe et al., 2021). These experi-
ences of spoken or written language may be captured and analysed in a
variety of forms, for example visual narratology (Atherton, 2020; Culshaw,
2019; Hunter, 2020). For student teachers, the relevance and effectiveness of
podcasting can be seen as ‘sonic andragogy’ - a deterritorialised space where
adult learners can reflect on the progress of their teacher education in a
quiet, private space (Brabazon, 2019, p. 1). This deterritorialisation can also
help collapse the boundaries between work and play, as demonstrated in
Rust’s (2021) qualitative and multimedia study with 6th graders. With older
children, for example 11th graders, podcasting using multimodal sounds can
re-territorialise children’s sonic spaces and allow them to talk back to the
dominant narratives that surround them (Guggenheim et al., 2021).
Collaborative autoethnography
If ethnography is a type of research in which the researcher immerses them-

selves in their subject, the autoethnographer immerses themselves in their own
story. CAE goes further insofar as the collection, analysis and interpretation
of data is a collective, pragmatic undertaking and it invites flexibility (Chang,
Ngunjiri & Hernandez, 2013; Charmaz, 2014; Chong & Reinders, 2021). Far
from being separate from the research process, CAE allows the co-construction
of meaning to be evocative, analytical, even creative (Harter, 2019). The form
may have its critics in terms of intellectual rigour, but it does confer a great deal
of creative freedom. Furthermore, its nomenclature could be viewed as para-
doxical (Chang, Ngunjiri & Hernandez, 2013). In addition to this, a data-heavy
culture can obscure the real lives of real people (Atherton, 2020, 2022).
The literature here draws on Atherton (2022), in which the author as par-
ticipant acknowledges that, because texts are polysemic, meaning making
can be viewed as collaborative, negotiated and interactive. The thinking
draws on connectivism (Atherton, 2018a, 2018b; Shukie, 2019). A devel-
opment from this thinking is the deployment of CAE as a research tool
(Atherton, 2022; Roy & Uekusa, 2020). The context of the pandemic cannot
be ignored, as participants were wrestling with existential problems in many
forms (Geha & Dhaliwal, 2020).
As a paradigm built on shifting sands, CAE may be viewed as problem-
atic, as it unites two concepts that appear diametrically opposed: the study
of a group versus the study of self. Yet the study of self can help individuals
understand collective culture, particularly when the self is evolving and the
articulation of feelings performative, authentic and sometimes fractured or
selective (Atherton, 2022a; Gatson, 2011; Heehs, 2013). CAE combines the
self-reflexivity of autobiography, the cultural interpretation of ethnography
and the multi-subjectivity of collaboration (2013, p. 17).
Research design, findings and discussion
The proposed collaborative autoethnography initially drew from a data-

base of podcasts created by the researcher to examine how COVID-19 has
affected the world of edtech. It developed into a pilot study of how PGCE
student teachers of Secondary English have used technology while training
to teach English during Covid. Participants were asked to reflect upon their
own experiences of using technology in the context of a developing pan-
demic by recording their voices experiences on Vocaroo, a voice recording
website. The audio was added to the data from the podcasts. The paper pro-
poses that the act of recording one’s voice alone could help student teachers
engage with, and therefore understand, hitherto suppressed emotions and
feelings. In addition to this, the deployment of reflexive thematic analysis
was appropriate as a way of framing the analysis of the human voice, with
its varieties in vocabulary, grammar, tonality and timbre. The underlying
risk of thematic analysis is a potential lack of focus, which may be seen as
lacking rigour, as the researcher is actively involved in the production of
meaning. Furthermore, the use of thematic analysis helped begin an evoc-
ative, iterative reflexive journey, which will be developed in future research
into reflective practice in teacher education (Braun & Clarke, 2019). The
next section concerns the pilot project’s research design and findings.
Pilot project – design, findings and discussion
Data collection
The qualitative data was from both the creation and the thematic analysis of
podcast episodes. The context was student teachers in training to teach in the
Secondary/ High School sector. I used Anchor.fm as my platform. Research
design presents challenges in terms of how unconventional the methods are
(Lowe, Turner & Schaefer, 2021). Kemmis and McTaggart (1992) view dia-
logic collaboration as a recommended step within action research cycles, yet
there is a relative paucity of literature on the ways in which participants can
co-construct new conceptual knowledge (Lowe, Turner & Schaefer, 2021).

One of the alluring elements of dialogic research can be how it acts as a cat-
alyst to the progress of a research project, as it begins at the reflection stage
(Lowe, Turner & Schaefer, 2021).
Ethics
In terms of ethical challenges, an overarching challenge arises from how

universities could be perceived as viewing ethics through a modernist
social science perspective, where ethics exist to protect against medical or
psychological harm or exploitation (Christians, 2011; Lapadat, 2017). CAE
can circumvent both the potential homogeneity of social science and the
risk of indulgence, as it is multifarious, multi-disciplinary and co-authored
(Atherton, 2022a; Lapadat, 2017).
The process of ethical approval was swift and straightforward. I wanted
the participants to feel that contributing was uncomplicated and unthreaten-
ing. I discovered Vocaroo, which I shared with willing students. They were
asked to record their voice and email me the audio via a link, so I could
download the audio file.
Findings and analysis
Coding
I deployed thematic analysis in a similar way to Chapter 7 (What is your

edtech journey? Autoethnography and the importance of learning journeys) and to
Atherton (2022a). I identified surface or semantic codes, followed by latent,
or implicit codes (Braun, Clarke & Weate, 2016). This achieved some rig-
our and empirical truth, yet this type of reflexive thematic analysis allowed
some researcher autonomy. That said, I was mindful of the risk of indul-
gence and researcher bias (Braun & Clarke, 2019). I wanted to discriminate
between relevant and redundant data (Atherton, 2022a; Braun & Clarke,
2019; Denscombe, 2007; Ellis & Bochner, 2010; Weimer, 2021).
Themes
The themes are listed below, using thematic analysis of transcripts of audio
diaries:
Transcripts
Participant A
• I was very lucky as I found teaching online quite easy
• my school was a Google school
• clear and simple to use for us in lessons
• the hardest aspect of teaching online with technology by myself was
Wi-Fi
• pupils didn’t get resources sometime or the Google links when sent
on time
• I was very lucky
• relatively stress free experience
Participant B
• used the 2nd person (‘you’) 21 times
• ‘Like everybody else it was really stressful’
• working as part of a community
• personal responsibility
• access your learning when they were away from school
• beyond my control
• kids that simply didn’t want to
• couldn’t login to online learning or
• didn’t engage
• I didn’t get work from them
• no matter how many messages were sent
• longing to hear from students
• inability to access the technology
• their needs meant that they were doing the work but they just were
for getting to upload it the different home experiences
• didn’t have a full understanding
• brilliant kids
• the return to in school learning
• re-entry midway through a unit of work
• had to quickly establish what kids have done
• emotional well being
• anxiety of coming back into school
• personal and pastoral elements
• try and safeguard and protect myself
• make sure that I was giving myself space and downtime
• delivering audio PowerPoints that students could complete in their

own time
• there’s anxiety you could see that there was worry that they were
going to be told off
• pastoral elements
• making sure that those kids feel safe in their return to school
• plenty of time to catch up
• a stressful period of time
• made myself and the rest of my cohort more resilient and more
adaptable and I think more creative in our delivery of content
• showing empathy too is that they may be going through the I’m not
entirely aware of so bringing that education and pastoral care into
one highly condensed experience
Participant C
• quite beneficial
• quite positive
• removal of real time classroom management
• space I think to focus on the teaching and learning
• confidence with subject knowledge
• barrier of the screen was helpful
• not exposed to a question you might not know the answer
• view students work on the screen rather than trying to decipher hand-
writing watch what was being typed in real time
• able to give individual help
• being able to mark all of the work after every lesson
• tricky in terms of time management but it helped with planning as
you could see what had been achieved
• helped me consolidate knowledge about marking and feedback and
using rubrics
• overall, it was a positive experience
• take some positives from it
• going back into school after that behaviour issues were more difficult
• interesting to see how next year
Participant D
• taught me a lot
• resilience
• time management skills
• definitely an experience
(Continued)
• able to understand kind of the stress that the kids were under
• easy to kind of relate to the kids and to build those relationships
• all kind of in it together
• they were able to empathise with us
• wasn’t pleasant for anyone involved
• invaluable insight into people’s lives into the struggles that they had to
go through
• we were no longer a blank slate of an authoritarian and figure I am
more of a person
Discussion
To help apply the literature to the research design, I developed the emerg-
ing themes identified earlier. My qualitative research was niche, used mixed
methods and straddled collaborative autoethnography and intrinsic case
study (Weimer, 2021).
Candour
The use of exploratory monologues were designed to provide the inti-

