This series has treated digital pedagogy as something to be enacted - a practice that lives through choices about tools, tasks, and relationships rather than a theory applied after the fact. To speak of enactment is to foreground how institutions are not fixed backdrops but living spaces where meanings and practices are continually remade (Castoriadis, 1997). In this sense, classrooms, platforms, and policies are not neutral containers but instruments through which particular educational worlds are brought into being.

Across the series, each post has explored a different dimension of this enactment: from rethinking infrastructures as sites of political design, to centring the relational labour of care, to experimenting with speculative and narrative assignments that let students “world” otherwise. For example, a collaborative mapping project can invite learners to imagine more just and plural digital futures together. These instances show how theory and practice intertwine - how critique can become creative, and how pedagogical action can materialise ethical commitments (Feenberg, 1999; Bayne et al., 2020).

Amid accelerating automation, AI-driven assessment, and the institutional pressures of platform capitalism, the need for such collective redefinition has become urgent. The infrastructures of higher education too often translate learning into data and metrics, while constraining imagination through standardised workflows (Selwyn, 2019; Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023a; Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023b). Postdigital scholarship shows how these dynamics are rooted in longer genealogies of technological rationality and how they shape the methodological, ethical, and political conditions of contemporary education. Enactment, in this context, becomes an act of resistance: the deliberate cultivation of autonomy, care, and plurality within digital systems designed for efficiency and control. To enact pedagogy critically is to intervene in how technologies shape our moral and institutional horizons, acknowledging their historical entanglements while opening space for alternative futures.

This final post offers a synthesis - a manifesto for collective action rather than a terminus. Its purpose is to bring the practical lessons and political commitments of the series into a shared horizon that readers can contest, adapt, and extend. The term “manifesto” is used here in the spirit of critical education traditions that view teaching as a public and plural activity (Arendt, 1958/2018), and in dialogue with The Manifesto for Teaching Online (Bayne et al., 2020), which treats manifestos not as declarations of certainty but as provocations to be enacted. A manifesto, in this sense, is not a fixed programme but a shared invitation to dialogue and co-creation - principles held open to inspection, revision, and dispute.

This approach aligns with speculative and futures-oriented pedagogies that use experimentation to surface assumptions and explore alternatives (Ross, 2022). In exploring this question - what principles might sustain a living, critical, and plural digital pedagogy - several recurring commitments emerge from practice. Transparency means making visible the assumptions and data relations that structure our tools; revisability means treating systems, policies, and curricula as open to change; accountability means ensuring design and procurement serve educational rather than managerial values; and plurality means protecting diverse ways of knowing, teaching, and learning. These commitments are not commandments but orientations: ways to keep pedagogy responsive and democratic.

The manifesto that follows is therefore less a set of claims than a method of engagement. It asks what kinds of small, sustained acts might make education more open, reflective, and just - whether through course design, platform choice, or collaborative community work. The test of such a manifesto lies not in its rhetoric but in the enactments it enables: the ongoing experiments through which educators, technologists, and students together reimagine the digital university as a truly democratic institution (Castoriadis, 1997; Arendt, 2018; Feenberg, 1999; Bayne et al., 2020).

Across this series, a central concern has been how to move from critique to action: how educators, technologists, and students can enact digital pedagogy through situated, everyday practices. The previous posts have shown that transformation does not rely on sweeping institutional reforms but on deliberate, often modest interventions that reshape how technologies mediate learning. These interventions exemplify what Feenberg (1999) terms “technical politics”: the capacity to influence the values and assumptions embedded within technological systems through thoughtful, situated acts of redesign and resistance.

One recurring thread has been the reclaiming of autonomy through small infrastructural modifications. These range from adopting open-source alternatives to proprietary tools, to reconfiguring LMS defaults in ways that enhance student choice, to disabling or reframing analytics in order to reduce data-driven behavioural nudging. Even minor shifts - such as renaming default content categories to reflect pedagogical intent, providing alternative submission routes, or using a federated annotation tool in place of a commercial plug-in - can unsettle the platform’s implicit assumptions about control and visibility. These actions resonate with postdigital analyses that show infrastructures to be active mediators of agency rather than neutral carriers of content (Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023a). They remind us that autonomy is not a static attribute but a practice that must be continually enacted.

