Transitional Technology: Why Literacy Should Be Good Enough

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Postdigital Science and Education

Publication Date

9-2-2026

Abstract

This conceptual paper argues that while postdigital literacy theory has developed powerful accounts of entanglement, materiality, embodiment, and distributed agency, it has fewer resources for explaining the affective and unconscious investments through which learners encounter AI-generated meaning as if it were addressed, evaluative, or authoritative. Current frameworks offer subtle accounts of how learners and AI systems are entangled, yet say less about why a particular learner invests AI feedback with an authority they simultaneously disclaim. Drawing on Winnicott as read by Phillips, the paper develops two paired concepts. The first is transitional technology, a term for systems whose outputs are structurally undecidable in status, hovering between authored and generated, addressed and emitted, judgement and pattern, and whose pedagogical value depends on holding that undecidability open. The second is good enough literacy, a way of reading and responding that tolerates the imperfect, frustrating, and unresolved character of AI-mediated meaning, leaving room for the learner’s own not knowing rather than optimising the encounter into seamless competence. The two concepts work as a pair. Transitional technology designates what the learner encounters. Good enough literacy is the mode in which the encounter becomes educationally generative. Together, they hold open the gap on which subjectification, in Biesta’s sense, depends, the gap between the learner’s own beginnings and meanings they do not wholly author or choose. The paper interrogates the recurring figure of the ‘literate machine’ through Phillips on omniscience and offers four orientations for educators designing AI feedback encounters in academic writing. Its proposal is that one way to think of postdigital literacy is that it is formative because, not in spite of it being imperfect.

ISSN

2524-485X

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Disciplines

Education

Keywords

AI feedback, Higher education, Postdigital literacy, Subjectification, Transitional object, Winnicott

Scopus ID

105049153290

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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