This structured review examined (academic) publications on flipped or inverted classrooms based on all Scopus database (n = 530) references available until mid-June 2016. The flipped or inverted classroom approach has gained widespread attention during the latest decade and is based on the idea of improving student learning by prepared self-studies via technology-based resources ('flips') followed by high-quality, in-class teaching and learning activities. However, only a few attempts have been made to review the knowledge of the field of interest more systematically. This article seeks to address this problem and investigates what constitutes the research on flipped classrooms and, in particular, to examine the knowledge contributions with the field so far in relation to the wider research topic of educational technology. This review found that the current state of flipped classrooms as a field of interest is growing fast, with a slight conference preference and a focus on higher education and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) area contributions, with the US as the predominant geographical context. It is concluded that studies on flipped classrooms are dominated by studies in higher education sector and are relatively local in character. The research tends not to interact beyond the two clusters of general education/educational technology and subject-specific areas. This implies that knowledge contributions related to the flipped classroom approach are relatively siloed and fragmented and have yet to stabilise. Academically and socially, the research is quite scattered, and only local evidence and experiences are available. The knowledge contributions within this field of interest seem to be anecdotal rather than systematically researched. To a large extent, the research lacks anchoring in, for example, learning theory or instructional design known from educational technology traditions and which would have helped much of the flipped classroom research to examine aspects of the flipped classroom approach more fully.

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Education policy increasingly takes place across borders and sectors, involving a variety of both human and nonhuman actors. This comparative policy paper traces the 'policy mobilities,' 'fast policy' processes and distributed 'policy assemblages' that have led to the introduction of new computer programming practices into schools and curricula in England, Sweden and Australia. Across the three contexts, government advisors and ministers, venture capital firms, think tanks and philanthropic foundations, non-profit organizations and commercial companies alike have promoted computer programming in schools according to a variety of purposes, aspirations, and commitments. This paper maps and traces the evolution of the organizational networks in each country in order to provide a comparative analysis of computing in schools as an exemplar of accelerated, transnationalizing policy mobility. The analysis demonstrates how computing in schools policy has been assembled through considerable effort to create alignments between diverse actors, the production and circulation of material objects, significant cross-border movement of ideas, people and devices, and the creation of strategic partnerships between government centres and commercial vendors. Computing in schools exemplifies how modern education policy and governance is accomplished through sprawling assemblages of actors, events, materials, money and technologies that move across social, governmental and geographical boundaries.

Social media are now an important aspect of the professional lives of school teachers. This paper explores the growing use of mass ‘teacher groups’ and ‘teacher communities’ on social media platforms such as Facebook. While these online communities are often welcomed as a means of professional learning and support, the paper considers the extent to which Facebook groups also expose teachers to some of the less beneficial aspects of social media, such as various forms of ‘digital labour’, commercialisation of exchanges and predominance of individualised reputation‐driven behaviours. Drawing on a detailed examination of a Swedish teacher Facebook group of over 13,000 members, the paper first addresses aspects of the online community that could be seen as professionally beneficial and/or valuable—particularly in terms of information exchange and social support. Yet while perceived by participants as a relatively beneficial and uncontroversial aspect of their working lives, the research also points to characteristics of the Facebook group that constituted disadvantaging, exploitative and/or disempowering forms of technological engagement. In these terms, the paper highlights tensions between what appears to ‘work’ for individual teachers in the short term and likely longer‐term implications that these practices might have for diminished professionalism and expertise of teachers.

With schools and universities closing across Europe, the Covid-19 lockdown left actors in the field of education battling with the unprecedented challenge of finding a meaningful way to keep the wheels of education turning online. The sudden need for digital solutions across the field of education resulted in the emergence of a variety of digital networks and collaborative online platforms. In this joint article from scholars around Europe, we explore the Covid-19 lockdowns of physical education across the European region, and the different processes of emergency digitalization that followed in their wake. Spanning perspectives from Italy, Germany, Belgium, and the Nordic countries, the article’s five cases provide a glimpse of how these processes have at the same time accelerated and consolidated the involvement of various commercial and non-commercial actors in public education infrastructures. By gathering documentation, registering dynamics, and making intimations of the crisis as it unfolded, the aim of the joint paper is to provide an opportunity for considering the implications of these accelerations and consolidations for the heterogeneous futures of European education.

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Sweden has one of the most marketised and decentralised school systems in the world while also ranking amongst countries with the highest levels of access to technology in classrooms. Considering the increasingly central role that digital platforms play in the practices of schooling, this article speculates on what might happen during the 2020s in highly decentralised school systems like Sweden's. Based on current trends in education, directions indicated by platformisation in other contexts and taking a critical speculative approach, it offers a discussion of what could happen to the practices of schooling and the public mission of education. This discussion is intended to raise important questions for researchers, educators and policy makers to consider as the platformisation of schooling unfolds.

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