The series has also emphasised the importance of making visible the human and institutional labour that sustains digital education. Platform interfaces often conceal the complex work required to maintain courses, support students, ensure accessibility, and align digital systems with pedagogical values. Revealing this labour is itself an ethical and pedagogical act. It foregrounds the relational conditions of teaching and resists narratives that present digital learning as automated, efficient, or effortless. Selwyn (2019) argues that confronting such labour is essential for challenging the myths surrounding AI-driven educational technologies. Concrete examples include the quiet work of updating captions, curating resources, troubleshooting LMS inconsistencies, or maintaining cross-departmental support networks. Making these processes visible reframes digital pedagogy as a collective enterprise rather than an individual burden.

Another strand has involved designing assignments that help students imagine and enact alternative technological futures. Speculative tasks - such as mapping data flows, drafting counterfactual platform policies, or developing ethical design briefs - encourage learners to examine not only the technologies they encounter but the worlds these technologies presuppose. Ross (2022) highlights how speculative pedagogy enables students to critically inhabit and question taken-for-granted digital norms while envisioning more just configurations. Such activities illustrate how assessment design can function as a form of infrastructural intervention: a way of building alternative imaginaries into the fabric of learning.

Finally, the series has underscored the significance of cultivating communities of care and experimentation. These communities, often formed across disciplinary and professional boundaries, create spaces where risk-taking, failure, and revision are understood as integral to pedagogical inquiry. Arendt’s (1958/2018) conception of action as unfolding within a shared world provides a valuable frame here: digital pedagogy emerges not from solitary innovation but from plural, dialogic engagement. This aligns closely with the ethos of revisability central to postdigital research (Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023b).

Taken together, these practices demonstrate that enacting digital pedagogy is an ongoing, revisable process rather than a fixed accomplishment. Small acts - whether infrastructural, relational, speculative, or community-based - accumulate and scale sideways, gradually shifting institutional cultures and technological imaginaries. Reflection, in this sense, is inseparable from practice: an iterative mode of inquiry that sustains the continuous remaking of the digital university.

This section proposes a set of interlinked principles to guide critical digital practice. These are not fixed standards or normative prescriptions. They function instead as provocations - touchstones inviting educators, technologists, and institutions to reflect on how their everyday decisions shape the conditions under which digital learning becomes possible. They draw on traditions of critical pedagogy, democratic theory, and postdigital research, all of which remind us that technologies are never neutral but always historically, politically, and institutionally situated (Feenberg, 1999; Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023a; Selwyn, 2019).

Transparency asks us to make visible the assumptions, defaults, and power relations embedded within digital platforms. This involves more than revealing data policies or documenting processes. It includes cultivating the capacity to perceive how technologies script certain forms of behaviour, reward some practices over others, and hide the institutional labour that sustains them. Transparency thus supports a form of algorithmic literacy that enables educators and students to question what platforms privilege, what they render invisible, and what kinds of pedagogical imagination they delimit (Bayne et al., 2020). By foregrounding the politics of design, transparency opens space for alternative practices and interpretations.

Revisability frames educational technologies, policies, and pedagogical approaches as living, evolving artefacts. Postdigital scholarship emphasises that infrastructures are continually reshaped by human action and should remain open to adaptation (Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023b). Revisability encourages institutional cultures that embrace critique, iteration, and flexibility rather than standardised stability. This means recognising that digital tools must adapt to new ethical insights, shifting learner needs, and changing social conditions. Treating systems as revisable affirms that pedagogy and technology evolve together and that responsiveness is a sign of collective attentiveness rather than organisational weakness.

Accountability concerns the ethical and political consequences of technological decision-making. Every choice - from adopting a plagiarism-detection system to selecting a commercial platform that centralises student data - redistributes agency and risk. Accountability therefore requires transparent governance processes and participatory mechanisms in which those most affected by technologies have a meaningful voice (Selwyn, 2019). It invites educators and institutions to assess who benefits, who is burdened, and how responsibility is shared. Accountability does not resolve all tensions but ensures they are acknowledged and debated rather than obscured by the rhetoric of innovation.

Plurality affirms multiple ways of knowing, teaching, and learning. Drawing on Arendt’s (1958/2018) notion of action grounded in the presence of others, plurality resists the homogenising tendencies of platform design - tendencies that often normalise specific epistemologies, temporalities, and interaction patterns. Plurality encourages spaces where diverse identities, methods, and scholarly traditions can flourish. It recognises that educational technologies are always partial embodiments of broader cultural assumptions and must be continually unsettled to allow alternative forms of practice and expertise to emerge.

Care highlights the relational, emotional, and often invisible labour that underpins digital education. This includes responding to student anxieties, maintaining accessible materials, troubleshooting technical difficulties, and supporting colleagues. Such work is essential yet frequently undervalued within narratives that frame digital learning in terms of automation or efficiency (Bayne et al., 2020; Ross, 2022). Care invites us to design infrastructures and institutional practices that recognise this labour, protect the well-being of educators, and centre attentiveness as a core value of digital pedagogy.

