Contemporary human existence is, at least in large parts of the global-North, including the North in the global-South, implicitly and explicitly marked by technologically infused lives. From digitally mediated entertainment consumption across public and private spaces, to highly specialized digitalized medical interventions, to digitally framed religious platforms, to learning in and through digital spaces, there exist virtually (pun unintended) no dimensions of contemporary human existence that are not technologically marked and/or mediated. Having said this, an important caveat is paying heed to the need for recognizing the permeability and even non-boundary marked nature of this technologically infused existence. Thus, physical–virtual, digital–analogue, online–offline and the myriad other ways of describing contemporary lives need to be recognized. It is not one or the other—there is a continuum and permeability between these (apparent) dichotomies, in and across spaces and arenas. This necessitates explicitly asking what constitutes and what does not constitute virtual sites in current times (or for that matter what constitutes physical sites). Such recognition has profound implications for understanding the nature of learning in the twenty-first century.

The contemporary technologically infused human existence is also marked by shifts that are often described in terms of (at least) four phases or generations. From the initial connectivity and access to information beyond physical texts and communication enabled by the internet in the 1960s that expanded exponentially in the 1990s, to the participation in the creation of content by anyone, anywhere and anytime with an internet connection in the new millennium. This latter social web phase was named Web 2.0 (thus giving the first phase the title of Web 1.0). By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, discussions regarding the next generation of the internet emerged. Web 3.0 is envisaged as going beyond,

the use of the traditional web by including natural ways of interacting with real-life objects that typically have not been considered as computing entities, such as cars, health support equipments, clothing […where] the human is the focal point […and the web] support[s] our daily activities in such a way that it will no longer matter if the given interactions are human to human, human to computer or even computer to computer, while we will be able to access services, information and fulfill any other communication needs in a fully global and ubiquitous environment. (Mahfujur, Abulmotaleb, Juan,, & Mahfujur, 2008, p. 9)

Web 3.0 is variously labeled as the flexible web or the phone web that is “intelligent” and includes important search tools and mobility dimensions. According to futuristic pundits, we are now shifting to Web 4.0 (or even Web 4.0 5.0) where artificial intelligence (AI), in the form of virtual assistants, can propose options based on algorithms gathered about our preferences and this “connects all devices in the real and virtual world in real-time” (https://​flatworldbusines​s.​wordpress.​com/​flat-education/​previously/​web-1-0-vs-web-2-0-vs-web-3-0-a-bird-eye-on-the-definition/​, accessed 2 May 2019). The AI-supported Web 4.0 5.0 is envisaged as symbiotic and with an emotional component. While these shifts—presented here as overarching brushstrokes—mask the parallel presence of the different phases in contemporary times, the trajectory from the “web of things to the web of thoughts” (https://​flatworldbusines​s.​files.​wordpress.​com/​2010/​11/​smartweb_​web_​5-0_​evolution_​confidential_​-v004.​jpg, accessed 2 may 2019) labels the phases in terms of from content to communication to context to things and to thoughts. These dimensions, we argue, are relevant for re-envisaging the what, where, when, why and how associated with learning. Such a stance is crucial for understanding the “in the wild” (Rogers & Marshall, 2017) nature of the research enterprise. This suggests that digitalization brings centerstage the omnipresent nature of learning—something that is always ongoing, that is, learning in the wild. Learning has, however, always been uncontrolled and something that happens beyond people’s conscious decisions. While digitalization makes apparent the glow of learning, the conditions for learning as well as teaching, have changed drastically over the last few decades. Such shifts, we argue, although very often framed in positively loaded terminology such as “innovation”, “change”, “flexibility” and “access”, in relation to the implementation and use of digital technology, are the result of circulating continua that bring together different dimensions of research, policy and practice.

We aim, in this chapter, to investigate and shed light on the nature of these continua by discussing how virtual sites for learning are created in practice, in policy and in research. Furthermore, we augment our arguments through a series of illustrative examples. More specifically, taking learning as the constant and ubiquitous ontological dimension of human existence, we focus on (1) virtual sites (both as they have been explored in research as well as how they have been (re)presented in policy) as the loci for identifying answers to what is real and what is virtual and their concomitant boundaries, (2) the myth of technology as educational panacea, and (3) the challenges that the dematerialization of our everyday wired lives bring to the future of the research endeavor.

A conceptual mind as action theoretical framing with relevance to contemporary learning is discussed and illustrated in Sect. 2, before the implications of such conceptual challenges are outlined in Sect. 3. Section 4 presents policy envisagings from the mid-1990s and compares them to more recent promises of the “online revolution”. The final section of this chapter presents concluding remarks on the conceptual challenges in the study of contemporary learning arenas.

Drawing upon more recent paradigmatic shifts, we conceptualize learning in terms of participation trajectories wherein the individual mind is by-and-large in interaction with other humans and with cultural and physical tools (Hutchins, 1995; Säljö, 2010). This line of thought is a result of a paradigmatic upheaval wherein socialization processes are envisaged as going beyond understandings of humans as isolated individuals whose cognition or learning is contingent on their isolated brains; such a social theory of mind conceptualizes learning as being situated and distributed across people-in-(inter)action-with-others-and-with-tools (Hutchins, 1995; Säljö, 2010). Wertsch (1998) succinctly uses the metaphor of the copyright age when he describes the unit and focus of analysis in the human sciences in terms of a centralized mindset. Drawing on Frye (1957), Wertsch illustrates his standpoint by describing the supremacy accorded to the human mind during the creative work of a painter or a poet, as if they produce their work ex nihilo (Wertsch, 1998). This amounts to the silencing of the sociohistorical context, that is, it is not accounted for, and thus neglected, in the analysis of human behavior. Wertsch and other scholars (e.g. Hutchins, 1995; Resnick, 1994; Rogoff, 1990) argue instead in favor of a shift toward a de-centralized mindset, where analytic efforts are put on the individual in interaction with tools, thus taking mediated action as the unit of analysis (Wertsch, 1998). Key assumptions that conceptually frame such an understanding of learning include the ubiquitous nature of development which is learning across social practices—inside as well as outside institutional arenas (including across the life span). Humans are doomed to learn (Bagga-Gupta, 2017a). Such an understanding needs to tweeze apart what is generally meant b...