macy and candour that solitude allows, hence the rejection of traditional
methods such as group interviews or focus groups (Culshaw, 2019). The
student teachers’ audio data revealed how student teachers developed their
own resilience in partnership with their own pupils. While each partici-
pant had their own approach to the process of using audio to share their
feelings, all demonstrated a notable candour, which solitude and the use
of the human voice facilitated. The second stage will develop the mono-
logues into audio files that could be listened to by the group, to identify
codes and themes, to co-construct their analysis (Lowe, Turner & Schaefer,
2021). The preliminary qualitative data supported Brabazon’s (2019) notion
of ‘sonic andragogy’, where recording of audio in private can find a quiet
space in which to reflect on their own terms. Though this study was con-
ducted with postgraduate student teachers, it echoes Rust’s (2021) study in
which podcasting gave the gift of a de-territorialised space and sonic agency
(Guggenheim et al., 2021). From the point of view of the listener, these
audio extracts were mesmerising in their rawness and minimalism, and they
invited investigation into embedded narratives. In these private but liminal
spaces, the lived experience was able to resonate and illuminate (Ellis et al.,
1992; Josselson & Liebech, 1995; Llinares, 2018; Richardson, 1997).
Disconnect between statements and emotions
In these audio diaries, a great deal was not being said; statements appeared
to belie real emotions. Statements could be contradictory, as participants
strove to stay strong and present themselves as resilient. This intensified the
performative element to the monologues and the sense of an evolving self
as identities shifted during the pandemic (Atherton, 2022a; Gatson, 2011;
Geha & Dhaliwal, 2020; Heehs, 2013). While participants will have been
exhibiting a stoicism that is necessary for the survival of student teachers
in a pandemic, there was still – the sheer variety of the preliminary data
revealed – a freedom from the constraints of established models of reflec-
tion (Pratt & Tynan, 2019). This freedom allowed them to meander at times
and to pursue truth via indirection. Examples of these are the references to
the benefits of remote teaching, for example easier behaviour management,
development of the teachers’ soft skills, working in a more democratic cul-
ture and a shared sense of developing resilience. At times, however, I was
mindful of not exploiting the emotions of participants (Christians, 2011;
Lapadat, 2017).
Opportunities to do things differently
While nobody wants to return to the lockdowns, the data may suggest that
teacher education could learn a great deal from the experience. The model
for training and educating teachers could learn from the space that the Covid
generation was given to focus on their subject knowledge, and the collab-
orative, democratic way in which they worked in departments (Carson,
Hontvedt & Lund, 2021). The act of articulating their feelings orally, in a
private space, appeared to give a sense of clarity (Brabazon, 2019; Evans,
Goering & French’s, 2021; Macias, 2021). In counterpoint to any clarity, the
data belied a sense of dislocation and fractured identity (Atherton, 2022a).
An example of how this manifested itself was the way in which Participant
B used the second person (you) many times, as if to distance their own emo-
tions from their experience. Another opportunity was presented through
the confidence and clarity with which the participants spoke, which I
assume required multiple takes. One of the important requirements of the
Core Content Framework for ITE in the UK, is modelling oracy, or effective
spoken language. This is expected in all subjects, not just English. The next
stage of the research will specify that student teachers will be developing
their ability to model effective oracy with their own students (Hackett-Hill,
2022; Hauger, 2019).
The ensuing collaborative autoethnography will ask student teachers to use

audio diaries on Vocaroo to reflect on their emerging English subject knowl-
edge. In these audio diaries, they will be asked to reflect on what they and
their pupils like and don’t like about the English curriculum: what do their
own students struggle with the most and how does it make them feel? They
will then form small communities of practice to code the qualitative data.
This collaborative autoethnographic study will use thematic analysis to ana-
lyse a small sample of stories from English educators. One of the benefits
of this narrow scope of research data is discussed in Atherton (2020). The
findings in Atherton (2022) back up Bochner’s (2002) notion of social science
benefiting from subjective narrative content in combination with empiri-
cal data. The limitations of the research design of CAE are manifold. One
of the limitations arises from the potential accusations of a lack of rigour
shared by all forms of autoethnographic inquiry (Atherton, 2022a; Bochner,
2013; LeRoux, 2017).
Suggestions for use in the classroom
• Raise the profile and build the brand of your department and that of
your school, maybe internationally.
• Develop students’ oracy, collaborative and social skills by recording
audio.
• Provide useful metrics on listeners and engagement
• Use as a reflection tool (Atherton, 2018a) (Figure 10.2).
Emerging technology in this field
In this section I will summarise the hardware and software that has made it
easy for me to create and distribute an educational podcast.
Anchor.fm
The Anchor app is owned by Spotify. It’s easy to create, edit and distribute
your podcast from your own phone, all through the app. You can add sound
effects, music from Spotify or your own library, and transitions.
Figure 10.2 Podcasting for teachers

Adapted from Atherton, 2018a
Vocaroo
Ask contributors to record audio remotely, then share the audio via a link.
Rode VideoMic Me
A directional microphone that you can use to record straight to Anchor via
sharing a link with your podcast guests.
Podcast platforms
At the time of writing, Anchor only submitted podcasts to Spotify and

Anchor. You can manually submit your RSS feed to Apple Podcasts, Google
Podcasts, Overcast, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic and
Stitcher. Also, don’t ignore the likes of Podbean, Libsyn, Buzzsprout and
even iHeartRadio.
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Edpuzzle 11
Online video for learning –
questioning and online assessment
Children’s consumption of video has changed radically since the 1990s, when
it was still seen as novel. In the 2020s, the challenge is to empower teachers
to ensure that video can augment each learning episode and help provide
meaningful formative assessment (Atherton, 2018a; Boyle & Charles, 2013).
A narrative account of the experiences of using Edpuzzle

in school and university
I have, on occasions, been guilty of being a little evangelical about

Edpuzzle. Edpuzzle is a video presentation and assessment tool,
from which users can source an endless supply of video content from
YouTube, Vimeo, TED Talks, Khan Academy, Veritasium, Numberphile,
Crash Course and National Geographic. I wrote about Edpuzzle in 50
Ways to Use Technology Enhanced Learning in the Classroom (Atherton,
2018a) because I had experienced a shift in students’ attention spans. In
the dark/halcyon days of teaching with video, a useful video could be
viewed by students as informative and engaging. That changed in the
mid-2010s, as infinite, instantly accessible video content shrank students’
attention spans and destroyed their willingness to watch the same video
at the same time and in the same room as other people. Edpuzzle is a
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-11
Edpuzzle 169
video presentation tool but it’s also an assessment tool. I fell in love with
it because I noticed that, when I used it, there was no hiding place for
the students. When they saw the highlighted markers, they knew that
a question about the video clip was looming, so they paid attention. I
could flit from teacher-centred activities to paired work; I could teach
student teachers about the importance of planning questions and what
to do with the answers. I could also encourage them to view their own
pupils’ education as the pupils themselves did: unencumbered by time
and space and enriched and underpinned by online content. That online
content could be flipped learning activities like pre-reading, viewing or
revision (more on these later), additional reading, stretch and challenge
activities (Kurtz, 2014).
I was drawn to how Edpuzzle enables you to crop and trim your vid-
eos, to focus the learning and to remove extraneous material that you
really don’t need. Once you’ve edited the videos, you can add your own
questions and these can be seen along the timeline. So, for example,
when you’re watching the video, you can see these little green symbols
and they indicate where the questions will be coming up so the students
can see where they need to be paying attention. Students can add their
own questions and even test each other. Now, just in case you’re thinking
that you have to make lots of video content, you don’t. You can source
videos from pretty much anywhere, including YouTube, Vimeo, TED
Talks, National Geographic, and so on, but you can also upload your
own videos and students can upload their own, too.
The magic of Edpuzzle is this. The video pauses automatically to dis-
play the questions, so the students therefore cannot be passive. There’s no
hiding place for them because they can see that there are questions com-
ing up along the timeline, so they need to be paying attention because
these questions will be important, assessed perhaps.
Now from the point of view of a teacher, there’s a variety of ques-
tion types that are presented to you – quizzes, open questions and closed
questions – so you can use Edpuzzle to help with the design of your
questions. There are a variety of assessment options, too. You can use it
for diagnostic tests. You can use it for ipsative assessment so that students
can focus on beating their personal best. You can self-assess, you can peer
assess (usually as a flipped learning activity) and it can be used for quite
powerful formative assessment.
Now you can go with it in a quite simple, straightforward way. You
play the video, the students watch them, they answer the questions orally,
(Continued)
170 Edpuzzle
perhaps as a whole class discussion or maybe with targeted questions. So