Together, these principles form an ethos rather than a doctrine. They are co-constructed, open to revision, and sustained through collective negotiation across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Their intent is not to prescribe a particular vision of digital pedagogy but to initiate ongoing, situated conversations about how educational technologies might support more just, plural, and imaginative educational worlds.

If the manifesto articulated in the previous section offers shared commitments, its substance is realised only through action. Principles such as transparency, revisability, accountability, plurality, and care gain significance when they are enacted within the complexities of institutional life. This section therefore explores how a manifesto becomes practical through small, collective experiments that reshape technologies and the relations around them. The emphasis is not on dramatic reform but on modest, situated interventions that circulate, accumulate, and gradually shift cultures of digital practice (Feenberg, 1999; Bayne et al., 2020). A single redesigned workflow, a shared reflective document, or a collaboratively adapted open tool can enact a fragment of the manifesto and open new possibilities for institutional change.

One route from principle to practice lies in co-creating open-source infrastructures aligned with pedagogical values. Open-source platforms, federated tools, and community-controlled repositories make it possible for educators and students to examine, modify, and redistribute the systems that support learning. This cultivates a more democratic mode of technological governance (Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023a). For instance, using open annotation systems or collaboratively maintaining an OER repository enables participants to shape the tool’s behaviour in ways that reflect the principles of plurality, transparency, and care. Such infrastructures also allow revisability in practice: because code, design decisions, and data structures are open, they can evolve responsively to community needs rather than vendor timelines.

Another pathway involves developing ethical review practices for educational technologies. As institutions adopt AI-enabled systems for assessment, analytics, or content generation, there is a need for structured processes that rigorously examine issues such as bias, data governance, labour effects, and pedagogical alignment. Ethical review mitigates the risk that technologies are implemented solely on the basis of efficiency narratives (Selwyn, 2019). It creates deliberative spaces where educators, technologists, and students can interrogate the consequences of adoption. This form of accountability helps ensure that technologies reinforce rather than undermine the values articulated in the manifesto.

Embedding reflective practices within digital design and procurement represents another crucial form of enactment. Procurement processes often foreground cost, speed, and institutional compliance over pedagogical nuance. Incorporating reflective prompts - asking how a tool affects autonomy, what forms of labour it makes visible or invisible, or how it aligns with institutional commitments - reframes procurement as an ethical and educational decision rather than a purely administrative one. Similarly, reflective digital design encourages multidisciplinary teams to pause, question defaults, and experiment with alternatives. Ross (2022) argues that such reflective, speculative practices create openings for institutions to imagine different digital futures and resist predetermined technological pathways.

A further mode of action involves building alliances between educators, students, librarians, technologists, and support staff. Digital pedagogy is inherently collective, spanning professional identities and organisational hierarchies. Alliances create spaces where diverse perspectives challenge institutional inertia and enable shared reimagining of tools and practices. Arendt’s (1958/2018) account of action as grounded in human plurality highlights why such collaborations matter: they enable a common world to be shaped by many voices. These alliances also distribute the relational and emotional labour of digital work, supporting the principle of care by ensuring that responsibility is shared rather than individualised.

Across these domains, small, iterative interventions matter more than grand solutions. Each action tests and refines the manifesto’s principles, transforming them from abstract commitments into lived practices. In this sense, the manifesto becomes a living archive: continually revised, renewed, and expanded through doing. Action is not merely the application of principle but its ongoing reinvention - the means through which values endure and take institutional form.

Critical digital pedagogy requires us to view education not simply as a service or a delivery mechanism but as a democratic institution sustained through imagination, dialogue, and collective action. This understanding challenges managerial narratives that frame universities primarily in terms of efficiency, performance, and compliance. Instead, it positions educational institutions as spaces where new meanings, practices, and futures can be created. Castoriadis (1997) describes institutions as expressions of the social imaginary: historically produced yet continually open to re-creation. Likewise, Arendt (1958/2018) depicts action as the mode through which people introduce “new beginnings” into a shared world. Together, these perspectives invite us to see education as a site of world-making, where democratic life is continually enacted.

If education is to function as a democratic institution in this deeper sense, then digital pedagogy becomes inseparable from politics. The platforms and infrastructures that organise learning are not neutral. They embody assumptions about communication, time, assessment, agency, and authority (Selwyn, 2019). Standardised workflows may prescribe what counts as legitimate interaction; analytics dashboards may normalise surveillance; fixed interface designs may limit forms of expression. These design choices shape the horizons of what students and educators are able to imagine and enact. Thus, universities must model democracy not only in their governance structures but in the technological and pedagogical systems they create, procure, and endorse. Digital infrastructures are not peripheral but constitutive of the university’s democratic character.

