In the discourse of digital education, time is increasingly treated not as a condition for learning, but as a variable to be optimised. Learning analytics, adaptive platforms, and performance dashboards frame education in terms of real-time feedback, live tracking, and just-in-time intervention. These tools promise immediacy, instant responses, continuous engagement, constant optimisation. Yet beneath this promise lies a profound distortion of how time functions pedagogically.

Such temporal configurations are not neutral. They are grounded in a particular imaginary of education, a collectively instituted framework of meaning and expectation (Castoriadis, 1997a). This imaginary privileges efficiency, quantification, and control. It treats learning as a sequence of discrete, monitorable events rather than as a slow, recursive, and transformative process. As Knox (2020) observes, educational technologies increasingly collapse time into a perpetual present, undermining the temporal rhythms that make reflective and critical learning possible. As Virilio (1995) argued, the acceleration of technological systems collapses temporal distance, compressing experience into a continuous present and eroding the space for deliberation.

The dominance of real-time feedback systems does more than streamline administration. It reshapes what counts as legitimate pedagogy. When education is structured around immediate data points, students are rewarded for responsiveness over reflection, presence over development, and engagement over understanding. The result is a culture of temporal compression that leaves little room for ambiguity, emergence, or becoming. This compression can produce anxiety, shallow cognitive processing, and pedagogical superficiality, symptoms often misread as individual failure rather than institutional design. Berg (1997) highlights how sociotechnical systems formalise time, structuring professional practice in ways that reflect institutional efficiency rather than human complexity.

This is not simply a technical feature of digital platforms. It is an institutionalisation of a particular vision of temporality: one that forecloses the future by reducing it to predicted performance, and erases the past by treating it as noise rather than narrative. In this way, EdTech’s temporal logic occludes the historical, rendering learning ahistorical, linear, and acultural. As educational infrastructure becomes more algorithmically governed, it risks enforcing a flat temporality that negates the social conditions through which meaningful learning is formed.

To reimagine time in education, we need new conceptual tools. The work of Cornelius Castoriadis offers one such tool in the form of the social-historical: the idea that institutions, and the temporalities they enact, are created by the radical imagination and therefore open to transformation. Rather than accept the temporal defaults embedded in digital systems, we might ask: what kind of time does education need? What kinds of becoming do we want to support? And how can our pedagogies honour the long arc of educational growth?

In the sections that follow, we will explore how educational technology encodes time, how Castoriadis helps us recover a richer sense of the historical, and how educators might reclaim temporality as a central dimension of democratic learning.

Digital education platforms increasingly operate within a temporal logic of immediacy. Dashboards, real-time analytics, and adaptive systems promise to streamline learning by offering instant feedback, continuous tracking, and short-cycle intervention. Learners are nudged to act quickly, respond instantly, and maintain a state of constant performance. This emphasis on immediacy reflects an instituted imaginary, what Castoriadis (1997a) might describe as a socially constructed vision of education in which time itself is rendered a resource to be optimised.

These systems function as mechanisms of temporal compression. Rather than supporting extended, recursive engagement with ideas, they fragment the learning process into moments of measurable activity. Short feedback loops are said to promote efficiency and responsiveness, features often praised in both formative and summative contexts. But when institutionalised at scale, such features risk privileging compliance and rapid throughput over depth, deliberation, and critical inquiry. In their most extreme forms, performance dashboards render students as data points in perpetual motion, always progressing, never pausing.

This temporal flattening aligns with what Rosa (2013) describes as the condition of “social acceleration,” where the pace of life outstrips our capacity for reflection. In this context, education risks becoming part of what Virilio (1995) calls the “dromocratic” order: a world governed by the imperatives of speed. Similarly, Berg (1997) shows how technical systems produce temporal expectations and behavioural norms that shape what practices are considered reasonable or legitimate. What emerges is not simply a set of tools, but an entire temporal regime.

