Educational technology (EdTech) : Unbounded opportunities or just another brick in the wall?

From the run-of-the-mill use of calculators and tablets to the utilization of artificial intelligence to test students’ ability to read, educational technology (EdTech) plays a ubiquitous and important role in preschools and compulsory and secondary schools, as well as in higher education in the Swedish context today. Sweden is among the European countries with the best access to bandwidth and connectivity and has a high student-to-computer ratio, making the Nordic countries well placed to avail themselves of new and emerging educational technologies. EdTech is an emerging concern in the broader European context, too, demonstrated not least by the establishment of the European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) in 2008. In this chapter, we consider to what extent educational technology has a disruptive or transformative influence on the educational environment today. For the purpose of this chapter, EdTech is used as an umbrella concept to define and identify a wide range of technologies that have been designed and developed with a stated purpose to be used for teaching and learning