Redefining Educational Technology: A Critical Collaborative Inquiry

Educational technologists have not settled on a fixed definition of the field and likely never will. However, attempting to define the field helps to understand the epistemological meanings that shape what the field sees, values, and considers worth pursuing. Through a critical historical review spanning over a century, alongside theoretical engagement with the concepts of entanglement and distributed agency, this paper identifies three key insufficiencies in current educational technology frameworks. These are the persistence of an instrumental-facilitative paradigm that treats technology as a resource deployed by human agents; the theoretical dissolution of the pedagogy-technology dichotomy that existing definitions have not absorbed; and the near-total silence on generative and agentic artificial intelligence, systems that now function not as tools but as active co-participants in educational processes. In response, we propose a new definition: Educational technology, as a field of inquiry and practice, encompasses the research, understanding, design, orchestration, and evaluation of entangled human-technological systems — spanning analog, digital, organizational, social, and agentic dimensions — through which learning and meaning-making are enabled, mediated, supported, and transformed. The field brings together researchers, practitioners, educators, communities, and institutions in ongoing efforts to study and improve educational experiences across formal, non-formal, and informal contexts. The field holds as a core commitment that its theory, research and practice should be ethically grounded and critically reflexive — attending to the societal implications of technological integration, with particular concern for equity and the distribution of agency among all participants in educational processes. These commitments describe what the field aspires to, not a guarantee of how all its practice is enacted. This definition is offered not as a resolution but as a basis for ongoing discussion, as it is best understood as a living definition. The field’s task is not to settle on a definition, but to keep it constantly evolving.