Throughout history, technological changes have affected and continue to affect educational concepts and practices as well as ideas about the future of education. Over the last three decades, the rhetoric of information and communication technology (ICT), digitalization programs as well as dynamics of datafication and marketization have become increasingly influential in this context (Haugsbakk & Nordkvelle, 2007; Shanks, 2020). This applies to educational policies and governance as well as to educational research and practices. While questions regarding knowledge use for sustainability and diversity are widely discussed today, issues of changing knowledge ecologies (Kuhlen, 2013) in educational research have hardly been studied so far. According to Barnett and Bengtsen (2020), the concept of 'knowledge' in a post-truth era needs to be rethought, especially as regards relations between reliable knowledges, universities, and everyday life (cf. Stadler-Altmann et al. 2023). These processes of change in the knowledge generation encounter relatively fixed structures of knowledge organization and transfer at universities, which face these new challenges with a time lag. This can be seen in a comparison of the three European countries and their university structures, each of which has its own culturally determined and historically evolved scientific organization. In Italy, research and teaching are organized along the lines of "scientific sectors", which are defined in a list drawn up by the Minister of Education. Fundamental differences can also be found in the way knowledge is communicated and conveyed through language, as Heller (2006) and Heller et al. (2015) can show for Italy and Germany. These framework conditions are now being subjected to processes of change through new technological possibilities (see Stadler-Altmann 2022). Recently, the influence of Open AI in educational institutions at all levels has been decisive and it is assumed that these new instruments will significantly change the way knowledge is produced. Against this background, the lines between academic, professional and common knowledge are becoming more subtle and new modes of distribution of forms of knowing are likely to emerge. The contribution starts (1) with an outline of the concepts of knowledge ecology and knowledge diversity, followed (2) by a critical discussion of ongoing tendencies of digitalization and datafication of academic knowledge production in the field of education in three European countries (Italy, Austria and Germany). Finally (3), the contribution aims at reflecting assumed and conceivable implications of changing educational knowledge ecologies and waning knowledge diversity.

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