that’s a teacher-centred activity. But you can also do it as a flipped learn-
ing activity, more student centred. If you look at the video on flipped
learning or the flipped classroom, you’ll see plenty more of that.
So once logged in, students can join a classroom by clicking on a link,
by entering a code in their account, and also through Google Classroom.
Now it is integrated with Google Classroom and similarly, if you watch
the video on G Suite, you’ll see quite a lot more of this.
You can use specific, targeted search terms to find content on TED
Talks or Vimeo or YouTube. You should think carefully about the ques-
tions and be prepared for the answers. Thankfully, in case you’re not
quite sure how to make the best of Edpuzzle, there are a variety of
video tutorials on the website that can guide you. There’s also Edpuzzle
Gradebook. You can set assignments, you can grade and provide feed-
back, and you can prevent skipping and monitor engagement. So, if your
students were tempted to skip towards the end of the video and miss out
very important content, you can check that. You can track your learners’
progress and generate data on their achievement, too.
So, a few questions to reflect. Are your students passive when view-
ing video content? Has their attention span shortened for video? Do
they prefer watching on their own, in teams, or on their own terms in a
classroom, perhaps, or the library? Have you considered how powerful
Edpuzzle could be as an assessment tool? How would you manage your
class when using Edpuzzle?
This section will be largely focused on academic papers and chapters about
Edpuzzle, of which there have been many. I used my university library data-
base for the initial search for Edpuzzle, which returned 386 results. I then
used the ‘Tweak my results’ feature on the library platform to narrow the
search. Under the ‘Availability’ tab, I selected ‘full text online’, ‘peer reviewed
journals and open access’ and I selected ‘articles’ and ‘conference proceed-
ings’ under ‘Material type’. The reason for selecting ‘articles’ was so that I
could select papers that have academic rigour; conference proceedings were
selected for the same reason but also because they can sometimes contain
more current research. I had deselected ‘book chapters’ because of the lag
between submission and publication, and newspaper articles and theses so I
could focus on current literature at the forefront of the thinking on edtech.
Edpuzzle 171
The next strategy to help me reduce the field was to look for catego-
ries under ‘Subject’. I wanted the topics to be as relevant as possible to the
overarching themes of this book and of my wider research. For those rea-
sons I selected ‘students’, ‘educational technology’, ‘teaching’, ‘education’,
‘teachers’, ‘flipped classroom’, ‘technology used in education’ and ‘collabo-
ration’. The exclusion criteria are also worth sharing. In order to address the
context of Secondary/High School or ITE, I excluded the following search
terms: ‘engineering’, ‘medical’, ‘elementary’ and ‘EFL’. This returned 32
results, which I will synthesise now, in addition to the results from a search
on Google Scholar post-2018, using the search terms ‘online video schools
Edpuzzle’. I restricted the ‘Publication date’ tab to post-2018, for the simple
reason that I wanted this chapter to reflect the progress that had been made
in the literature since I wrote about Edpuzzle in Atherton (2018a).
Before I synthesise recent studies on Edpuzzle, I will summarise the chap-
ter about Edpuzzle in Atherton (2018a). The chapter provided a short liter-
ature review and practitioner tips on how to use Edpuzzle in the classroom.
Edpuzzle could be deployed to help students self-assess, either synchro-
nously or asynchronously. This suggestion drew on Wiliam’s (2011) findings
that self-assessment can develop students’ self-regulation, unite their mind,
emotions and actions, and improve their motivation (Mega, Ronconi & Beni,
2013; Wiliam, 2011). Furthermore, the chapter suggested ways in which
Edpuzzle could refine teachers’ responses to students’ answers by asking for
the thinking behind their answers. This intended deepening of engagement,
however, may improve intrinsic motivations but Baumeister, Alquist and
Vohs (2015) warned against confusing intense feeling with intense learning
(cited in Atherton, 2018a). This desire for deeper engagement became acute
during the pandemic yet persists in the context of asynchronous learning
and the flipped classroom.
Flipped classroom
Some of the literature on Edpuzzle views it through the lens of the flipped
classroom, while others explore its pedagogic flexibility. Some focus specifi-
cally on Edpuzzle, while others view Edpuzzle in the context of other edtech
tools, especially video platforms and frequently in the context of remote
learning due to COVID-19 (An et al., 2021; Díaz de León-López et al., 2021;
Onah et al., 2021). In some cases, Edpuzzle did not receive a great deal of
prominence (Sanz-Labrador et al., 2021). Before going any further, it will be
appropriate to update Atherton (2018a) on the notion of the flipped class-
room. Flipped learning inverts the traditional model, in which the teacher
172 Edpuzzle
is the knowledgeable ‘sage on the stage’ who disseminates knowledge, then

sets homework to cement or test the knowledge (Atherton, 2018a; Morrison,
2014) (Table 11.1).
Early literature on the flipped classroom argued that it encouraged a con-
structivist way of learning, in which knowledge was viewed not as static
transmission but emerging and evolving (Bergmann & Sams, 2012; Fosnot,
2013; Kurtz, 2014). Though a great deal of blogs and newspaper articles
have been evangelical about flipping the classroom, academic writing has
been more circumspect. For example, earlier work such as Scheg (2015) may
have recognised the potential for the flipped classroom to constitute a para-
digm shift, but it also warned of the tendency for flipped learning to neces-
sitate voluminous online resources, many of which may be of limited use
(Atherton, 2018a; Scheg, 2015). The post-2018 literature reports on several
pieces of action and practitioner research, for example a descriptive analy-
sis case study in the USA by Nuss (2021) in the context of TESOL (teach-
ing English as a second language) and remote learning due to COVID-19.
Table 11.1 Traditional vs ‘flipped classroom’
Traditional Flipped classroom: Benefits of flipped Risks of flipped

classroom: learner-centred classroom classroom
teacher-centred
Students sit in Students can work Better sense of Less control over
rows anywhere on self-actualization production of
mobile devices work
Information is Problem-based A more individual They still have to
presented tasks and differentiated study the materials
approach to
learning
All students Personalised Fosters high-order Potential for shyness
get the same responses are thinking
information encouraged
Learning Learning Encourages thirst for Weaker, less
outcomes are outcomes are knowledge motivated students
static, finite interdisciplinary will need careful
handling
About facts Synagogy – Ownership of Students may feel less
students knowledge secure
collaborate in
content creation
From Atherton (2018a). Adapted from www.centeril.org (open source)
Edpuzzle 173
The use of Edpuzzle is discussed in relation to its positive impact on engage-

ment and efficiency of learning (Nuss, 2021; Chin et al., 2022). Similarly,
Spanish Secondary physical education students recorded improvements in
outcomes and intrinsic motivation when the classroom was flipped using
Edpuzzle. The study was from the perspective of self-determination the-
ory (Ferriz-Valero, Østerlie, García-Martínez, & Baena-Morales, 2022).
Also in Spain, Jimenez & Jadraque (2021) reported on improved test scores
for secondary mathematics students who had used Edpuzzle. Similarly,
Pulukuri and Abrams (2020) praised the student accountability measures
that Edpuzzle takes, for example preventing students from skipping straight
to the questions so they can guess the answers. More harmonious findings
from Ecuador placed Edpuzzle in the context of flipped learning and found
a positive effect on outcomes, communication, empathy, collaboration and
participation (Cueva & Inga, 2022, p14). Edpuzzle has been recognised in
the literature for offering the flexibility to be part of flipped classrooms
or teacher-centred activities (Atherton, 2018a; Pulukuri & Abrams, 2020).
Moreover, Edpuzzle has sometimes been analysed for its uses in a didactic
context. An example of this is within modern foreign language classrooms
(Măluţan & Negoescu, 2021).
Secondary/High School and problem-solving
Giyanto, Heliawaty, and Rubini (2020) found that using Edpuzzle as a learn-
ing tool brought about significant improvements in students’ problem-solv-
ing skills and this was represented in improved test scores. This is similar to
observations about Edpuzzle and other video tools in the Nigerian context.
Edpuzzle was judged as likely to improve students’ critical thinking Onah
et al. (2021). Though this paper is located in the context of higher education,
it supports findings about other edtech tools in Atherton (2018a, 2018b, 2019).
Secondary/High School – explicit instruction and feedback
Many recent policy documents draw on the modish practice of explicit

instruction (Rosenshine, 2012). This has influenced studies into edtech tools
like Edpuzzle. Cesare et al.’s (2021) North American study into Edpuzzle
found that it had potential to facilitate engaging explicit instruction and the
collection and storage of swift informal feedback. Some of the ways that
teachers can use Edpuzzle for effective explicit instruction are through mod-
elling, guided or independent practice Cesare et al. (2021). Explicit or direct
174 Edpuzzle
instruction, of course, is not confined to teacher-centred activities in the class-

room, especially since the pandemic. Moreover, Edpuzzle announced integra-
tions with Google Classroom, Google Drive and Screencastify as a response to
how the pandemic necessitated more asynchronous learning (Atherton, 2022;
Edpuzzle, 2022). A more comprehensive list of integrations with Edpuzzle
can be found below in Recommendations for use in the classroom and also in
Cesare et al. (2021). Whether in real time or not, recent studies emphasise
the fine balance between the need for instruction and the proven effectiveness
of video-based learning in providing a sense of student agency and feedback
literacy (Carless, 2020). In addition to these suggested benefits for students,
video-based learning has been associated with improvements in how teachers
design their lessons and resources to use language effectively, address miscon-
ceptions and refine the proportion of teacher talk (Luckin, (ed)., 2018).
Conclusions from the literature
My inference from the literature would be that Edpuzzle has a great deal
in common with many edtech tools and platforms, in that its potential is
as rich or as limited as the overall curriculum planning, pedagogical style,
delivery and management (Atherton, 2018a, 2018b, 2019). In terms of pro-
posals for further research, there may be a great deal of potential in deploy-
ing Edpuzzle as an interactive video feedback tool from peers of educators
(Carless, 2020). At the same time, there is a danger that the literature may
serve to strengthen the position of specific edtech platforms, at the expense
of emerging ones (Atherton 2018a) or that the students could become
dependent on edtech, to the detriment of traditional literacies (Atherton
2018a; Gardner & Davis, 2013).
The following is adapted from Atherton (2018a):
• place considerable emphasis on the design of your questions and how

the students are likely to answer them. You can design open-ended ques-
tions, multiple choice questions and comments.
• anticipate your students’ misconceptions and consider how questions
arising from video content may address these.
• assess your students’ answers! Consider alternating between paper-based
worksheets/workbooks/exercise books and the videos themselves.
Assessment.
Edpuzzle 175
• the videos can be automatically paused to reveal questions for the learners
to answer. Teachers may add audio – for example a recording of the teacher
asking a question. Not only can video help assess, Edpuzzle allows you to
track your learners’ progress and generate data on their achievement.
• if a teacher sets an asynchronous task, they can see how long a student
has viewed a video, at what time and whether or not they skipped it. In
a classroom situation, the learners will know that they have to consider
the questions that will be coming up soon.
• while it may be the case that there is no hiding place for students in
Edpuzzle, existing learning management systems (LMSs) can also
be integrated into Edpuzzle. Therefore, there is no hiding place from
Edpuzzle for the likes of Schoology, Canvas, Microsoft (including
Teams), Blackboard, Moodle, Clever, Blackbaud and PowerSchool.
• don’t be scared of using the accessible video editing tools to crop the
videos that you select. Once you have edited out the parts that you don’t
need, you can add questions along the timeline. If you get stuck, don’t
worry, as there are many YouTube videos that can offer clear and struc-
tured support.
• have you considered asking your students to make their own videos, to
be saved in your LMS? These videos could be creative tasks, monologues,
demonstrations, assessed practicals, performances, screencasts, experi-
ments and so on. The teacher could then add questions or comments for
formative assessment.
Transcript from interview with Victoria James from Edpuzzle

on Edtech Innovators podcast (Atherton 2022)
In July 2022, I exchanged ideas about how best to use video tools in the class-
room with Victoria James, the Country Manager for Edpuzzle in the United
Arab Emirates. An edited transcript of the podcast interview is below.
Pete
I’m in danger of being evangelical and making bold claims about

