This morning, thanks to Chronicle spam, I encountered the unfortunate portmanteau phygital education for the first time. Did we really need a new marketing term for the hybrid experience of in-person and digital learning? To be fair, it’s more than that, far more than education, as this Forbes article explains.

Here are the high points.

Phygital is omnichannel, psychology, combined revenue recognition, compromise, and a “journey, not a destination.” So I guess that means it’s about the friends we make on the way. I won’t go into it; I think you get the idea. It’s about sales. It’s what happens when you get frustrated chatting with an AI on a website and human customer service steps in and what happens when that doesn’t work and you end up having to talk to a person anyway. That’s omnichannel. And it’s also certainly a compromise and often a journey without a destination. So I suppose that all makes sense?

Phygital education is basically about integrating digital learning practices and tools into in-person learning. It claims to be new. The origin story begins with the move online during the pandemic and the subsequent return to campus. However, I am reminded of Lester Faigley in his early 90s Fragments of Rationality where he discussed using a chat program called InterChange in a LAN computer classroom. (That’s Local Area Network, i.e., not internet, for the millennials in the audience). Or maybe Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms (1980) or perhaps even Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974).

So I came up with my own portmanteau puncept, combining fidget and digital into fidgital. This is meant to point to the affective effects of the digital penetration into the physical world. But let’s be clear. The digital is always already physical. If digital media didn’t have a physical, material existence then how would we find it? Where would it be if not already in the physical world? But obviously what we are talking about is the increasing human capacity to interact with digital media in increasingly powerful ways in an increasingly large area of the world. As I mentioned in a recent post, very soon, the university classroom will “just” be the professor, the students, and several AIs. Phygital education is about coming to terms with that, which we probably do.

Fidgital education is also about that but with less marketing speak and more emphasis on the complex intersections of the body/mind with this emerging digital mediascape.