This regime is deeply connected to the values of neoliberalism. Immediacy, productivity, and efficiency are not neutral attributes; they are expressions of a market-driven worldview in which the value of education is indexed to outputs and performance metrics. Williamson (2017a) illustrates how this logic pervades education policy and practice, embedding quantification at every level. In such a framework, learning becomes inseparable from data: to learn is to be seen to perform, to generate traceable evidence, to optimise one’s metrics.

This regime reshapes learners not only as subjects of education but as objects of governance. As Knox (2020) notes, algorithmic systems in education increasingly collapse time into a perpetual present, one in which learners are continuously visible, measurable, and subject to intervention. The temporal structures of these systems demand constant availability, responsiveness, and presence. The result is a model of learning that mirrors the rhythms of platform capitalism more than the unpredictable trajectories of intellectual or personal development.

Resisting this logic may involve designing pedagogies that slow down learning: cultivating long-term projects, encouraging revision and reflection, and valuing absence and silence as pedagogical tools. Such interventions reassert the educational value of duration, uncertainty, and becoming, qualities that are poorly captured by EdTech’s drive toward the instant and the efficient.

To challenge the temporal logic of EdTech, we must expand our understanding of time beyond metrics and moments. Cornelius Castoriadis offers a powerful reimagining through the concept of the social-historical, a temporality grounded not in abstract chronology but in the collective, symbolic, and creative life of societies. The social-historical refers to the ongoing creation of meanings, institutions, and practices through which time itself becomes intelligible (Castoriadis, 1997a).

Rather than existing on a neutral timeline, time is instituted: it is made meaningful through shared narratives, rituals, calendars, developmental arcs, and generational horizons. Castoriadis departs from mechanistic notions of time as a fixed container, instead locating it within the symbolic and political life of a society. In World in Fragments, he emphasises that history is not merely a sequence of events but a space of radical creation, shaped by human imagination and capable of rupture and renewal (Castoriadis, 1997b).

This view resonates with Henri Bergson’s critique of spatialised time, the idea that time is often treated as if it were space, composed of measurable segments rather than lived duration (Bergson, 1910). While Castoriadis builds upon this insight, he extends it further: for Castoriadis, temporality is not only lived but also socially instituted. Time is not pre-given; it is made through the norms, institutions, and symbols that govern collective life.

Educational institutions are prime examples of such temporal production. They shape time through curriculum structures, academic calendars, and developmental narratives. But under the pressure of EdTech’s efficiency logic, these temporalities are increasingly flattened, reduced to linear progression, instant feedback, and algorithmic scheduling. The social-historical reminds us that this is not inevitable. Just as societies have created different temporal imaginaries in the past, we can remake them in education today.

For instance, project-based or community-engaged learning models that unfold over extended periods reflect the temporality of becoming rather than performance. They allow for ambiguity, revision, and deeper relational engagement. These pedagogical forms enact time differently, they honour the long arc of reflection and transformation, resisting the compression imposed by platform logics.

Understanding learning as a social-historical process reorients us from outcomes to emergence, from metrics to meaning. It invites us to reclaim temporality as a field of pedagogical struggle and democratic imagination. Learning unfolds not in the measurable now, but in the open horizon of what we can collectively institute.

Digital assessment systems increasingly prioritise immediacy and prediction. From AI-generated grades to modularised micro-credentials and real-time dashboards, assessment is reframed not as a pedagogical dialogue but as an instrument of performance monitoring. Learning becomes data: captured, quantified, and processed in ever-shorter cycles to produce actionable insights. In such systems, feedback is not a space for reflection but a tool for optimisation, what Williamson (2017b) describes as an “educational data assemblage” designed to anticipate and steer learner behaviour.