Edpuzzle. I love the way that, as I’m training teachers, it enables them
to think about their questioning. So, the design of their questioning, and
also to think about, well, what am I going to do with these answers once
the kids have actually answered them? What are the next steps? How is
this going to be formatively assessed? I love the fact that there’s no hiding
place for the students.
(Continued)
176 Edpuzzle
Victoria
Yeah. Which is great. Because we remember the times when putting a

video on seemed like a sort of a worthy educational exercise. But now we
are a bit wiser, aren’t we?
Pete
I suppose people weren’t really paying attention in the first place.
Victoria
Yes, it turns a passive experience into an active experience and then an

engaging experience. I mean, I set my six-year-old daughter an Edpuzzle
lesson about the lifecycle of a butterfly. And you know, she’s so excited to
kind of click the buttons and the fact that you can put pictures in there.
And you can make it easy enough for the six-year-old to watch. But she’s
just more excited. Like it’s interesting. Suddenly, she gets to feel validated
and she gets to click and see that she’s right. And so she really loves it for
that element as well. And I think one of them is the fact that it makes
for a more engaging experience with the fact that with a bit of creativity,
teachers can use it for absolutely anything and everything. I was speaking
to a science teacher recently, and she sends her health and safety mes-
sages about the upcoming labs or her practical classes, she puts the health
and safety message onto her Edpuzzle recording. And then it comes to
school, if they haven’t watched the video, if they’re not on her list as
having completed the video, they can’t do the practical you know, and
they only do that once. We have schools who only use Edpuzzle for their
teacher training to even talk about other edtech products to get their
teachers up to speed with the tech they are implementing. And they want
to know if their teachers have watched the video. So, yeah, it’s a bit of a
bit of creativity, and you can use it for a whole host of activities.
Pete
Yeah, there’s no hiding place outside the classroom either. Because, yeah,
we know what time they’ve watched the video and whether they’ve
skipped it.
Edpuzzle 177
Victoria
If you’re using Live Mode with the class and looking back at the way that
students are answering questions, there’s no embarrassment as the names
aren’t shown – you’re looking at how other students are using these as dis-
cussion points. Edpuzzle prides itself on being a flipped classroom prod-
uct, probably in the main, and that’s probably how most of our teachers
use it. I hear from them, again, like I said about the science teacher or
languages teacher about specific applications where they see their trickiest
concepts, or even in things like pronunciation and recording their own vid-
eos for languages, where I just see really good examples of great videos.
Pete
And also getting the students to make their own videos, which is hugely
empowering in terms of things like developing their own or receiving
broader literacy skills, presentation skills, employability, and so on.
Victoria
The student project section of Edpuzzle as well, have you seen that? I
think it was quite a new release. They’re embedding their own questions,
their own comments, they’re becoming the teacher. I like the idea that
students can then link to a kind of further reading or to blog posts and
things like that, based on the content that they’re either recording or pull-
ing from YouTube. So, they’re being critical and analytical and they add
it back into their LMS.
Pete
What you don’t want to happen is for the Edpuzzle LMS to be in conflict
with a school’s existing LMS and for that to create problems for the teach-
ers and confusion for the students.
Victoria
Well, we have integrations with pretty much all of the major LMSs,
so it means that there shouldn’t be any conflicts. It should all be fairly
(Continued)
178 Edpuzzle
seamless. We’re working on a Moodle integration at the moment. We’ve

got lots of universities, we’ve got the Pro accounts. I’ve used it a lot since
you’ve been in higher education as well. Do you use it for you? Do you
train teachers about Edpuzzle?
Pete
I would say to our English student teachers, have you tried this? It’s amaz-
ing. So, I would demonstrate and model how to use it. And then I would
ask questions about what would you do next and what kind of feedback
would you expect to get from the students? So, if you design this ques-
tion, how would the students answer it?
How might they answer it remotely? What happens next? Why am
I using Edpuzzle and why is it better than not using it? These are really
important questions. But more importantly, it’s about magic. Because
what they’ve got to do, what we’ve got to show them is that a teacher is
a kind of magician - that their lesson should feel magical in some way.
The rest of this interview can be heard at https://spoti.fi/3PuwwIb.
Emerging tech in this field:
• MaestroVision
MaestroVision offers one hour of audio or video recording for free.
• Flipgrid
Not exactly an emerging technology but it has developed considerably in
recent years. The video platform now makes it much easier to create and
interact with groups, both inside and outside the app, with added social fea-
tures and privacy settings.
• Veo, Swivl, GoReact, Planet eStream and IRIS Connect

These video platforms for remote lesson observations and video feedback
are not free but can facilitate lightbulb moments for student teachers.
The main barrier to mass adoption is safeguarding issues, whether real or
potential.
• YouTeachMe
Through YouTeachMe, a teacher can access millions of videos uploaded by
teachers and upload their own. They can then share the videos with their
Edpuzzle 179
Figure 11.1 Edpuzzle in the classroom

Adapted from Atherton (2018a)
students and engage in two-way communication with them in order to sup-

port and assess. The focus is on transparency and school improvement.
• Spongy Elephant
Bite-sized videos and online training for schools (Figure 11.1).
180 Edpuzzle
In the next and final chapter, I will pull together all the themes and issues
that have contributed to this project.
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Conclusions 12
Edtech and education – moving
forward together
This conclusion will build on the narrative writing that has been a feature
of each chapter. In doing so, the conclusion will crystallise the essence of
the author’s journey by drawing together the relative success of the research
questions, the literature explored, the research methods deployed, the data
analysed and implications for further study. The conclusions will draw
together the various theoretical models and research methods. The chapter
will also make recommendations based on the overall book.
Synthesis of relevant literature
The starting point for the book was in considering the taxonomies and
definitions of edtech (Ingle & Duckworth, 2013; Passey, 2014). In doing so,
the literature objectives of the earlier publications Atherton (2018a, 2018b,
2019), started to be influenced by my own positionality, as a beginning
teacher educator who is enthusiastic about edtech but not a learning tech-
nologist. My position, though, did not inhabit a space of lack but a journey
to understanding through immersion. This ethnographic stance influenced
later work on autoethnography.
The search terms, then, were designed to drive the literature in the direc-
tion of studies that were considering or critiquing the effectiveness of edtech
DOI: 10.4324/9781003221401-12
184 Conclusions
in the classroom (Bayne, 2015; Hamilton & Friesen, 2013; Higgins, ZhiMin
Xiao & Katsipataki, 2011; Kirkwood & Price, 2013). Furthermore, some of
the literature in Atherton (2018a, 2018b, 2019) had explored questions about
the extent to which edtech may accelerate students’ progress (Luckin, 2018a).
This question became exceedingly difficult to answer. This was exacerbated
by a paucity of empirical studies and a prioritisation of research approved
or commissioned by public bodies like the Department for Education (DfE)
in the UK. This prominence of officially sanctioned studies led to a lack of
coherence in the research literature on the effectiveness of edtech (Baker,
Smith and Anissa, cited in NESTA, 2019, 2022; Atherton, 2018a, 2019). This
was further complicated by the iterative development of edtech platforms
versus the rushed nature of some of the research conclusions (King et al.,
2014; Baker, Smith and Anissa, cited in NESTA, 2019). COVID-19 and the
ensuing issues surrounding remote learning confused this further. Though
COVID-19 will be referred to in the literature as an unwelcome compan-
ion to this book, it will not cloud the overall research questions. It seemed
that the chasm between technological innovations and students’ progress
through tech was unlikely to be bridged this way. There was a danger that a
lack of cohesion and consensus on edtech was retarding the establishment
of recognised paradigms with strong boundaries. This fluidity was in danger
of creating an echo chamber effect on account of its potentially unwieldy
and transitory data (Barbera et al., 2015; Colleoni, Rozza & Arvidsson, 2014).
This desire to bridge the chasm of competing or contested definitions
continued throughout the book, though with a little less idealism, greater
caution and a much narrower focus. That said, the issues regarding defini-
tions and taxonomies persisted. In the case of social media, the literature
reported on persistent hybridity and fluidity surrounding the term and its
applications (Atherton, 2020a, 2022). Chapter 6 pointed to a challenge that
would lay ahead in ongoing and future work on edtech, that how to catego-
rise and define technologies in education are contested ontologically, epis-
temologically, semantically and ideologically (Bayne, 2015; Shukie, 2019).
Connectivism
This book has used connectivism to frame the use of edtech tools in the
classroom. Here, the learning process is affected by technology by viewing
the mind as an ecology, a network that technology helps make connections
(Siemens, 2005, pp. 26–27). Atherton (2018b) discussed the findings of a
small-scale research project into how Initial Teacher Education (ITE) trainee
teachers can use Kahoot! to help them reflect on the learning process. This
Conclusions 185
study was concluded in Chapter 4 – Hooked on dopamine? Learning through

failure in game design. This chapter discusses how connectivist thinking
places greater emphasis on diverse opinions and decision-making, instead
of the fixed acquisition of knowledge (Donnelly, 2010; Huang, Bhayani &
Go, 2014; Siemens, 2005). Connectivism is also a pertinent framework for all
the remaining chapters for the same reasons, though this is often implicit to
avoid repetition.
Connectivism and bridging the chasm
The book continues a theme initiated in my practitioner book (Atherton,

