This final post is not a conclusion. It is an invitation - a provocation - to imagine what digital education might become if it were truly shaped by pedagogical values rather than platform logic. Across the previous five entries, this series has traced the contours of a university increasingly mediated by commercial platforms, governed by logics of efficiency, data extraction, and managerialism. But if digital infrastructures encode political assumptions (Bowker and Star, 2006), then it follows that they can be reimagined, contested, and rebuilt.

A manifesto is necessary because critique alone is not enough. If we are to reclaim pedagogy in a platformed world, we must assert principles for action. A manifesto frames the moment as one of collective urgency. It provides orientation in an environment where institutional inertia normalises technological drift, and where AI-led reform increasingly displaces deliberation with automation (Selwyn, 2019; Williamson and Eynon, 2020). A manifesto insists that education remains a profoundly human endeavour - dialogic, relational, situated.

This is not the work of individual heroism, nor a nostalgic call to resist all technological change. It is an appeal to educators, students, technologists, librarians, and activists to treat pedagogy not as a fixed set of methods, but as a shared political project—one that demands ongoing negotiation of power, tools, and values (Stommel, 2014; Quinn, Burtis and Jhangiani, 2022). The digital university can be otherwise. But getting there will require not only critique, but collective imagination—and the courage to act upon it.

This series has traced a path through the infrastructural, pedagogical, and political dimensions of digital education, revealing how technology is never merely a tool but always a terrain of struggle. Each post offered a different vantage point on this terrain, and together they form a critical map for rethinking the digital university.

From Post 1: Framing the Digital The series began by interrogating the dominant narratives of digital transformation. Instead of taking terms like “innovation” and “efficiency” at face value, it asked what assumptions they conceal. Drawing on the work of Selwyn (2022) and Feenberg (1991), it argued that the digital in education is always ideological – encoding visions of what learning is for, who it serves, and how it should be governed. The post called for a shift from technological determinism to critical digital literacy, positioning educators not as passive adopters but as political agents within digital systems.

From Post 2: The Hidden Curriculum of the LMS This entry examined how platform architectures – particularly in Learning Management Systems like Canvas or Blackboard – shape the conditions of pedagogy. Drawing on critiques from Watters (2020) and Castañeda and Selwyn (2018), it demonstrated that the design of these systems embeds a “hidden curriculum” that privileges compliance, standardisation, and surveillance. The LMS was shown to be less a neutral container for learning and more an active force in structuring student behaviour and teacher autonomy.

From Post 3: AI, Assessment, and the Automation of Judgement In this post, the focus turned to the encroachment of AI in evaluative practices. Here, the stakes are epistemological: what does it mean to assess, and who gets to decide? The post explored how systems like automated marking and AI-assisted plagiarism detection risk displacing human judgement, masking bias, and reinforcing mechanistic views of learning. Citing Knox (2020) and Tsai, Perrotta and Gašević (2020), it argued that critical pedagogy must reclaim assessment as a relational, interpretive, and dialogic act.

From Post 4: Digital Policy is Pedagogy This post made the case that digital governance – including procurement, data policy, and platform strategy – is itself a pedagogical domain. Institutions often treat these as operational or infrastructural concerns, disconnected from teaching and learning. But as Mattern (2015) and Williamson (2017) show, infrastructural decisions shape what kinds of knowledge, relationships, and practices are possible. The post urged educators to engage in infrastructural critique, challenging the invisibilisation of policy-making and reclaiming it as a shared educational responsibility.

From Post 5: Critical Infrastructure: Reimagining the Digital University Finally, the fifth post shifted from critique to possibility, exploring existing and emerging models of alternative digital infrastructures. Open-source tools, federated platforms, and community-led initiatives were presented not as utopian dreams but as working counter-examples to the dominant corporate model. Drawing on Bardzell (2010), Tréguer (2017), and Zhang et al. (2022), it highlighted the importance of transparency, interoperability, and user sovereignty. At stake is nothing less than the ownership and governance of educational futures.

Across these posts, a clear argument emerges: the digital university is not a fixed inevitability but a contested space. It can either reproduce dominant logics of efficiency, compliance, and datafication – or become a site of democratic imagination and collective resistance. Reclaiming digital pedagogy means recognising that every platform, policy, and protocol is a pedagogical choice – and acting accordingly.

