ABSTRACT
Why is it that so many promising digital educational innovations, conceived, theorised, carefully implemented and with equally promising results, fail to be taken up more generally in higher education? There are a number of reasons why this might be so, which the literature on change and innovation has explored. This chapter explores the notion that digital educational pilots are somehow ‘labs’ that experimentally prove an intervention can succeed, which then requires to be disseminated more widely. It is argued that most aspects of that process are suspect, and the reasons why that is so involve a consideration of Bruno Latour’s analysis of Pasteur’s scientific method, and a reconceptualisation of dissemination as transformation, where practices developed in quasi-laboratory settings become grounds for more radical modes of curriculum design and learning.