2018a) and Atherton (2018b) – that of a chasm between the skills required in
the workplace and those developed by student teachers and teacher educa-
tors. With the topic of social media in Chapters 5–8, this chasm appeared to
widen. This is where the notion of connectivism became more problematic.
Not only was a great deal of the literature from the early 2000s, the chapters
and my work as a teacher educator highlighted a tension between theory
and policy. While connectivism acknowledged the technology-enhanced
serendipity of knowledge in the digital age, much of the reality of children’s
learning is traditional and teacher-centred (Blin & Munro, 2008, cited in
Kirkwood & Price, 2013). Furthermore, recent policy literature about ITE
has barely mentioned technology and has emphasised psychology-based
research and studies commissioned by the DfE or Ofsted (DfE 2019a, 2019b;
Ofsted, 2022).
More recent literature on connectivism was cited in, for example,
Rhizomatic learning: Pearltrees and online curation tools, where connectivism is
referred to as a reference point, to illustrate how edtech can create an inter-
connectedness between users and networks (Shukie,). This chapter departs
from connectivism to stand as a theoretical chapter on rhizomatic learning
(Cormier, 2011, 2014). The chapter entitled Hooked on dopamine? Learning
through failure in game design develops the notion of connectivism further
and with more recent literature. This chapter updates and critiques the liter-
ature and findings in Atherton (2018a, 2018b). Part of the chapter examines
the author’s initial attraction to connectivism, to impose a sense of order
from chaos (Downes, 2022; Shukie, 2019). The chapter crystallises the reser-
vations that the author has developed about connectivism. Firstly, connec-
tivism is not the product of extensive empirical evidence, though it has the
potential for empirical validation (Downes, 2020). Secondly, the theory is at
odds with the need for teaching to be tied to learning objectives and discern-
ible student progress (Baume & Scanlon, 2018, cited in Luckin, 2018a).
186 Conclusions
In counterpoint to this, however, Chapter 3 – Virtual insanity? Is virtual

reality still the future of education? – positions virtual reality (VR) as aligned
with the ideas of connectivism. The reason for this is that VR is frequently
tangential to or an enhancement of an augmentation of a prescriptive
curriculum; the learning emerges not via the transmission of facts but by
empowering students to navigate and connect knowledge and experience
(Atherton, 2018a; Donnelly, 2010; Siemens, 2005).
Narrative writing
My research interest in narrative writing about edtech arose in Atherton

(2018a) and from my own interests and skillset. This interest intensified
when some of the most illuminating qualitative data in Atherton (2019) was
drawn from participants’ own stories about their experiences with edtech
in the classroom. This led to a change in direction in the research towards
autoethnography. The relevance of narrative writing here would be in the
pursuit of creating rigorous and engaging qualitative research from narra-
tive writing. If narrative writing was raw data, it would need a recognised
structure if it were to answer the emerging research questions in Atherton
(2020a, 2020b). The persistent risk of accusations of self-indulgence would
be necessary, as the self would become a narrative text (Atkinson, Coffey,
and Delamont, 2003; Ellis, Adams & Bochner, 2011; Wall, 2016).
If the self and the related narrative writing were to create a piece of qual-
itative research around a series of critical incidents, what might be the effect
and value of this (Denzin, 2011; Ellis & Bochner, 2010)? Narrative writing as
reflective practice could be viewed as a way of foregrounding the research-
er’s lived experience as a challenge to the sometimes contradictory or selec-
tive statistics that are used presented in education (Ellis & Bochner, 2010;
Hebdige, 1979; Struthers, 2014). By deconstructing the self, the researcher
may reconstruct the self (Ellis & Bochner, 2010; Struthers, 2014).
Autoethnography
Though autoethnography was a change of direction, it was not a paradigm

shift, as the same issues of taxonomy and definition persisted. Atherton
(2020a) explored these issues through the literature. I was drawn to the
notion that the researcher could approach autoethnographic studies related
to edtech with creative freedom (Ellis & Bochner, 2006).
Conclusions 187
Themes around building new paradigms, emerging theories, contested

and hybrid definitions and the role of the educator vis-à-vis technology con-
tinued the themes from the literature in the book. These themes were devel-
oped and synthesised with literature from my earlier papers. In Atherton
(2022a), the challenge proposed at the end of the review was to re-configure
definitions and perspectives on autoethnography and to ensure a rigorous
methodology (Hart, 2018, pp. 15–16). The paper reconsiders the notion of
connectivism, in the sense that digital autoethnographies can serve as cel-
ebrations of the ease of digital creation. When digital texts are celebrated,
deconstructed and curated by their creators, knowledge becomes part of a
negotiated and fluid ecosystem (Clark, 2020; Downes, 2022; Dunn & Myers,
2020; Hunter, 2020; Siemens, 2005). Aligned with the issues surrounding
edtech and learning in Atherton (2018a, 2018b, 2019), digital autoethnogra-
phies may be seen as an example of how learning how to navigate knowl-
edge can be more important than static facts.
Atherton (2019), there is an awareness that the role of the practitioner as
researcher may help build bridges between education and technology and
challenge the reliance on voluminous data. Hence, there is a call for multiple
autoethnographies from educators as researchers. This challenge to a cul-
ture of digital positivism (Atherton, 2018a; Fuchs, 2017) was initially seen to
address the digital divide and to build a culture in which resistance and pos-
sibility can flourish (Atherton, 2018a; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Positivism
and digital positivism are discussed in more detail in several chapters.
Summary of themes in the literature
The common and emerging themes in the literature that have informed this
book can be summarised as follows:
• Contested and fluid terminology
One of the common themes discussed throughout the literature is the ways
in which the categorisation and taxonomies of edtech terms are in a state of
flux, hybridity and convergence as the technologies develop fresh iterations.
This is further problematised by the ways in which terminology related to
edtech is contested in the literature. The global and fractured nature of the
literature has made it hard to pinpoint gaps.
• A lack of coherence in studies

188 Conclusions
Some of the findings and research problems have been common across
much of the literature in the book. Many studies have been focused on spe-
cific edtech tools, which date or develop quickly. The conceptual literature
has frequently drawn on ageing paradigms or proposing new ones. Applying
this paradigmatic complexity has rendered problematic the pursuit of epis-
temological truth.
• Emerging themes
Some of these emerging themes have chronicled a desire for a more evi-
dence-based form of research about edtech.
Methodologies used and researcher standpoint
Mixed methods research
The book used mixed methods to investigate new and emerging edtech and
pedagogy from the perspective of a beginning teacher educator and early
career researcher. The quantitative and qualitative findings informed each
step of the book in a logical way. The autoethnographic elements used mul-
timodal texts and qualitative data, drawn from social media and online digi-
tal publishing tools. On reflection, this can be viewed as an act of resistance
to the positivist model of communication from academics (Metcalfe, 2019).
In communicating my own thinking in a public arena like Twitter, I was con-
tributing to a counter-narrative, through which corporate, dominant ideas
can be commoditised (Metcalfe, 2019).
Research paradigms and ontological and epistemological

standpoints
In this section, I will synthesise my application of the paradigms and the-

oretical positions that helped my book make a valuable contribution to
knowledge.
The chapters in the book built on Atherton (2019) and the proposal in
the introduction by proposing the notion of digital constructivism as a
theoretical lens through which the literature and evidence may be consid-
ered. Constructivism can be viewed as a dominant paradigm in education,
but it might be naive to suggest that the earlier exploration of connectiv-
ism represented a paradigm shift (Blin & Munro, 2008, cited in Kirkwood
Conclusions 189
& Price, 2013). Other perspectives that became more relevant as the book
became more coherent were instrumentalism and positivism.
Instrumentalism
Another starting point for this body of work was to provide a challenge
to instrumentalist ways of viewing technology as an unstoppable, natu-
ral force. This force is deemed ideologically neutral (Lanclos, 2016). The
chapters critiqued an evangelical stance on the perceived benefits of edtech
on engagement and students’ progress (Bayne, 2015; Selwyn, 2011; Selwyn
et al., 2020). The book’s challenge to instrumentalism is applicable to the lit-
erature and research into a variety of topics, notably autoethnography, VR,
artificial intelligence (AI), social media and blockchain technologies. The
key challenge to instrumentalism is the accusation that this type of thinking
suppresses debates about the power of big tech, social inequalities and the
ramifications of political decisions (Bayne, 2014). This notion was explored
in Chapter 6 – The tip of the iceberg? Social media in education (Gitelman, 2013).
This selection of literature that runs counter to instrumentalist narratives
continues in the book. An example of this is Chapter 7 – What is your edtech
journey? Autoethnography and the importance of learning journeys. The text
focuses on the lived experience and the researcher as data challenge episte-
mological notions of the nature of data. This epistemological challenge is
evaluated in a different way in Chapter 8 – Blockchain, edtech and learning com-
munities. Here, the literature review advises caution in the mass adoption
of blockchain technologies and their attendant big data management. The
reasons for this are legal issues, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
and potential erasure of essential data (Loukil, Abed & Boukadi, 2021).
Positivism
Where instrumentalism views raw data as a value predictor of truth, pos-

itivism posits that data from the social sciences should be analysed in the
same ways as the physical sciences. The book consistently questions ways
in which a great deal of social research can be empiricist and that social
science research can be oppositional and hierarchical (Atherton, 2020a,
p. 50; Ellis & Bochner, 2006). A response to the realities of digital positivism
might advocate a move away from excessive notions of empiricism, which
are given credibility by big data (Atherton, 2018a, 2019; Fuchs, 2017). This
idea was developed further in Chapter 5 – Search smarter? Leveraging Pinterest
190 Conclusions
for learning. The chapter addressed the epistemological choice of rejecting