The platformed university thrives on closure: predefined workflows, locked-down interfaces, invisible algorithms, and depoliticised choices. To challenge this, we must open up space for questions - not to find neat answers, but to agitate thinking, surface contradiction, and invite collective reimagining. The following provocations are meant not to resolve but to disrupt; not to stabilise, but to stir.

What pedagogies are our platforms making possible - and what are they foreclosing?

Behind every LMS template and every “learning tool interoperability” spec is a pedagogical model, often unspoken. Is it dialogic or didactic? Open-ended or prescriptive? What modes of engagement are assumed, and which are rendered difficult, if not impossible? We must ask: where is the friction between the platform and our pedagogical intent, and what does that friction reveal?

Who owns our digital classrooms? Who is absent from decisions that shape them?

The digital classroom is not a neutral extension of the physical one. It is owned, configured, and surveilled - often by actors far removed from the pedagogical relationship. Procurement teams, corporate vendors, AI engineers: these are now de facto architects of the learning environment. What might it look like to reassert educational ownership and democratic participation in these decisions?

How do we resist ’datafication’ without reverting to nostalgic models of teaching?

Resistance to data extractivism must not become a retreat into romanticised pasts. The chalkboard is not inherently more just than the dashboard. Instead, the task is to develop future-oriented forms of pedagogy that are relational, contextual, and humane - without falling prey to either techno-solutionism or nostalgic anti-technologism.

What would it mean to design technology from a place of care, justice, and trust?

Care is rarely a category in technology design - but what if it were foundational? How might tools change if designed not for scale, efficiency, or compliance, but for relational accountability, for mutual trust, for epistemic justice? Who would build them - and who would be empowered to refuse?

These are not merely questions for developers or administrators. They are pedagogical questions. They belong in staff rooms, course design meetings, and student assemblies. And they demand a collective response: critical, experimental, and unfinished.

If pedagogy is, as Paulo Freire (1970) reminds us, a practice of freedom, then our digital infrastructures must be designed to serve that purpose. Yet too often, educational technologies re-inscribe forms of control, measurement, and managerialism that distort what education is for and who it is for. What follows is a manifesto - not to dictate action, but to orient collective work toward a more just and democratic digital education.

Reclaiming digital pedagogy is not a solitary act - it is a shared, ongoing, and necessarily collective process. This manifesto does not offer a closed set of solutions but opens a conversation. Its provocations and principles are intended as starting points for deeper reflection, critique, and action in your own institutional and pedagogical context.

At a time when digital education is increasingly shaped by platforms, protocols, and predictive systems, reclaiming pedagogy means resisting closure. It means imagining and enacting alternatives grounded in justice, care, and collectivity. As Muñoz (2019) reminds us, “Utopia is not prescriptive - it is a mode of critique and a horizon of potentiality.” The invitation here is to join in the project of building that horizon - together.

Conversations are already taking place across the Fediverse, in hybrid pedagogy forums, in departmental meetings and informal networks. Educators are co-developing cooperative tools, redesigning assessment practices, and rethinking procurement policies. Join them. Start your own. Annotate this manifesto, adapt it, remix it.

Pedagogy is not a private practice; it is a shared struggle over what education is for and who it serves. Reclaiming it in the digital age will require courage, imagination, and above all, community.

Against the backdrop of platform dominance, data extraction, and institutional inertia, it is tempting to believe that the digital university is already determined - that the future of education will simply be administered rather than imagined. But such a view accepts the logics of inevitability that critical pedagogy urges us to resist. As Freire (1994) reminds us, “Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search - a search which can be carried out only in communion with others.” This is the work ahead: not resignation, but the difficult, collective labour of reimagining education otherwise.

Hope, in this sense, is not naïveté. It is, as bell hooks (2003) insists, a “disciplined practice” - an active stance in the face of oppression and despair. To reclaim pedagogy in the digital university is to believe that our tools, institutions, and infrastructures can be made to serve different ends. It is to understand that every choice - about a platform, an assessment, a procurement contract - is also a pedagogical decision, shaping what kinds of relationships, knowledge, and futures are made possible.

This hope is dialogic. It requires spaces where educators, students, technologists, and administrators can speak, listen, and build together. It calls for a refusal of the logics of control and efficiency that dominate so much of educational technology. And it insists on the dignity of human experience as the foundation of any meaningful learning.

The path to a community-owned, values-aligned digital university will not be quick or easy. But it begins here - in critical reflection, in shared vision, and in the radical belief that education can be otherwise. The infrastructure of higher education is not fixed. It is built every day in our choices, our silences, and our collective imagination. Let us build with hope.

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