In the contemporary discourse surrounding educational technology, critique is too often cast as obstruction. In environments governed by the logics of innovation, efficiency, and scalability, the act of questioning prevailing trends is treated as a form of negativity, something to be bypassed in the pursuit of technological advancement. Yet, as many scholars in Critical Pedagogy and philosophy of education have argued, critique is not a hindrance to progress; it is its condition. To imagine otherwise, to see critique not as resistance but as creation, is to reorient our understanding of what it means to engage with educational futures.

This post begins from the premise that educational technology is not neutral. As Feenberg (2002) observes, technologies are shaped by social interests and political values, and they, in turn, shape the institutions in which they are embedded. The dominance of what Morozov (2013) famously labelled technological solutionism, the belief that complex social problems can be resolved through elegant technical fixes, has had profound consequences for education. Within this paradigm, critical perspectives are often treated as outdated or unproductive, and the potential of imagination is subordinated to the promise of automation.

Against this, Cornelius Castoriadis offers a powerful conceptual alternative. For Castoriadis (1997), critique and creation are not opposites but two moments of the same social-historical process. Every act of institution, whether political, educational, or technological, is underpinned by the radical imagination: the human capacity to bring into being what does not yet exist. To critique an existing institution is thus to participate in the work of creation. It is to refuse the given not only in protest, but in order to open space for new possibilities.

In this sense, critique is not simply a matter of analysing the faults of current systems. It is an imaginative and political act, a call to remake the world. As Biesta (2013) argues, education must reclaim its purpose not merely as the transmission of knowledge but as the formation of subjectivity and the construction of democratic life. Such a view demands more than technical refinement; it calls for a radical reimagining of the institutional forms, technological infrastructures, and pedagogical commitments that underpin education itself.

This post takes up that call. It will explore how critique functions as a generative force in digital education, examining its marginalisation in platform discourse and its resurgence in grassroots practices, from open education and federated platforms to participatory pedagogies and co-creation. In doing so, it affirms that critique is not the enemy of innovation, but its necessary companion, especially if we aim for an innovation grounded in justice, plurality, and democratic possibility.

To understand critique as a generative force, we must return to Cornelius Castoriadis’ ontology of creation and social transformation. For Castoriadis, critique is inseparable from the radical imagination, the capacity of human beings to institute new forms of social life. He introduces the concept of the instituting society to explain how all institutions, from law to education, are the product of imaginary significations: shared social meanings that underpin and legitimate our collective arrangements (Castoriadis, 1997).

Crucially, this imagination is not a passive mirror of reality, nor merely an individual faculty of creativity. It is a social-historical force: the way a society gives itself meaning and thereby creates its own institutions. To critique, in this context, is not simply to dismantle existing structures but to participate in the imaginative act of creating new ones. Critique becomes a political act of world-making.

This insight has significant implications for digital education. In contrast to the dominant narratives of technological progress, which often reduce critique to resistance or negativity, we must affirm critique as a transformative act. In many contemporary edtech spaces, however, critical perspectives are marginalised or dismissed as barriers to innovation. Selwyn (2022) observes that calls for caution, reflection, or dissent are often labelled as anti-technology, even when they are grounded in deep commitments to justice, autonomy, and meaningful learning.

Such marginalisation is not accidental. It reflects the hegemony of solutionist thinking in education, where critique is conflated with delay or dysfunction. But as Castoriadis reminds us, without critique, no new institution is possible. Every act of social creation begins with the ability to say: this is not inevitable, this can be otherwise.

This understanding aligns powerfully with traditions of Critical Pedagogy. Paulo Freire (1970) insists that education must begin with a questioning of the world, a refusal to accept the present order as final. bell hooks (1994) describes engaged pedagogy as a practice of freedom, where critique is not a retreat from action but the condition of meaningful transformation. Henry Giroux (2020) likewise frames critical education as a space of civic imagination, where learners are invited to see themselves as capable of shaping the world, not merely adapting to it.

These perspectives converge in affirming critique as a constructive, imaginative force. For instance, when educators engage students in the co-creation of curricula or the design of assessment practices, they are not merely rejecting established templates. They are participating in the imaginative act of creating new educational meanings and relationships, enacting critique as creation.