Within this framing, educators become institutional agents - re-founders of democratic life who hold open spaces of autonomy within constraint. Castoriadis reminds us that autonomy is not merely individual self-direction but the collective capacity to question and remake institutions. Arendt similarly emphasises that action gains significance only when it occurs in the presence of others, creating a public world shared among plural voices. Educators enact this democratic role when they design assignments that invite interpretation rather than compliance, challenge platform-imposed norms, cultivate spaces for dissent, or make visible the labour and negotiation behind digital practice. Even modest interventions - such as reworking a discussion format, adopting an open tool, or reframing the meaning of an assessment - introduce new beginnings into an institution that might otherwise slip into routine.

Linking autonomy with democracy clarifies the stakes of critical digital pedagogy. Both require the ongoing capacity to question inherited forms, revise established practices, and imagine alternatives. Autonomy is enacted when students and educators can interrogate technological assumptions; democracy is enacted when institutions remain open to such interrogation. Postdigital scholarship highlights that infrastructures are always historically situated and therefore revisable (Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023). Technologies should not be accepted as given but treated as provisional artefacts that can be adapted, challenged, or replaced in pursuit of more just and plural educational futures.

Recognising education as a democratic institution reframes digital pedagogy as a practice of world-building. It positions universities as places where alternative technological arrangements can be experimented with, not simply implemented. This demands institutional conditions that support collective agency - time for reflection, communities of practice, transparent governance, and mechanisms for shared decision-making. Democracy is not a static ideal but a lived set of practices, enacted whenever educators and students reshape their environments, question defaults, and open up new possibilities for collective life. Through such acts, the digital university becomes a space of freedom, imagination, and renewal.

Critical digital pedagogy depends on collective experimentation: a shared willingness to revise practices, question technological defaults, and contribute to the ongoing reimagining of educational life. The manifesto outlined earlier is deliberately unfinished. Its principles only gain force when enacted, adapted, or contested by diverse communities. In this sense, experimentation becomes both a method and an ethic - a refusal of closure and a commitment to learning in public. It invites educators, students, and technologists to take part in shaping digital pedagogy as a dynamic, circulating, and plural practice rather than a static set of prescriptions.

One entry point into this shared project is the practice of openly sharing code, curricula, tools, and configurations that embody critical commitments. Such sharing expands the pedagogical imagination available to others and enables educators to see alternatives to platform-imposed norms. A critical data literacy assignment, a privacy-conscious configuration of a learning platform, or a collaboratively generated marking guide can each function as small interventions that challenge dominant assumptions. Feenberg’s (1999) account of “technical politics” helps illuminate how even minor modifications express normative stances about agency, care, and justice. By opening these interventions to others, educators contribute not only resources but also ways of thinking about how infrastructures might be reimagined.

Participation in assemblages of purpose-built services across the Fediverse, integrated through open standards such as ActivityPub, offers another avenue for collective experimentation. These distributed ecosystems function as living laboratories where alternatives to commercial, centralised platform models can be explored and tested. Their decentralised and horizontal architectures allow knowledge and practice to circulate across institutional boundaries rather than being channelled through managerial hierarchies. Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox (2023a) argue that postdigital collectives are most generative when they bring together educators, researchers, technologists, and students in shared acts of inquiry. Within these federated networks, experimentation becomes a communal process: participants analyse tools, expose hidden assumptions, remix resources, and co-develop speculative designs for more open and democratic digital infrastructures.

A further mode of contribution lies in documenting failures, frictions, and tensions as part of the knowledge commons. The dominant narratives of educational technology often celebrate seamless innovation while obscuring the labour, uncertainty, and misalignment that accompany real practice (Selwyn, 2019). Yet moments of breakdown - an inaccessible workflow, an assessment that does not land as intended, or an analytics feature that produces harmful incentives - provide valuable insights into the values embedded within systems. Ross (2022) highlights that speculative and experimental methods require vulnerability: the willingness to be transparent about what did not work, to revise plans openly, and to treat failure as generative rather than embarrassing. Sharing such experiences strengthens institutional memory, challenges the amnesia of repeated innovation cycles, and supports cultures of revisability.