This model of assessment reflects a broader collapse of educational temporality into an “eternal present,” in which only the most immediate and measurable aspects of learning are valued. It marginalises the slow, recursive, and often messy process through which understanding unfolds. As Wheelahan and Moodie (2021a) argue, micro-credentials fragment curricula into atomised, tightly defined units that obscure broader disciplinary coherence and reduce learning to a sequence of decontextualised outcomes. This disaggregation aligns with market logics that treat education as modular, flexible, and just-in-time. Meanwhile, Wheelahan and Moodie (2021b) caution that such credentialing schemes risk entrenching precariousness, producing “gig qualifications” for a gig economy. Assessment becomes an instrument of credential accumulation, not a vehicle for transformative meaning-making.

This fragmentation undermines the development of disciplinary thinking, critical autonomy, and coherent learner identities. Where long-form, integrative tasks once encouraged deep synthesis and reflective judgement, students now encounter compressed timelines, high-frequency testing, and a reduced expectation for sustained engagement. As Biesta (2013) argues, such instrumentalisation risks hollowing out the very purpose of education: not simply to produce skills but to support the subject-formation of persons capable of acting in and with the world.

Moreover, predictive analytics and AI grading systems increasingly reconfigure assessment as a future-oriented surveillance apparatus. They do not simply report on learning but attempt to forecast it, reinforcing normative pathways and penalising deviation. Burrows, Gurevych and Stein (2015) trace the evolution of automated grading technologies, showing how early systems were shaped by assumptions that prioritised surface-level textual features over deeper understanding. Such systems risk naturalising a view of the learner as a pattern of detectable behaviours, compressing complex thought into measurable outputs. In doing so, they reduce the space for ambiguity, exploration, and educational failure. Risk-taking and unanticipated insight are treated not as generative, but as anomalies, disruptions to predictive accuracy rather than invitations to deeper inquiry.

Against this backdrop, authentic assessment offers a vital counterpoint. It foregrounds complexity, context, and interpretation. Rather than assessing whether students have acquired isolated competencies, it asks how they engage with ideas, navigate ambiguity, and demonstrate understanding over time. Longitudinal forms such as reflective journals, portfolios, or iterative project work allow educators to trace development, not just performance. As Crisp (2010) argues, these modes of assessment invite students to be active agents in their own evaluation, positioning them as co-constructors of meaning rather than passive recipients of judgement.

Such approaches are not simply more humane; they are also more epistemically honest. They recognise that learning is emergent, relational, and historically situated. Recovering duration in assessment, then, is both a pedagogical and political imperative. It means resisting the seductive promise of frictionless efficiency in favour of slower, deeper forms of engagement that respect the rhythms of human development. It calls on educators to design assessment not as a mechanism for classification but as an encounter with the unknown, a space where learners are invited to dwell, struggle, and become.

Educational time is not only what systems measure, it is also what educators cultivate. Against the compressed temporalities of digital platforms, we must recover pedagogical forms that honour duration, emergence, and memory. Rather than orienting students toward immediate outputs or short-cycle deliverables, we can cultivate practices that locate learning within historical and relational continuities. This shift requires reimagining education not as a transactional process but as a temporal and ethical space of becoming.

Narrative becomes a key modality in this reimagining. Through critical autobiography, counter-storytelling, and dialogic inquiry, students are invited to situate themselves within broader social and historical narratives. These practices challenge the individualisation and depoliticisation of learning by affirming that knowledge is always produced in relation, to history, to community, and to lived experience. As hooks (1994) argues, education must become a practice of freedom, one that connects personal development to structural critique and collective struggle.

Such narrative practices are not merely reflective; they are constitutive. In telling their stories, learners do not just recount their past, they reinterpret it, locating meaning in the margins, reclaiming erased histories, and generating new connections. Reflection becomes a political act, and learning a site of memory-work. As Freire (1970) insisted, critical consciousness emerges through the dialogic naming of the world, which necessarily involves reclaiming the past as a resource for transformation.

Community memory plays an equally crucial role. As Giroux (2020) argues, pedagogies that draw on histories of dispossession, struggle, and resilience help learners see themselves as agents within ongoing movements for justice. These pedagogies honour the knowledge embedded in community practices, oral traditions, and intergenerational exchange, forms of knowing often marginalised by data-driven, ahistorical systems of digital learning. By engaging students with archives, testimonies, local histories, and situated epistemologies, educators create spaces for affective, embodied, and situated forms of critical inquiry.