To critique, then, is not merely to analyse, it is to begin the work of imagining an education otherwise.

Technological solutionism remains one of the dominant ideologies of Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Coined by Evgeny Morozov (2013), the term refers to the tendency to frame social and institutional problems as solvable through technical means alone. Within higher education, this manifests as a persistent faith in platforms, dashboards, learning analytics, and AI-driven interventions as remedies to complex pedagogical, cultural, or political issues.

Such solutionism is not neutral. It privileges values like efficiency, automation, and optimisation, often at the expense of ambiguity, dialogue, and pedagogical risk. TEL strategies shaped by these ideals reduce education to problems of scale, access, or delivery, measurable issues with tractable technical fixes. These strategies regularly marginalise practices that foreground critical reflection, social context, or collective meaning-making.

Critique, under these conditions, is often cast as obstruction. To question the inevitability of a new system or dashboard is to be labelled resistant or out-of-touch. But critique, in the sense offered by Castoriadis (1997), is not merely oppositional. It is generative. It is through critique that the radical imagination asserts itself, questioning what has been instituted and offering the possibility of something otherwise.

Critique, then, is inseparable from creation. It does not stand outside practice, condemning from a distance, but participates in reconfiguring what counts as meaningful, legitimate, and possible in education. Yet dominant EdTech discourses tend to treat such dissent as irrelevant or impractical. Even in institutional settings that embrace “innovation,” critique is often sidelined in favour of reproducibility, key performance indicators, and technological compatibility.

For example, institutional adoption of predictive learning analytics tools such as Blackboard Predict frequently proceeds without meaningful consultation with educators. These tools embed assumptions of efficiency and risk-aversion into practice, often reifying deficit models of student engagement. Similarly, grassroots platforms like Federated Wiki, which centre co-creation and decentralised authorship, receive little institutional attention, despite their alignment with critical, participatory pedagogy.

To move forward, we must treat critique not as obstruction, but as essential to creating democratic alternatives in digital education. As Biesta (2021) reminds us, education should call students into the world not merely as data points or consumers but as subjects capable of ethical and political judgment. This requires more than better tools; it requires an institutional culture where critique is recognised as a world-making act.

Critique becomes transformative when it is enacted through practice. Rather than opposing dominant systems in abstraction, educators and technologists have long developed alternative practices that embody critique as a mode of creation. In this section, we examine three domains, open education, federated platforms, and participatory pedagogy, that demonstrate how critique can be institutionalised as an affirmative force in digital education.

• Open education as critique-in-practice
  The open education movement has often been positioned as a critique of the exclusivity and commodification of knowledge. By challenging the proprietary logics of academic publishing and advocating for open licensing, open educational resources (OER) manifest a vision of education rooted in accessibility, justice, and participation (Weller, 2014). Rather than simply making resources free, open education has the potential to question who produces knowledge, under what conditions, and for whose benefit (DeRosa and Jhangiani, 2017). However, as Bali, Cronin and Jhangiani (2020) argue, this potential is frequently co-opted by institutional strategies that reduce openness to cost-efficiency, sidelining its critical and political dimensions.
• The Fediverse as critique of platform logic
  Decentralised social networks like Mastodon and PeerTube enact a living critique of the centralised, surveillant architectures of mainstream platforms. These federated systems intentionally reject algorithmic recommendation engines, corporate data extraction, and opaque moderation policies. Instead, they prioritise transparency, community governance, and local autonomy. This shift challenges the power structures that dominate digital communication, where algorithmic infrastructures increasingly determine what is visible, valuable, and knowable (Ananny, 2016). As Freedman (2014) argues, media power is not merely a matter of content but of the institutional and technological arrangements through which communication is structured. The Fediverse exemplifies how technical systems can resist dominant imaginaries and reconfigure infrastructure as a site of collective agency and political imagination.
• Participatory pedagogy and co-creation
  Approaches such as co-creation, student partnership, and participatory design represent forms of pedagogical critique. These practices reconfigure the teacher–learner relationship, treating students as collaborators rather than passive recipients. They directly challenge hierarchical structures embedded in many educational systems and technologies. Drawing on Fraser, Araneta, and Maatwk (2022), which documents decolonial student–staff co-creation frameworks, these initiatives shift power, redistribute agency, and reshape notions of legitimacy and voice within institutions. Such collaborative practices are not marginal add-ons, they are acts of remaking institutional form and purpose.