Central to all these activities is the recognition that critical pedagogy is never owned. It circulates across communities, adapts to new contexts, and transforms through collective participation. Arendt’s (1958/2018) account of action as a public, plural practice underscores that meaningful change arises when individuals come together to build and rebuild a shared world. Castoriadis’ (1997) conception of autonomy as collective self-institution similarly frames experimentation as a democratic act: an ongoing capacity to question inherited structures and imagine alternatives. Thus, contributing to this project - whether by sharing a snippet of code, joining an open network, publishing a reflective failure, or participating in collaborative design - becomes part of a wider ecology of transformation.

Through collective experimentation, the manifesto becomes a living document - revised, expanded, and renewed through practice. Its principles gain durability not through preservation but through continual reinvention. In this way, digital pedagogy remains open, adaptive, and plural: a shared endeavour shaped by the communities that sustain it.

This manifesto has outlined an ethos rather than a fixed programme - a set of orientations for sustaining critical digital pedagogy as an imaginative, democratic, and plural practice. Its central commitments to autonomy, plurality, care, and collective responsibility operate not as prescriptions but as dispositions that keep educational life open to renewal. Autonomy, in Castoriadis’ (1997) sense, is always collective: the shared capacity of a community to question inherited forms and to re-create its institutions. Plurality, as Arendt (1958/2018) argues, is the condition of human action, grounding the possibility of encountering one another as distinct yet mutually implicated in shaping a shared world. Care foregrounds the often-invisible relational, affective, and technical labour that digital education rests upon, challenging narratives of frictionless automation (Selwyn, 2019). Collective responsibility recognises that the shaping of technologies, policies, and pedagogies is never the work of individuals alone but of networks, alliances, and distributed forms of expertise.

Taken together, these orientations affirm that digital pedagogy is always in the making. It is enacted through choices about tools, workflows, and platforms; through the relations we cultivate with students and colleagues; and through the designs we experiment with, revise, or resist. A redesigned assignment that foregrounds interpretation over compliance, a procurement conversation that questions opaque defaults, or a collaborative reworking of an open-source tool each exemplifies the ongoing process by which digital pedagogy is realised. Feenberg’s (1999) account of the politics of technology highlights that every configuration expresses values, and every modification participates in reshaping those values. Revisability, far from indicating instability, becomes the hallmark of a democratic educational culture - a sign that institutions can respond to critique, uncertainty, and emerging conditions.

This work unfolds within a democratic horizon. Democracy in education is not limited to formal governance structures but is expressed through the capacity of a community to remake its shared world. Arendt (1958/2018) shows that action introduces “new beginnings”, while Castoriadis (1997) frames institutions as historical creations that require continual re-founding. Pedagogy thus becomes a democratic practice: the everyday work of sustaining and renewing an educational commons where learners and educators can question assumptions, explore alternatives, and imagine different futures together. In digital environments, this requires resisting the closure sought by platform logics that privilege efficiency, prediction, and uniformity. It involves cultivating infrastructures that support plurality, transparency, and openness, and recognising that every technological choice either expands or constrains the democratic possibilities of the institution (Bayne et al., 2020; Jandrić, MacKenzie and Knox, 2023).

The conclusion of this series is therefore not an ending but an invitation. Critical digital pedagogy grows through participation - through the imperfect, provisional, and experimental contributions of those who share practices, offer reflections, document failures, and collaborate across boundaries. Ross (2022) argues that speculative and experimental methods allow communities to explore the futures of education collaboratively rather than inherit them passively. In this spirit, the manifesto remains intentionally incomplete, gaining vitality as others take it up, challenge it, and expand it in their own contexts. The invitation is to keep experimenting, imagining, and building together - not to finish the work of the manifesto, but to extend it outward into practice. Through such collective action, the digital university can become a place of freedom, creativity, and democratic possibility.

• Arendt, H. (2018) The Human Condition. Second edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Bayne, S., Evans, P., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J., Macleod, H., O’Shea, C., Ross, J., Sheail, P. and Sinclair, C. (2020) The Manifesto for Teaching Online, MIT Press, Cambridge. https://doi-org.manchester.idm.oclc.org/10.7551/mitpress/11840.001.0001
• Castoriadis, C. (1997) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Feenberg, A. (1999) Questioning Technology. London: Routledge.
• Jandrić, P., Mackenzie, A. and Knox, J. (eds) (2023a) Postdigital Research : Genealogies, Challenges, and Future Perspectives Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31299-1
• Jandrić, P., Mackenzie, A. and Knox, J. (eds) (2023b) Constructing Postdigital Research : Method and Emancipation Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35411-3.
• Ross, J. (2022) Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.manchester.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9781003202134
• Selwyn, N. (2019) Should Robots Replace Teachers? AI and the Future of Education. Cambridge: Polity Press.