This special issue is a collection of articles that emerged from a series of symposia on praxis in higher education, aimed at critically exploring challenges and possibilities for educational praxis, including its role in the contemporary university. The collection highlights the need for asking critical and uncomfortable questions about what is and what could be in higher education. It calls for more focused attention on the consequences of what we do as teachers and university communities, both intentionally and inadvertently, so that higher education can be more socially just and responsive to student and societal needs amidst contemporary challenges. In explicating the concept of ‘educational praxis’, the editorial introduces the metaphor of ‘walking on the edge’ to illustrate the concept’s ‘uncomfortable dimension’ in terms of academics’ responsibility to engage critically with challenging issues in endeavours to address educational concerns.

The study presented here is interested in understanding the ways in which social interaction in technologymediated institutional settings is constrained and afforded by what Pennycook defines as “critical moments” in the educational experience. Drawing on Social Learning Analytics and on the concepts of heteroglossia, contingency and chaining, this paper critically discusses a methodology that allows the analysts, and ultimately learners and educators, to follow and visually represent the mobility of the learners-in-concert-with-tools across space, time and language varieties and modalities in technology-mediated communication. The empirical data focused on here is drawn from a large project which includes 40 hours of naturally occurring interactional materials, generated through screen recordings of online sessions of an Italian for Beginners course offered by a Swedish university in the videoconferencing platform Adobe Connect. Preliminary findings suggest that the environment, both in terms of what happens inside and outside the virtual learning site, is of primary importance when it comes to the organization of the interaction among individuals in terms of what becomes the participants’ focus during the encounters. A visual representation through a multivocal approach of this mobility of learners, topics and tools will, it is suggested, support learners, educators and designers in locating where and when in the interaction “critical moments” have occurred, in order to understand how such shifts in focus support or hinder the learning experience.

Over the last few years, technological developments in semi-autonomous machines have raised awareness about the strategic importance of human-robot interaction (HRI) and its technical and social implications. At the same time, HRI still lacks an established pedagogic tradition in the coordination of its intrinsically interdisciplinary nature. This scenario presents steep and urgent challenges for HRI education. Our contribution presents a normative interdisciplinary dialogic framework for HRI education, denoted InDia wheel, aimed toward seamless and coherent integration of the variety of disciplines that contribute to HRI. Our framework deemphasizes technical mastery, reducing it to a necessary yet not sufficient condition for HRI design, thus modifying the stereotypical narration of HRI-relevant disciplines and creating favorable conditions for a more diverse participation of students. Prospectively, we argue, the design of an educational 'space of interaction’ that focuses on a variety of voices, without giving supremacy to one over the other, will be key to successful HRI education and practice.

Integration, inclusion, and equity constitute fundamental dimensions of democracy in post-World War II societies and their institutions. The study presented here reports upon the ways in which individuals and institutions both use and account for the roles that technologies, including ICT, play in disabling and enabling access for learning in higher education for all. Technological innovations during the 20th and 21st centuries, including ICT, have been heralded as holding significant promise for revolutionizing issues of access in societal institutions like schools, healthcare services, etc. (at least in the global North). Taking a socially oriented perspective, the study presented in this paper focuses on an ethnographically framed analysis of two datasets that critically explores the role that technologies, including ICT, play in higher education for individuals who are “differently abled” and who constitute a variation on a continuum of capabilities. Functionality as a dimension of everyday life in higher education in the 21st century is explored through the analysis of (i) case studies of two “differently abled” students in Sweden and (ii) current support services at universities in Sweden. The findings make visible the work that institutions and their members do through analyses of the organization of time and space and the use of technologies in institutional settings against the backdrop of individuals’ accountings and life trajectories. This study also highlights the relevance of multi-scale data analyses for revisiting the ways in which identity positions become framed or understood within higher education.

The study presented in this article explores the ways in which discursive-technologies shape interaction in "digitally-mediated" educational settings in terms of affordances and constraints for the participants. Our multi-scale sociocultural-dialogical analysis of the interactional order in the online sessions of an "Italian for Beginners" language course provided by a university in Sweden is illustrated in terms of an Introduction phase, a Language and Grammar phase, a Discussion phase, and a Concluding phase. Dimensions of TimeSpace shape the organization of the lessons where a range of literacy practices can be identified. A second step in the analysis zooms into the Discussion phase. Taking the concepts of epistemic engine and epistemic domains as points of departure, we explain how the written word shapes the interactional order in online settings. This study highlights how different interactional orders allow for the opening up of new socialization spaces, in which students are more likely to be prevented from getting trapped in their own script of task-oriented activities. Here, participants' cultural processes are complexly layered in digitally-mediated encounters, where their focused orientation towards a variety of offline and online oral and written resources is partly curtailed by the digital environment itself.

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to educational opportunities.

This study focuses on the analysis of recorded sessions, part of an ‘Italian for (adult) beginners' online course. Our interests relate to accounting for how students negotiate different language varieties, including modalities, and how communication in virtual learning settings enables both flexible participation trajectories and identity positions in and across the boundaries of time and space.

The sociocultural and dialogical analyses here are framed in terms of fluidity of ‘glocal' positions and (trans)languaging that emerge in and across time and space in Technology Mediated Communication. Our findings suggest that online environments support meaning-making where it is possible to identify alternative ways of (co)constructing and mediating learning. Such hybridity as well as the performative character of learning and identity display have important implications for online glocal communities.

The empirical study presented here focuses upon naturalistic social interaction in online synchronous communities within higher education. Our interests here relate to accounting for the communicative strategies employed by participants who are dealing with a common task, and how these specific tasks are negotiated within the constraints and opportunities accorded in the multimodal multilingual virtual setting. Taking sociocultural theoretical points of departure, we focus on students' languaging and use of tools when they have access to a range of resources inside the online videoconferencing program. The study is based upon screen recordings of both student-only and teacher-lead meetings during one semester in the online course Italian for beginners offered by a Swedish university. The analysis is two-fold: we provide an overview of the interactional patterns at the general lesson level in the data complemented by a micro-interactional analysis of selected slices of everyday life from two meetings. Our findings indicate that students make use of several resources that dialectically shape how they get positioned within the virtual community culture. These identification processes function as ways of enriching and nurturing learning, both of appropriating the target language, as well as enabling ways of being in multimodal, multilingual communities of practices.