Critique must not be treated as the preserve of specialists, detached from the practical realities of teaching and learning. Rather, critique should be reimagined as a collective, pedagogical orientation, an ongoing practice embedded in the everyday work of educators. When we engage in critique, we are not merely diagnosing problems but intervening in the process of meaning-making, institution-building, and subject formation. In this sense, critique is not commentary from the sidelines. It is a generative practice of making and remaking education.

Castoriadis’s (1997) conception of creation helps reframe critique not as negation but as invention. The act of critique, in this register, is a mode of instituting the new: a rupture in inherited meaning and a movement toward alternative imaginaries. It is world-making, not simply world-questioning. As Freire (1970) writes, education is a practice of freedom when it invites learners and educators to remake the world together. Similarly, Biesta (2006) argues that democratic education requires not just technical skill or socialisation but subjectification, the emergence of the self as a political and ethical being through dialogue and dissensus.

This reimagined form of critique must also acknowledge the risks and limitations of institutional containment. As Motta (2013) observes in her analysis of Latin American social movements, institutions often appropriate radical practices, reframing them within managerial logics that neutralise their transformative potential. To resist this process, critique must move from refusal to what might be called refusal-with-creation: the rejection of dominant norms combined with the construction of new forms, relations, and meanings.

Such practices are already underway in higher education. When educators engage in participatory curriculum design, or co-develop assessment criteria with students, they are not merely making teaching more inclusive. They are actively redefining institutional norms. When faculty collaborate to challenge standardised metrics of “impact” or “student satisfaction”, they are reclaiming agency over the narrative of educational value. These are not isolated reforms. They are acts of critique embedded in practice, small but significant moves that reconfigure the fabric of education.

Seen this way, critique is neither a distraction from educational work nor a luxury for the politically inclined. It is the very ground of democratic renewal. A political pedagogy of critique asks educators to see themselves as co-authors of institutional life, capable of transforming not only what is taught but how, why, and by whom. It invites a shift from critique as reaction to critique as reconfiguration, from commentary to co-creation.

In an era dominated by metrics, automation, and managerial logics, it is vital to recover critique not as a gesture of negation but as a force of world-making. Critique is not an academic luxury nor a rhetorical device, it is a generative, imaginative act that reconfigures what education can be. As Castoriadis reminds us, to critique is to create; to challenge inherited institutions is also to institute new forms of meaning, relation, and practice.

This does not mean critique must always take the form of formal theory or manifestos. It might appear as the rethinking of a module outline, the reshaping of a learning platform, or the refusal of data-driven defaults. But it is in these acts that the imagination reclaims space from technical rationality. Critique becomes visible in practices that question the obvious, repurpose the given, and assert the possible.

Such acts of critique are not merely pedagogical; they are institutional. In challenging the dominant logics of platforms, policies, and pedagogies, educators enact counter-institutional practices, what Castoriadis might describe as the institution of new social imaginaries. As Motta (2013) illustrates through her analysis of Latin American social movements, pedagogical critique can serve as the foundation for new social relations and institutions, not merely acts of resistance. These are not utopian gestures detached from the material world, but grounded acts of institution-building that unfold within and against existing systems.

As bell hooks (1994) reminds us, education as the practice of freedom does not simply reside in what is taught, but in the relationships that sustain learning. Critique, then, is relational: it emerges in dialogue, in collective refusal, and in the creation of spaces where autonomy and plurality can flourish.

Looking forward, a new set of questions comes into view, questions not only of what we teach, but when. What temporal logics are embedded in our educational technologies, and what do they make possible or foreclose? When platforms promise “real-time feedback” and perpetual responsiveness, are we losing the capacity to engage with learning as a historical, unfolding, and transformative process? In the next post, we turn to Castoriadis’ concept of the social-historical to ask: how might we reimagine the temporality of education, not as data-driven immediacy, but as a horizon of emergence, becoming, and collective memory?