These approaches resonate with Castoriadis’s (1997a) notion of the social-historical, the understanding that human institutions, including education, are not static structures but the outcome of collective meaning-making over time. A pedagogy of emergence and memory affirms that temporality is not just a backdrop for learning but an active terrain of struggle and imagination. It recognises that education unfolds across multiple temporal scales: the immediate moment of insight, the slow formation of identity, and the long arc of social transformation.

In this light, rituals of reflection, memorialisation, and community engagement are not ancillary to learning but central to its formation. They sustain a vision of pedagogy as a process of collective world-making, one that honours the past without being trapped by it, and orients learners toward futures not yet determined. It is through this grounding in memory and emergence that education can resist the logic of acceleration and rediscover its vocation as a transformative social project.

The temporality of education is not neutral, it is imagined, shaped, and institutionalised. Educational technologies do not merely accelerate communication or deliver content more efficiently; they also embed particular assumptions about how learning unfolds. As Castoriadis (1997a) makes clear, institutions are not fixed structures but ongoing creations of the social-historical, configurations of meaning shaped by collective imagination. The ways we structure time in education, then, are not technical decisions but political acts, rooted in particular visions of what it means to learn and become.

The dominant temporality of EdTech is one of immediacy: dashboards display live metrics, learning analytics offer instant feedback, and automated assessments deliver results in seconds. These features promise responsiveness, but they also promote a flattened temporality, a perpetual present where reflection, uncertainty, and emergence are treated as inefficiencies. As Virilio (1995) warned, the acceleration of systems can lead to the disappearance of meaning, as temporal compression leaves no space for depth or difference. In such a landscape, educational time risks becoming a tool of control rather than a condition for liberation.

This techno-temporality aligns with broader neoliberal imperatives: to render education measurable, predictable, and productive. Students become data points in a system of continual optimisation, and the messy, recursive processes of deep learning are displaced by short-cycle feedback and constant benchmarking. Yet as Biesta (2006) insists, education must resist this reduction to instrumental outcomes. It should be a space for subject-formation, interruption, and democratic encounter, none of which can be measured in real time.

To reclaim time as a condition for learning, we must reimagine education as a space where slowness, memory, and emergence are not indulgences but necessities. This means cultivating pedagogical practices that stretch beyond the timeframe of the lesson, module, or assessment cycle. Narrative inquiry, long-form projects, journaling, and historically situated critique are all examples of temporal practices that allow students to locate themselves within broader contexts, of history, community, and meaning. Such pedagogies open time, rather than constrict it.

Moreover, these forms of learning honour the durational nature of transformation. Autonomy, criticality, and ethical agency are not delivered in a download or unlocked by a rubric, they unfold across time through engagement, friction, and reflection. They require educators who are willing to resist the call for speed and stand instead for process, presence, and pedagogical patience.

To imagine a different temporality for education is also to imagine different institutions. We must create conditions where students and educators can dwell with ideas, revisit questions, and cultivate understanding over the long arc of learning. As Wheelahan and Moodie (2021a) argue, the fragmentation of curricula into micro-credentials reflects not just an economic logic but a temporal one, one that disrupts coherence and undermines the deep structures of educational purpose. Reversing this trend demands a renewed commitment to educational time as a horizon of possibility, not merely a container for delivery.

Looking ahead, the final post in this series will bring together the threads explored thus far, imagination, critique, autonomy, and temporality, to ask how we might reclaim the digital university as a site of democratic possibility. It will argue that institution is not the opposite of freedom but one of its conditions, and that pedagogy must be reimagined as an ongoing, collective act of ethical and imaginative world-making. In an era of pervasive platform logics and managerial control, it is time to reclaim not only what learning is, but what education is for.