In the mid 80s, Apple launched the project called “Apple Classrooms for Tomorrow” (ACOT). The aim of this project was to study classrooms in which students and teachers had immediate access to computer technology. The main conclusion reached by this research was that these classrooms allowed students greater control and responsibility of their own learning (Fisher, 1989). This research tried to respond, through technology, to an educational need, hence the focus was on learning subjects and not on technology itself or the spaces in which it was introduced.

Forty years later, the outlook remains the same. In 2012, the consortium or European Education Ministries, European Schoolnet (2017), launched the Future Classroom Lab project, which, like the Apple project tries to adapt classrooms spaces to a more efficient way of learning. In other words, we have adapted the classrooms by focusing on the instrumental or didactic perspective of this technology. We have not considered that space and technology are neutral means whose effect on us depends exclusively on the use we make of them (Dowd & Green, 2019). But neither space nor technology are neutral, they demand certain behaviors from us regardless of how we use them (Sánchez-Rojo & Martín-Lucas, 2021).

For Heidegger human beings “do not dwell because we have built, but we build and we have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers” (Heidegger, 1993, p.350). This means that our human condition impels us to dwell in spaces, make them our own, as it is in and through them that we develop our individual identity. When we make a space our own, we feel at home, protected, safe and let our guard down, which allows us to be guided by their demands.

The possibility of intimacy is what turns an educational space into a place and, at the same time, what allows its influence on the person in formation to be deep and real. That is why in recent years some authors demanded a recovery of what is genuinely pedagogical (Hodgson, et. al, 2017). In this sense they draw attention to the need to stop considering pedagogy as a means to achieve objectives imposed by external environments and educational spaces as extensions of the family home or anterooms of the labor market (Masschelein & Simons, 2013). Examples such as the so called place-based learning situate the school as an essential enclave within the local community (Vander Ark, et al., 2020). Also Colwell et al, (2016) highlights the importance of having special corners in the school so that children can create their own place in the classroom (Colwell, et al., 2016). However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build spaces in an hyperconnected world where the space-time barrier has been broken by digital artifacts. Spaces are now tending to equalize more and more and, consequently, they are losing their singularity.

In line with the above, in the field of education there are those who have called digital classrooms commonly known as «classrooms of the future». These classrooms are configured by an open, flexible and reconfigurable hyperspace and a hypermedia context that makes it difficult to differentiate between online and offline (Fernández Enguita 2018; 2019). In this respect, this paper's main objective is to analyze, from a pedagogical point of view, the digitized and flexible classrooms that are gradually being used by more and more educational centers around the world and at all levels, in themselves; that is, leaving aside the didactic use that may or may not be made of them.

This paper presents the results of qualitative research (Mittenfelner & Ravich, 2016) focused on the image as the main source of documentation and analysis (Banks, 2010). The study was based on the following research question: What is the classroom of the future like and what characteristics does it have? Are there differences between different classrooms of the future in different regions of the world? A convenience sampling was carried out according to type of classroom (Hyper-classrooms or Active Learning Classroom) and region criteria. A total of 41 different images of hyper-classrooms were selected, of whom 53.6% were University classrooms and 46.3% were primary schools’ classrooms in 5 regions and 19 countries. Initially, all data was analysed through the Nvivo 12, under an inductive category coding approach (Mittenfelner Carl & Ravitch, 2016; Packer, 2017). The system of categories was structured in two main categories: Shape and Expression of the classroom and material elements, and twenty sub-cathegories. Then, a study of the relationship between categories was carried out with Gephi 0.10.0 software.

The results show that the “classroom of the future”, although it receives different names depending on the region where it is located, is the same no matter the region of the world we are in. These types of classrooms are always spacious, mobile, diverse and adjustable, precisely like the internet; this explains how this space has managed to combine the virtual, analogue and digital. Everything that takes place within the classroom’s physical setting can still be found in the virtual environment. Besides that, it seems that there is no room for teacher in the hyper-classroom, the computer and the projector take centre stage in the classroom, occupying the place the teacher once held. In short, a hyper-classroom not only refers to a new setting, but above all to a new educational model (Fernandez-Enguita, 2018) that meets the requirements of a society that is highly dependent on technological and digital devices. The last decades we have been opening the classroom in architectural, material and technical terms, and this is nothing more than a symptom that, for a long time, education instead of responding to educational ends, has been left in the hands of economic, political or social ends, among others. That is why we agree with García del Dujo et al., (2021) that if there is one thing that is missing in the learning spaces, it is pedagogy.

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