> The indirect legitimacy in a network environment is actually post-institution even though the way we talk about it centers the institution. Because ed-tech arises from the business of the institution — accountability regimes, technologies, the spaces between bureaucratic nodes — it cannot legitimize the institution. Therefore, ed-tech as we currently practice and understand it could not do the necessary work of exclusion, rank ordering and symbolic exchange that institutions require of disciplines. On the upside that does mean, as Mahi points out, that ed-tech can do things sociology cannot. It can allow networks to filter ideas rather than prestige (even when those significantly overlap). The institutionalization efforts like journals and such are actually trying to preclude precisely the kind of network effects that make the journals possible. [source](http://blog.edtechie.net/edtech/ed-tech-as-dsicipline/)