the pursuit of objective, universal truths through empirical data in terms of
the main schools of epistemology (Ellis et al., 2011; Struthers, 2014). This
conclusion was drawn from some of the quantitative data. Gathering and
coding the data was made more straightforward but did not offer as many
areas to pursue as qualitative data. An alternative paradigm of critical digital
research (Colleoni et al., 2014; Fuchs, 2017; Wyly, 2014) is proposed to address
the limitations of digital positivism.
This concept is developed further in Chapter 6 – The tip of the iceberg?
Social media in education. The following quote from Fuchs (2017) crystallises
this book’s challenge to digital positivism, which reflects a research culture
that is colonised by computer science (Fuchs, 2017).
While Fuchs (2017) actively calls for a paradigm shift from the tyranny of
big data to critical digital/social media/critical realist research, I propose an
emerging theoretical notion of social postpositivism. Social postpositivism could
recognise the role of the participant and the researcher in the production of
‘emotion and affect’ (Boler, 2019, p. 187). This idea of the entangled self draws
on the autoethnographic approach to examining the performative aspects of
being an academic within the neoliberal context (O’Keeffe, 2019). These ideas
are formulated in Chapter 6 –The tip of the iceberg? Social media in education.
Overview of methods
The chapter that deployed grounded theory was a logical development from
the starting point of constructivism. Constructivist grounded theory was
selected as the most apt for Atherton (2020a), as there are no firm general-
isations arising from the data, only an ‘interpretive understanding’ (Denzin
& Lincoln, 2011, p. 366). This use of grounded theory was continued into
the qualitative systematic review entitled, Chapter 2 – March of the robots? AI
in practice (Chong & Reinders, 2020).
The systematic review in Atherton (2020b) was developed further in
March of the robots? AI in practice. Constructivist grounded theory was used
in a way that mirrors a growing movement towards secondary systematic
research (Chong & Reinders, 2020). The advantages of this method were
that it reduced risk of the generation of unwieldy and disparate data and
created a greater sense of focus (Charmaz, 2014; Chen, 2016; Chong &
Reinders, 2020). Furthermore, the use of constructivist grounded theory
embraced pragmatist conceptions of multiple realities. This acknowledged
the role of the researcher in the production of meaning and avoiding overly
firm generalisations (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011).
Conclusions 191
Collaborative autoethnography
The interest in collaborative autoethnography developed from a reflection

on the ease with which qualitative data could be collected and coded using
online survey tools like SurveyHero (Atherton, 2018a). This interest gath-
ered momentum in the recommendations in Atherton (2019), which pro-
posed that multiple autoethnographies may help bridge the chasm between
education and technology. This increasing focus on the lived experience of
participants was curtailed during the pandemic, as there were negligible
opportunities to develop the trust required for a research project that asks
participants to reflect on their positionality. There needs to be more prac-
titioner research into specific social platforms, preferably in the context of
Secondary ITE.
Outcomes of the book
A refinement of the literature review process
Chapter 2 (March of the robots? AI in practice) specified the databases used and
the inclusion and exclusion criteria, then used constructivist grounded the-
ory (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). The review in then developed this by applying
a theoretical framework to the systematic review – the PRISMA model.
During the period in which the research took place, the DfE increased
their emphasis on the importance of technology in education. In 2019, The
DfE published policy documents on edtech, the emphasis was on embed-
ding ‘good’ use of technology; the intention was to reduce workload, bring
about improvements in outcomes and create a more inclusive educational
culture (Department for Education, 2019a). There was an emphasis on pro-
curement and access to markets for technology companies and how to over-
come ‘barriers’ to using technology. This technology was proven to reduce
workload, promote inclusion and improve learning (DfE, 2019a).
The first lockdown due to COVID-19 occurred less than one year later
and this placed greater emphasis on edtech and pedagogy, in addition to the
challenges of teaching pupils remotely and assessing pupils who have been
unable to take exams. In a comparable way to some of the policy literature,
policy has tended to view technology in an essentialist way, as ideologically
neutral (Bayne, 2015). As if to amplify the need for technology to be a more
prominent feature of learning, the new Core Content Framework for Initial
Teacher Training did not contain a single reference to technology.
192 Conclusions
This body of work addresses the following issues with the literature:
• a paucity of practitioner research on edtech in peer-reviewed journals in

the context of Secondary ITE in the UK.
• a preponderance of small-scale practitioner research located among
undergraduate students in universities in other continents.
• a tendency to neglect issues of social justice.
• a paucity of autoethnographic studies into teacher educators’ develop-
ing skill set and issues of social justice.
This book was located in a niche of ITE in the UK. That said, it contributed
to ongoing debates about edtech and pedagogy, about specific edtech tools,
about social media and, subsequently, autoethnography. One of the reasons
for this is the fact that the sample represents a significant proportion of
student teachers in the North of England. The EU government sponsored
study published at the end of the process (EDUCATE, 2021) was larger in
scope and used a variety of research methods. The significance of mine vis-
à-vis these larger studies is the focus on teacher professional and lived edu-
cators’ experiences. This may be less representative but is potentially more
relatable on account of its smaller dataset.
Conclusions
How has the ‘chasm’ been a space of both creative opportunities and chal-
lenges in shaping the researcher’s academic identity? The entanglement of
the self in the research started as an authentic way for me to investigate
edtech as an outsider, exploring a perceived chasm between how the world
of education lags behind the technological culture of the private sector
(Atherton, 2019; O’Keeffe, 2019). As the book developed, it became increas-
ingly apparent that the bridge over the chasm is the researcher. I am the
bridge over the chasm. As I attempted to traverse this symbolic bridge, I was
enlightened by the revelations from the mixed methods data about Kahoot!
(Atherton, 2018b) and other edtech platforms (Atherton, 2019, 2022a,
2022b). I became more of a tech agnostic than an evangelist, as I unearthed a
great deal of contradictory data, which may be replicable to other research-
ers but is not applicable across contexts. This deepening contingency led
to a greater focus on the lived experience as a way of exploring that iden-
tity, to help bridge the chasm. It became clear that the bridge was not a
conduit to conclusive generalisations arising from mixed methods data, fol-
lowed by narrative writing, visual narratology and the ensuing grounded
Conclusions 193
theory and thematic analyses. Indeed, if I am the bridge, then I am a par-

tial conduit of a steady flow of preliminary findings on iterative progress
and emerging research methods. This bridge, then, would bring me back to
connectivism – full circle – to the theoretical origins of the book (Atherton,
2018a, 2018b, 2019; Siemens, 2005). Despite my inclination to use connec-
tivism as a departure point, recent literature has revived the research ques-
tions around it, for example Downes’ (2022) updated review and Boyraz and
Ocak’s (2021) review in the context of learning during the pandemic.
How can qualitative inquiry help teacher educators construct a coherent
identity?
My own autoethnographic work is part of a growing trend to challenge
the positivist and instrumentalist traditions of social science research. My
own priorities were to produce a body of unique, replicable and rigorous
qualitative research. I discussed in earlier sections how I adopted innovative
data collection methods and acted on advice from peer reviewers in order
that the methodology was made more rigorous. The greater transparency
over data collection methods and clarity over my analysis using construc-
tivist grounded theory and thematic analysis is likely to provide a road map
for other teacher educators to explore any aspect of their experiences or
identities. What emerging paradigms and research methods are attempting
to interrogate the edtech space?
These emerging methods and paradigms are summarised below.
Collaborative autoethnography?
The call for collaborative autoethnography began in Atherton (2019) and

was reiterated in Atherton (2022b). The case for collaborative autoeth-
nography to build on this focus on drilling down into individual stories to
explore ontological truths (Roy & Uekusa, 2020). Indeed, the fact that social
media are, at the time of writing, in their infancy may begin to explain the
enmity towards them; is it possible to answer ontological questions when
the subject is on shifting sands (Atherton, 2018a; Babbie, 2014)? In terms of
the focus of my own body of research, the pandemic has clearly increased
a feeling of isolation among student teachers and teacher educators. That
said, the ongoing lockdowns have provided opportunities for researchers to
develop their constructivist or interactionist theoretical perspectives (Roy
& Uekusa, 2020). This study builds on the use of reflexivity through narra-
tive writing and autoethnography in Atherton (2022). The concluding com-
ments regarding collaborative autoethnography as a logical development
were followed up at the Belonging in a Digital World – Enhancing the student
194 Conclusions
journey conference in June 2022 and are addressed in more detail in the chap-
ter for Routledge (Chang, Ngunjiri & Hernandez, 2012).
Adopting a multihyphenate approach
I propose that my research has led me to the proposal that edtech is in search
of a new set of paradigms. One of the reasons for this is that the edtech
space, into which I have immersed myself performatively (Clark, 2020), is
on shifting sands ontologically, epistemologically and axiologically. This par-
adigmatic pluralism has led me to adopt an appropriate way to navigate my
own positionality: it necessitated a multihyphenate approach. The term multi-
hyphenate draws from the multiple roles that can be performed in the acting
world, hence multiple hyphens (Kimmons & Johnstun, 2019, pp. 639–640).
This book provides evidence of the new and emerging ways of researching
edtech and points the way forward to applying these further in the book.
Impact and recommendations for further study
The edtech space possesses a notably high incidence of paradigmatic plural-

