Educational systems around the globe in general, and in Europe in particular, are increasingly susceptible to processes of digitization. From Open Educational Resources to MOOCs, from large scale global assessments, big data and data-driven analytics to highly specific and individualized digital instruction, from flipped classrooms to open universities, it is clear that educational systems all over Europe are required to deal with both the constraints and the affordances that come along with the digitization of nearly all parts of societal life. However, despite the increasing ubiquity of digital devices in all areas of education, the concrete role and specific operations of these devices have until recently not gained much attention from different sociologies of education (Selwyn, 2015).

Taking stock of the existing and the current research field on the role and effects of the digitization of the educational sphere, we argue that in classical sociological research the following two approaches/positions can be identified: on the one hand there is a contextual approach that scrutinizes the impactof digital tools on the educational sphere (and that zooms in on how digital devices are reshaping and restructuring educational systems); on the other hand there is a personal approach that is more focally interested in the experiences, meaning-giving and self-understanding of individuals (students, professors, teachers, pupils, etc.) with regards to (the impact of) these evolutions on their personal lives.

Although these approaches shed light on important issues, they tend to obfuscate what happens precisely in specific educational practices at the moment that digital devices become ubiquitous. That is, they tend to deal with digital technologies as a monolithic block. Moreover, ‘the’ digital is often considered as a very broad condition of our lives today. This is surprising, given the intuition shared by many, viz. that digital devices have radically altered education, and have fundamentally impacted what can (and cannot) be done in the educational process. For instance: screens seem to direct attention as much as they lead to distraction; note taking on a laptop seems to alter how students process information, for worse and better; continuously being-connected has not only globalized European education but has equally led to fragmented and shredded professional lives of academics; etc. (e.g. Masschelein & Simons, 2015; Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). In that sense, it makes more sense to consider these digital tools not as neutral objects to make use of (or not), but rather to conceive of them in terms of active devices. That is to say: digital tools that not only do something, but that equally make other educational actors do something as well (Decuypere, 2015; Vlieghe, 2015).

In view of these recent developments and considering their undertheorized status within sociologies of education, we want to lay the groundwork of a new approach towards the digital and education. First, we want to come to a more profound and precise understanding of what digital devices make us do today (e.g. Sørensen, 2009; Williamson, 2016). In order to come to such an understanding, we argue that we need to start from specific educational practices in order to identify the grammar of the digital, that is, the specific logic by means of which the digital operates and is made operable, and the ways in which one can start to relate to such operations. Second, developing a rigorous analysis of this grammar, we aim to deepen our insights into how to get more digitally fluent in education, both as teacher/pupil and as lecturer/student.

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