Some weeks ago, this text was originally written as a professional introduction for a colleague in Australia. I was trying to explain who I am and what I do, so that he could see whether I might fit into some of the initiatives his team is currently working on. However, I decided to share it here because, in trying to explain who I am and what drives my work, I ended up writing something that probably describes me better than any current formal biography.
I’m a curious person by nature — someone who finds it difficult to stay within a single disciplinary box.
My academic work has always been driven by a deep interest in how people, ideas, and technologies shape each other in educational contexts. That curiosity has led me to move between pedagogy, policy, technology, and institutional design — fields that, in Spanish, we understand as part of pedagogía — trying to understand how digital and now so-called “intelligent” systems (sorry, quotations on this concept are crucial for me) are transforming the way we teach, learn, and think about education, learning, and society.
Over time, this restlessness has become a way of working: I enjoy crossing boundaries, connecting projects and disciplines, and building shared frameworks that make complexity visible rather than hiding it. That’s also what draws me to human-centred and critical approaches to digital transformation — because education, for me, is never just about tools, but about the relationships and meanings we construct through them.
That search for connections has shaped the projects I lead and contribute to.
In the CUTE and now CUTIE (University Competences for the Use of Technology in Education and Institutional Development) projects (cutie.unak.is), we’ve been exploring how universities can build their own capacity to evolve — not merely by integrating digital tools, but by aligning pedagogical, organisational, and ethical perspectives on technology. Through this work, I’ve come to understand institutional change as a process of collective sensemaking, where strategy and everyday teaching practice meet and inform each other.
That institutional dimension also guided my work in DigCompEdu FyA (link), where we adapted and contextualised the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators to the Spanish university level, creating tools and processes that connect individual competence with institutional development.
The DALI (Data Literacy for Citizens) Project (dalicitizens.eu), a European initiative that concluded in late 2023, expanded this reflection beyond formal education. In DALI we designed and tested game-based and open learning approaches to help adults and communities develop critical data literacy, connecting ethical awareness, civic participation, and digital empowerment. For this purpose we developed a Data Literacy Framework, and a set of open resources and print-and-play board games (toolkit.dalicitizens.eu).
DALI was led by Barbara Wasson and her team at SLATE in Bergen. Thanks to that connection, from December 2025 I will join —as an international partner— the AI LEARN – Norwegian Centre for Research on Artificial Intelligence and Learning, continuing this line of inquiry on how we can cultivate critical and humanly meaningful forms of intelligence in education.
In parallel, my work in CoDiCri (Critical Digital Competence: Towards Agency for Learning through Open Educational Practices) examines how openness, collaboration and reflection nurture agency in digital learning ecosystems, while the ongoing COPLITELE-IA project explores how generative AI and educational co-design can help us rethink what it means to learn in connected environments.
These experiences have reinforced my conviction that digital transformation in education is never just about innovation; it is about rethinking power, participation, and purpose in how we design for learning.
Alongside these projects, two threads have become increasingly central in my work.
The first is a critical and theoretical reflection on the nature of educational technology as a field, and on technology itself — on how our ways of knowing, designing, and teaching are shaped by the systems we create. This interest has guided my collaborations with scholars such as Neil Selwyn and Ben Williamson, where we explored how educational technology research must move beyond instrumental views to interrogate its political, ethical, and epistemic dimensions. More recently, this line of thought has evolved into my work on artificial intelligence in education, where I argue for a polyhedral understanding of AI — one that recognises its coexistence as artefact, system, discourse, and ideology. Drawing on the seven dimensions identified in our recent critical work on AI in education —instrumental, ethical, social/anthropological, epistemological, ideological, political, and market— we conceptualise AI as a prism through which different facets of education are refracted. Each dimension invites a different kind of question: about what AI does, what it means, who benefits from it, and how it reshapes our understanding of knowledge, agency, and justice in education.
The second thread is the analysis of educational practice — both my own and that of others. I see practice as a privileged site of theory-making: the place where the complex relations between people, tools, and institutions become visible. This is why many of my studies — from personal learning environments and critical data literacy to institutional competence frameworks and AI-mediated learning — are grounded in observing how teachers and students design, negotiate, and inhabit their learning spaces. It is through these concrete cases that I try to understand, and help others understand, what educational transformation really means in practice.
Together, these lines of work —critical reflection, empirical observation, and collaborative design— shape how I approach both research and innovation.
They keep me moving between theory and practice, between institutions and classrooms, always asking how we can build educational systems that remain human, reflective, and just, even —and especially— as they become more intelligent.
I like to think of my work as grounded in a sociomaterial understanding of education and learning — seeing learning and teaching not as human activities supported by technology, but as entanglements of people, artefacts, spaces, and discourses that together shape what learning becomes.
This way of thinking is not just theoretical for me; it emerges constantly from my own teaching practice.
With my students, I try to create spaces where we can question how we learn, how technology intervenes in that process, and how we might design learning experiences that are both critical and caring.
For me, these are not only pedagogical exercises but acts of inquiry and commitment — ways of linking theory to lived experience, and of keeping reflection alive within practice. Through them, I try to nurture in myself and in those I teach a sense of shared responsibility for how educational futures are imagined and built. Ultimately, my commitment is to an education that remains deeply human, critically aware, and open to complexity — an education that does not merely adapt to intelligent systems, but learns to live and think well with them.
I realise this may sound like a lot — perhaps too many threads and interests woven together (Muchness is my second name ;-)). But I wanted to give you a sense of who I am and how I think, so that you can imagine whether any of this might be useful to you, to your team, or to the work you are doing.
For me, collaborations only make sense when they grow from mutual curiosity and shared questions, and I hope this first draft about me helps you see the kinds of questions that would help us to collaborate.
Muchness included — as always.
