In contemporary public debates, AI and robotics are presented as technologies that will revolutionise the future of education. Promoted by an increasingly powerful industry, iterative cycles of hypes and hopes are boosting the creation of an imaginary (Beer, 2019; Taylor, 2004) that makes their introduction into the field of education a ‘desirable necessity’. AI and robotics innovations, often referred to as “disruptive”, are presented as a way to improve (the future of) teaching and learning.

This presentation deals with the analysis of this imaginary with the aim of understanding the different educational timescapes enacted through it (Kitchin, 2023). Our analysis will focus, in particular, on the envisioning of AI-based educational robotics within that industry (Beer, 2019).

Recently, scholars have focused on the investment made by the EdTech industry in imagining digital educational futures (Williamson & Komljenovic, 2022) and, within that, on the social production of temporality (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020). This literature highlights the complexities of the relationship between technology and socio-technical imaginaries, the contingency of time-making (and space-making) and how specific forms of technological innovation in education can be related to shifting experiencing and understandings of time (Decuypere & Simons, 2020; Vanden Broeck, 2020). In line with wider debates on temporality (Kitchin, 2023), speed, acceleration, real-timing, personalisation, and efficiency are key issues (Rosa, 2003; Beer, 2019) to understand the traits of imagined educational temporalities. Likewise, the interplay between three different temporal regimes is widely discussed, an immediate, archival and predictive time (Barassi, 2020). Within those debates that mainly deal with datafication and platformisation, there is also a specific focus on processes of imagined anticipation, that look to the future not as a resource to progress towards but as a resource to be drawn into the present (Decuypere & Vanden Broeck, 2020), using anticipated outcomes to rethink current practices and identify desirable futures (Amsler & Facer, 2017).

The distinctive contribution of our presentation is to project those debates on the social production of educational temporalities on the educational robotics imaginary, a relatively unexplored field (for an example see Tafdrup, 2020). Our analysis will, in particular, focus on the social production of temporalities enacted in the Educational robotics imaginary (Beer, 2019). We will explore how the EdTech industry envisions educational robotics innovation and how this envisioning has to do with the social production of a distinct set of technologically-mediated educational temporalities.

Theoretically, we draw on David Beer’s (2019) analysis of imaginary, defined as how “people imagine [something] and its existence, as well as how it is imagined to fit with norms, expectations, social processes, transformations and ordering” (p. 18). In this perspective, the imaginary is profoundly material as it shapes practices, and in turn, practices shape the imaginary through the forging of ideals and norms (Taylor, 2004). In our presentation, we will mobilise Beer’s theoretical and analytical toolbox to explore the AI-based educational robotics imaginary and the related temporalities. Additionally, we anchor to Rob Kitchin’s analysis of digital timescapes (2023), providing us a conceptual grid to analyse the emerging forms of robotically-mediated educational temporalities. If temporality denotes the diverse set of temporal relations, processes, and forms that are embodied, materialised and experiential, and if robotic technologies have profoundly transformed these relational processes, the educational robotics timescapes could be analysed by mapping out the fluctuations in pace, tempo, rhythm and synchronicity.

Consistently, the research questions that we will explore are: 

• What forms of temporality are enacted in the imaginary of robotics in education?
• What kind of pace, tempo, rhythm, synchronicity are distinctive of those forms of temporalities?
• What relations and ethics can be detected on those forms of temporalities?

Methodological innovation is another distinctive trait of our contribution. To address our research questions, we analyse EdTech companies’ work of envisioning through a quantitative and qualitative composite methodology, to map and understand the social making of temporalities imbued with the emerging imaginary. We combine the use of Network Text Analysis (NTA), to extract semantic networks/galaxies (Hunter, 2014) and identify the influential pathways for the production of meaning within texts (Paranyushkin, 2011), with a qualitative interpretation of these networks through the time-conceptual grid inspired by Kitchin’s work on digital timescapes. Our first step was to select a corpus of EdTech companies providing AI-based robotics services. The sample was created by searching three combinations of terms on Google: Artificial Intelligence and Educational Robotics companies, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics solutions for education, and Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for schooling. Two approaches were used to create a sample of AI and robotics organisations. The first involved generating lists of results. The first search term developed six lists of companies related to AI and robotics. We visited their websites and selected those offering educational solutions. The second approach focused on the top results for the other two search terms. This search resulted in a sample of 40 AI and robotics organisations, ranging from consultancy to AI artefact providers. After establishing the sample, we proceeded to examine the materials on the public websites of each organisation. Our investigation focused on two things. First, we looked at the types of services and solutions offered to explore the different types of AI and robotics solutions for education presented and to see the kinds of problems or opportunities these solutions were said to address. Second, we focused on the promises, hopes, and expectations linked to introducing AI-based robotics artefacts in a classroom. Data were extracted using the T-LAB software. The textual material was normalised, and the dictionary was built through lemmatisation and disambiguation of words. The corpus obtained was imported into Gephi software, which organises the lemmas in an adjacency matrix, and the network structure of lemmas is formalised as a 1-mode network. NTA and, specifically, a community detection algorithm based on the Louvain method (Fortunato, 2010) mapped distinct clusters. Through this procedure, we investigated particular semantic networks and the centrality of different time-conceptual cores. These cores are then qualitatively analysed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the forms of pace, tempo, rhythm, and synchronicity contingent on each one.

The presentation discusses five heterogenous traits of an envisioned robotically-mediated educational temporality that are enacted in the educational robotics imaginary. We relate them to the relentless work of the EdTech industry and the envisioning of a future of education co-inhabited by AI-based robotic artefacts. Specifically, the NTA allowed us to identify the centrality of five temporal concepts in the emerging educational robotics imaginary, such as potentiality, adaptiveness, automation, improvement, and efficiency and a set of related semantic networks. We will show how each of these semantic networks, combined with a qualitative interpretation of texts, allows us to discuss in detail the rhythms of such an envisaged temporality (e.g. cyclical in the case of adaptiveness), the forms of calculation of time (e.g. mechanically standardized in the case of efficiency), the temporal relations that are designed (e.g. optimizing in the case of potentiality) and the enacted modalities that establish a particular relation between the present, the past and the future (e.g. prophetic in the case of automation). In concluding the analysis, we discuss how the various and multiple forms of temporalities linked to the educational robotics imaginary are paradoxical and have significant cultural implications for how educational time is mediated, embodied, placed and experienced by teachers and students. We also reflect on how this work of temporal envisioning can be related to similarly paradoxical educational problematisations, promises, solutions, and goals.

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