Paper short abstract:

Manufacturers of digital educational media depict their products as innovative means of improving education, thus allying a number of different actors. This frame is stabilized via an avant-gardist rhetoric, claims of the inevitability of digital technology, and by being present in different media.

Paper long abstract:

In countries where schools are financed and managed by state administration (e.g. Germany, France), manufacturers of digital educational media perceive the educational sector as a difficult market with bureaucratic decision making processes, low budgets, and a general aversion to technological innovation. Companies that aim to introduce novel technologies thus have to resort to a specific strategy of marketing their products. A number of different actors have to be convinced of the benefits of an educational technology: teachers and principals, parents and students, administrators and politicians, and also the general public. This is achieved by allying these different actors via a promise of a better future in which educational problems are solved through a technological fix. Digital educational media are thus framed as innovative not solely in technological but also in educational terms. Three strategies are employed to stabilize this narrative: (1) depicting users of digital media as part of an avant-garde that overcomes failures of the past; (2) highlighting the inevitability of digital technologies in the classroom; (3) being present at different events and in the media. This narrative of innovation results in a trajectory in which not only the product but the development process itself is constantly under revision and in flux. Drawing on the sociology of innovation we understand this narrative not as addendum but as an integral part to the development process. The paper builds on an ethnographic case study on the development and marketing of a 3D learning environment (called "virtual classroom").