ism. There are many reasons for this, for example the shifting sands of the
technologies themselves, the fluidity of definitions and paradigms in rela-
tion to real-world applications and policy. The multihyphenate recognises the
convergence of research problems and paradigms. The advantage of this
pluralistic approach is that reflection on competing paradigms can reveal
deeper truths. The disadvantage is the risk of self-contradiction (Kimmons
& Johnstun, 2019, pp. 639–641).
Some of these contradictions, however, are borne of persistent and
emerging paradoxes and oppositions. One of the changes that started to
occur during the pandemic was that student teachers were sometimes
actively engaged in demonstrating their own competence in edtech to their
mentors and colleagues in schools. There was rapid progress on one hand
and practical and epistemological stasis on the other. This emphasised the
need for more research that empowered student teachers and teacher educa-
tors to reflect on the development of their own skills and their professional
identities. This led to the desire to develop the book from qualitative feed-
back to individual reflection and rigour of research methods. The pandemic
also challenged and problematised existing research paradigms, yet there
was neither a paradigm shift, nor a new paradigm. This book concludes
with a citation of Deleuze (2006) and Taglietti, Landri and Grimaldi (2021),
Conclusions 195
who describe the convergence of ontology and epistemology during a tran-

sitional period of crisis in which there are more questions than answers.
Another development of my research into a series of autoethnographic
works has helped challenge my sense of professional self. A growing preoc-
cupation with quantitative metrics has arguably created a more performative
professional identity (Cowen, 1996; Metcalfe, 2019). The way this manifests
itself is through using research output to raise my profile and demonstrate
it via metrics such as H-Index, citations and social shares (O’Keeffe, 2019).
While this may be a complete synthesis, its claims for ontological reali-
ties or epistemological truths can only be provisional (Taglietti, Landri &
Grimaldi, 2021).
Suggested further research
The importance of the lived experience in writing about edtech
The autoethnographic work used multimodal texts and qualitative data,

drawn from social media and online digital publishing tools. On reflection,
this can be viewed as an act of resistance to the positivist model of commu-
nication from academics (Metcalfe, 2019). In analysing my communications
on a public arena like Twitter, I was contributing to a counter-narrative to
corporate, dominant ideas (Metcalfe, 2019).
• what are the emerging skills the teacher educators need as they support
their students in their use of technology and how do these contribute to
the formulation of identities?
• how has the ‘chasm’ been a space of both creative opportunities and
challenges in shaping the researcher’s academic identity?
• how can qualitative inquiry help teacher educators construct a coherent
identity?
As a body of work, the book has helped develop debates about the following
issues:
• mixed research methods.

• the importance of narrative writing in developing reflective models.
• the role of the researcher in the production of research.
• the usefulness of autoethnography in producing rigorous research.
• what are the emerging skills the teacher educators need as they support
their students in their use of technology?
196 Conclusions
• how do teacher educators form their identities in relation to technology?

• how has the ‘chasm’ been a space of both creative opportunities and
challenges in shaping the researcher’s academic identity?
• how can qualitative inquiry help teacher educators construct a coherent
identity?
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Index
Abed, M. 116–118 diversity and academic validity 101;

Abrams, B. 173 edtech events 104–105; findings and
Alammary, A. S. 115 analysis 103–104; iconoclasm and
Alchemy of Learning 112 innovation 101–102; research design
Alexa 18 102–103
Allcoat, D. 40 autonomous learning 54–55
Amazon 121
Amin-Hammami, M. 41 Babbage, Charles 22
anarchic learning culture 139 Badr, A. 116
Anchor app 107, 149–151 Barnes, S. 116
Anchor.fm 156, 162 Bastedo, K. 40
Apple 121 Bayne, S. 69
Arenas, R. 116 Bdiwi, R. 116
artificial intelligence (AI) 189; and Belfiore, H. J. L. 153
coachbots 14; Colin 11 Bennett, L. 40
Atherton, P. 3–5, 12, 55, 57, 76, 86, 91, Besser, E. D. 153
92, 94, 99–100, 103, 106, 154, 155, Billingsley, G. 39
157, 162, 171, 174, 183, 184, 185, Bitcoin 115, 128
186, 187, 190, 193; autoethnography Blackwell, L. E. 153
99; crypto 125; experience and blockchain technology: caution and
reflection 98; mini SWOT analysis hostility 116; data management
124; pandemic pivot 119; technology in education 117; definition 115;
in education 120; use narrative in education 115; Web 3.0 towards
writing and visual narratology 100; Web 4.0 117
Web 4.0 122 Bochner, A. 162
augmented reality (AR) 35, 36, Book Creator 107
38, 78 Bouali, N. 38
autoethnography 12; analytical insights Boukadi, K. 116, 117, 118
100–101; critique 102; definition 100; Boyraz, S. 193
Index 203
Brabazon, T. 160 De Runz, C. 116

Bruguera, C. 68 Di Cerbo, K. 55
Buffer and Pallyy 78 DiGii Social 130
digital cultures 42, 106
CAE see collaborative digital positivism 75, 187, 189–190;
autoethnography big data vs. small data 88; theoretical
Cain, J. 154 models 88–89
Canva 78, 107 Ding, N. 39
Carpenter, J. P. 87 Downes, S. 19, 57, 193
Cesare, D. M. D. 173–174
Chamekh, Y 41 Edpuzzle 107; in the classroom 171,
Chang, Y. S. 40 179; flipped classroom 171–173; as
Charmaz, K. 19 a learning tool in Secondary/High
chatbots 5, 9, 12–17, 19, 20–22, 28–30 School 173–174; Pete Atherton
Chen, J. C. 40–41 175–178; recent studies on 171; uses
Cherif, A. A. 116 in the classroom 174–175; Victoria
Chien, S.-Y. 40 James 175–178; video presentation
Chong, S. W 19 and assessment tool 168
Chong, S. W. 16 edtech 56; application of the paradigms
Cifuentes, L. 38 188–189; autoethnography 186–187;
Clark-Wilson, A. 15 collaborative autoethnography 191;
Cohen, L. 18 connectivism 184–186; effectiveness
collaborative autoethnography (CAE) of 183–184; emerging themes
151, 155–157, 162 187–188; events 104–105;
Connell, R. 89 instrumentalism 189; mixed methods
constructivist grounded theory 153, research 188; multihyphenate
190–191, 193 approach 194; narrative writing 186;
continuous professional development positivism 189–190
(CPD) 152 Edtech Expo: Edtech Thought Leaders
Cormier, D. 138 93–94; Liverpool 2018 90
Cortana 18 edtech platforms 2; and education 4;
COVID-19 14, 66, 69, 74, 141, 153, in schools and colleges 3; variety of 3
171, 191 education: AI – broader issues in 20–21;
creative learning principles machine learning in 20
(CLPs) 139 Education 4.0 117, 141
CredenceLedger 116 Elgazzar, K. 116
critical platform gaze 2 Ellis, V. 139–140
cryptocurrency 121, 125, 127 English National Curriculum 54, 144
Cukurova, M. 15 Eseni, N. O. 173
Curcio, R. 68 Ethereum 115
cyberbullying 51, 66, 74, 76–78, 85 ethics 21, 114, 157; and functionality of
AI 14
Davis, T. J. 38 Evans, R. 153
Deb, S. 41 Evernote 145
Deleuze, G. 138, 140, 194
Department for Education (DfE) Facebook 37, 74, 84, 90, 94, 120–121, 125
184–185, 191 Faiz, S. 116
Depth of Knowledge (DOK) 140 Feng, Q. 39
204 Index
Fernandez, P. 116 Holmberg, J. 41

Flipgrid 178 Honan, E. M. 137
Fortnite 44 Hordvik, M. 138
Fransson, G. 41 Hossain, M 116
Freeman, C. 68 Hsiao, H. S. 40
French, S. D. 153 Huang, Y. 40
Friesen, N. 56 Hung, P. C. K. 116
Fuchs, C. 75, 89, 190 Hussein, Aftab 12, 22, 28
Furtmueller, E. 19 Hwang, G.-J. 40
game-based immersive virtual reality Ibrahim, A. 140

learning environment (GIVRLE) 39 immersive virtual reality (iVR) 40
game-based learning 55–56 Initial Teacher Education (ITE) 66, 103,
game theory 57 138, 151, 152, 154, 192
General Data Protection Regulation Institute of Education (IOE) 11
(GDPR) 117, 189 intelligent personal assistants
Gibbs, G. 106 (IPAs) 18
Gimkit 59 Internet of Things (IoT) 116
Giyanto 173 Interpretative Phenomenological
Glass, G. V. 18 Analysis (IPA) 40
Gleason, B. 68 IRIS Connect 178
GoBubble 130 ITE see Initial Teacher Education
Goering, C. Z. 153
Goetz, E. T. 37 Jadraque, M. A. 173
Google 121; Cardboard 43, 43; Jenkins, A. R. 153
Classroom 170 Jensen, L. 39
GoReact 178 Jimenez, C. 173
Griffiths, Zoe 112; blockchain and Jowallah, R. 40
machine learning technology
112–113; COVID-19 pandemic Kaczorowski, T 173–174
113–114; data sovereignty 113; trip to Kahoot 50–53, 107; autonomous
Istanbul 126 learning 54–55; in classroom 59;
Grimaldi, E. 141, 194 connectivism 56–57; empirical data
grounded theory 12, 19, 21, 100, 106, 57–58; limitations of 58; student
153, 190, 191, 193; vs. thematic teachers using 54
analysis 12 Kaliisa, R. 38
Gruzd, A. 68 Kavanagh, S. 42
Guattari, F. 138, 140 Kazanidis, I. 38–40
Guitert, M. 68 Keeney-Kennicutt, W. 38
Kemmis, S. 156
Hamilton, E. C. 56 key performance indicators
Hashey, A. 173–174 (KPIs) 89
Hassanain, E. 116 Konradsen, F. 39
Haythornthwaite, C. 68 Krutka, D. G. 87
head-mounted displays (HMDs) 37,
39, 41 Landri, P. 141, 194
Heliawaty, L. 173 Le Roux, C. S. 103
HMDs see head-mounted displays Li, G. 39
Index 205
Lin, C. Y. 40 Organisation for Economic

