Next Stop Perpetual Beta: notes for an ethics of design in digitally augmented learning contexts

Not even the pandemic period – which in many ways made necessary the use of networked devices – has contributed to trigger a reflection able to conceive and manage the digital beyond the opportunity/limitation represented by the remote connection. In the light of this awareness, this contribution will try to highlight some epistemological premises in order to outline a conceptual and operational context within which to make more intelligible the complexity of our interaction with digital technologies. Consequently, we will proceed to outline a design horizon within which to develop pedagogical perspectives and education approaches in which digital technology could effectively contribute to reshaping and enriching the learning scenario. More specifically, by sharing the main goals and some of the decisive phases of the project design “Briciole di Futuro” (“Crumbs of the Future”) – carried out during the 2019/2020 school year in a class (fifth year) of the primary school of the IC Galilei in Reggio Emilia – we will try to highlight the opportunity to identify in digital technology a coherent extension and a creative expression of that cooperative and anti-authoritarian matrix of the scientific community. The spatio-temporal prerogatives of a digitally augmented classroom setting will be also illustrated, as well as the methodological strategies selected in order to facilitate, in the multiple types of interactions thus made possible among the children (and with the teachers), a dialectical experience and an argumentative habit in order to achieve, in this case, a shared co-design of the school of the future (year 2119).