Entangled Education: Beyond the analogue/digital binary

Entangled Education: Beyond the analogue/digital binary In a moment when higher education is asked to respond boldly to accelerating social, technological, and ecological change, courage becomes an essential disposition for reimagining how we design learning. This paper argues that one crucial site for cultivating such new courage lies in rethinking our relationship with the digital—not as an add-on or a parallel domain, but as an organic and inseparable part of contemporary life. Drawing on scholarship in postdigital education (Fawns, 2019), we contend that many higher education institutions remain trapped in a persistent binary that positions online learning as a derivative copy of an assumedly “original” face-to-face course. This binary no longer reflects the entangled reality in which students and educators now live. In the postdigital condition (Bayne et all, 2020) the digital is not something we have moved beyond; rather, it permeates our everyday practices, relations, and environments. Yet institutional structures, policies, and pedagogical routines often continue to treat digital technology instrumentally. This paper explores what an entangled education might look like when educators allow themselves to rethink the digital organically. We analyze how dissolving the digital and analogue divide opens opportunities to reconceive space and time, enabling new forms of interaction, expanded avenues for communication, and more relationally attuned approaches to learning design. Within such entangled environments, students can develop greater agency as they engage actively with course materials, collaborate across diverse modalities, and contribute their ideas in ways that feel meaningful, situated, and connected to real-world contexts. To illustrate these possibilities, the paper presents examples of a courageous, pioneering design in a Masters online course at Aarhus University, Denmark where experimenting communities (Thestrup, 2013.) were formed. These cases are based on action research, where interventions were tested and semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations conducted over a period of 10 years of teaching. We illustrate how reconfigured learning spaces and new interactional relations can deepen students’ sense-making and support their ability to connect theoretical knowledge with lived problems and potential solutions. As such it fits very well with Nordic research (Lackéus, Hyldegård, & Færgemann (2025) in developing education to support individual and collective agency. References Barnett, R. & Bengtsen, S. (2020). Knowledge and the University; Reclaiming Life. Routledge. Bayne, S., Evans, P., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J., Macleod, H., O´Shea, C., Ross, J., Sheail, P. & Sinclear, C. (2020). The Manifesto for Teaching Online. Cambridge Massachusetts London: MIT Press. Fawns, T. (2019). Postdigital education in Design and Practise, Postdigital Science and Education, Vol. 1, Pages 132-145. Fawns, T. (2022). An entangled pedagogy: Looking Beyond the Pedagogy-Technology Dichotomy, Postdigital Science and Education, Vol. 4, Pages 711-728. Gautlett, D. (2023). Creativity: Polity. Lackéus, M., Hyldegård, J. & Færgemann, H. M (2025). Value creation pedagogy across disciplines in Higher Education. International Journal of Management Education 23 (3) 101270. Negroponte, N. (1998). Beyond Digital: WIRED Ventures Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Issue 6.12, December 1998. located 08.10.2025 at https://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html Thestrup, K. (2013). Det eksperimenterende fællesskab: Systime