There are no tools. Tools are passive, neutral. They can be picked up and put down, used to achieve human goals without changing the user (the user might change, but the change is not attributed to the tool).

Tools are really technologies. Each technology creates new possibilities for acting, seeing and organising the world. Some would call these affordances but I have been trained away from this word by Martin Oliver (2011) and others – it’s complicated but has to do with avoiding absolute properties. Jon Dron (2021) talks about “adjacent possibles” – new things that can be done in the particular situations where the technology is or might be. These possibilities are relational – it is the combination of the technologies and people in particular situations that shape what is possible. But shaping is reciprocal – the possibilities shape the people (how they think, feel and act) and the ways different technologies are assembled together, and vice versa (people and technology assemblies shape possibilities). There are always a whole lot of technologies in play, and they are assembled and entangled with each other in context. The social activity in which these entanglements are entangled is far reaching.

So a hammer is not just sitting there waiting to be picked up, it is actively involved in possibility-shaping, which subtly and unsubtly entangles itself with social, cognitive, material and digital activity. A hammer brings possibilities of building and destroying, threatening and protecting, and so forth, but as part of a wider, complex activity.

I am saying all this because, to me, it’s part of a more theoretically precise view of technology and how it shows up in education, how it can affect things even when it is not currently present or used, and how it is never by itself, so any effects are always caught up in what else is going on. This complexity means problems are harder to solve, but there are more places to act in trying to respond to those problems. A hammer is not inherently good or bad, it depends on the context, the ways in which it is assembled into ways of doing things, the discourses around it, the (always relational) agency of the people in its orbit.