Lin, H. C. 40 Co-operation and Development
LinkedIn 85, 90 (OECD) 54
Lin, K. Y. 40 Oyelere, S. S. 38
Loukil, F. 116–118
Lovelace, Ada 11, 23 Pandey, N. 122
Luckin, R. 15 Paulin, D. 68
Lundgren, L. 68 Pearltrees: online questionnaires 143–
Luo, H. 39 144; as part of a rhizomatic learning
Luo, T. 68 143; rhizomatic learning by student
Luxton-Reilly, A. 42 teachers 137; small-scale research
project 137; subject knowledge
Macias, H. 153 resources 138
MacPhail, A. 138 Pellas, N. 38–39
MaestroVision 178 pervasive neoliberalist culture 103
Mahmoud, Q. H. 116 Pilot project: candour 160; coding
Majid, F. A. 41 157; data collection 156–157; ethics
Manion, L. 18 157; statements and emotions 161;
massive open online courses thematic analysis of transcripts
(MOOCs) 137 157–160
McGaw, B. 18 Pinstamatic 78
McTaggart, R. 156 Pinterest 64; in classroom 69–70, 76–77;
Merchant, Z. 37 data collection and analysis 70–71;
Meritt, J. 39 functionality 65; impact and spread
metaverse 38–39, 44 65; infographic 77; reputation 65–66;
micropreneur 86 social literacies 65–66; vivo coding
Minocha, S. 40 72–73
Momohjimoh, F. O. 173 Pittard, E. 68
MondlyVR 44 Planet eStream 178
Morrison, K. 18 Plimmer, B. 42
multi-disciplinary bibliographic Plonsky, L. 16
databases 17 podcast: collaborative autoethnography
Mystakidis, S. 38–40, 55 154–156; definition 151; exploratory
Myth of Proteus 141 dialogue 155; Logo for Edtech
Innovators 150; platforms for 153,
natural language processing (NLP) 164; reflection and collaboration 153;
13, 20 research design 156; research methods
neoliberalism 68, 89, 142 153–154; in the Secondary/High School
neoliberal learning culture 139, 142 and ITE sectors 152; for teachers 163
Netflix 121 Poore, M. 69
Nuss, S. 172 Pratt, A. 154
PRISMA model 191
Ocak, G. 193 professional learning network (PLN)
Octi 78 87, 90, 94
Oculus Rift 37 Pulukuri, S. 173
Okonkwo, E. A. 173
Onah, J. C. 173 Quizizz 59
Opogo 118, 129–130 Quizlet 59
206 Index
Radu, I. 38 social postpositivism 89, 190

Rafferty, L. 116 socio-technical assemblages 2
Rahman, M. 116 Spongy Elephant 179–180
Rashid, M. 116 Stefaniak, J. 68
Ray, A. B. 41 SurveyHero 60, 70, 142, 191
Reinders, H. 16, 19 Surveyhero.com 69
Remo 93–94 Swivl 178
rhizomatic learning: circum-curriculum
144; CLPs 139–140; definition 137; Taglietti, D. 141, 194
Deleuzian philosophy 140; education Tahir, R. 53
as multi-structural process 139; teacher-centred game 57
exploration of subjectivities and teacherpreneurs 68, 86
entanglements 140; and MOOCs teaching English as a second language
137; neoliberal learning culture 142; (TESOL) 172
student motivation 139 Technology Acceptance Model
Roblox 44 (TAM) 41
Rode VideoMic Me 163 Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL)
Romeu, T. 68 3–4, 56, 67
Ronglan, L. 138 The Sandbox 36–37, 59
Roy, R. 66 Times Education Supplement (TES) 129
Rubini, B. 173 Ting, L. 153
Rumii 44 Trivia Crack 59
Rust, J. 155, 160 Tsai, C. 41
Turing, Alan 12
Saenz, M. 153 Twitter 65, 66, 85, 90–92
Salmon, G. 141
Sch0lar.io 117–118 Ubiquitous Learning Environment
Scheg, A. 172 (ULE) 116
Schroeder, S. 68 Uekusa, S. 66
Sellers, M. 137 University College London (UCL) 11
Shamsudin, N. M. 41
Shi, A. 39 Veo 178
Siri 18 virtual insanity 5
Siu-Yung Jong, M. 40 virtual learning environments (VLEs)
Sketchy 59 39, 117, 141
Smith, M. L. 18 virtual reality (VR) 20; in the
Smith, S. 39 classroom 44–45, 45; collaborative
Snapchat 51 learning through 40; in the context
social media: analytics 87; barriers 73– of Secondary/High School
75; cyberbullying in 78; definition 67; education 37; digital cultures 42;
and education 87; further work 75– in education 41, 42; experiences 36;
76; as informal learning 68; learning games 39; in K-12 schools 41–42;
by participating 86; LinkedIn 85; learning design 39; platforms 36;
literature on 67; neoliberalism 89; used as an educational tool 40–41
neologisms 85; Twitter 85; use in vivo coding 72–73
classroom 87 Vocaroo 156, 163
social neologisms 85 Von Mühlenen, A. 40
Index 207
Wang, A. 53 Yang, Y. 39
Wang, Y. 39 YouTeachMe 178–179
Web 4.0 140–141 Yu, Z. 39
Webb, N. 140
Weimer, K. R. 154 Ziegler, N. 16
Westelius, C. 41 Zipoy, Ted 117; blockchain 122; certificate-
Wilderom, C. 19 based learning 120; mobile era 121;
Wiliam, D. 171 money management 125; peer-to-peer
Wolfswinkel, J. 19 networks 123–124; Scholar 119; STEM
WordMaster Game 59 seeking scholarships 124; student debt
Wuensche, B. 42 123; student debt crisis 127; students
scholarships 126; Ukrainian refugees
128; Web 4.0 122
xBrowserSync 145 Zuo, M. 39

Goal Setting and Problem Solving in The Tech Enhanced Classroom

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Goal-Setting and

Goal-Setting and Problem-Solving in the Tech-Enhanced Classroom explores how

Pete Atherton is Senior Lecturer in Teacher Education at Liverpool John

List of illustrations vii

1 Introducing the chasm 1

2 March of the robots? AI in practice 9

3 Virtual insanity? Is virtual reality still the future of education? 35

4 Hooked on dopamine? Learning through failure in

5 Search smarter? Leveraging Pinterest for learning 64

6 The tip of the iceberg? Social media in education 84

7 What is your edtech journey? Autoethnography and

8 Blockchain, edtech and learning communities 112

9 Rhizomatic learning: Pearltrees and online curation tools 134

10 Podcasting in education 149

11 Edpuzzle: Online video for learning – questioning and

12 Conclusions: Edtech and education – moving forward together 183

Teaching and learning problem

There is a significant disconnect between the preponderance of edtech plat-

Literature and practical applications

Extract from Atherton (2018a). 50 Ways to Use

As an experienced teacher, it started to occur to me in the mid-nough-

• edtech on either side of the pandemic.

I am entangled in this selective interrogation of edtech and am positioned

Researching the chasm

precipitated further questions about the effects of the pandemic on teach-

• the importance of narrative writing in developing reflective.

Goal-Setting and Problem-Solving in the Tech-Enhanced Classroom: A Teaching

Chapter 1 Introducing the chasm

Chapter 2 March of the robots? AI in practice

Chapter 3 Virtual insanity? Is virtual reality still the future of education?

Chapter 4 Hooked on dopamine? Learning through failure in game design

Chapter 5 Search smarter? Leveraging Pinterest for learning

Chapter 6 The tip of the iceberg? Social media in education

Chapter 7 What is your edtech journey? Autoethnography and the importance

Chapter 8 Blockchain, edtech and learning communities

Chapter 9 Rhizomatic learning: Pearltrees and online curation tools

Chapter 10 Podcasting in education

Chapter 11 Edpuzzle: Online video for learning – questioning and online

Chapter 12 Conclusions: Edtech and education – moving forward together

Structure of each chapter

The basic structure of each chapter will be as follows:

• recommendations for use in the classroom.

Teaching and learning problem

Figure 2.1 FirstPass being used at Bolton College, UK

Narrative account of the author’s experience and

My earliest dalliance with AI in education was at a conference near

Institute of Education (IOE) at University College London (UCL) were

contextualise recent and emerging thinking with deconstructing the

I am approaching AI through the lens of the lived experience of one team

Grounded theory vs thematic analysis

I am drawn towards grounded theory in this chapter and in Atherton

Review of relevant literature and findings

The chapter established the following research questions, which develop

• a continuation of recommendations to focus on the design of edtech,

• reference points for navigating recent literature when exploring issues of

I will select literature about the broader issue of AI in the Secondary/

In terms of categories or taxonomies (Atherton, 2019), the literature refers

1. Social Science Citation Index (SSCI).

I used a university database to further narrow my search. I selected the fol-

• full text online.

Books about AI are in danger of dating quickly, so I ensured that I selected

The first search terms included the terms ‘chatbots’, ‘artificial intelligence’

I made the decision to narrow the searches further by restricting them to

The initial search allowed me to assemble papers from peer-reviewed jour-

long-established tradition dating back to 1967 (Glaser and Strauss, 1967;

With real-time feedback, can these students write in a more informed

We wanted to provide the students with real-time feedback on answers to

Figure 3.1 Google Cardboard