During the process of peer review of my recent paper, Digital Education Utopia – mostly an analytical, speculative and methodology-oriented paper on the utopian ‘impulse’ in digital education – one of the reviewers asked the question, ‘yes, but what are we supposed to do?’. This happens quite a lot when publishing work which is broadly in the area of critical or theory-based digital education research – people often want you to signpost actions, or indicate implications for practice. This can be sligthly annoying when the aim of the paper is to develop theory, or offer frameworks for others to think differently, but sometimes – as here – it was useful. Advocating for contemporary utopia is not only about imagining, it’s also about about what we can do, and how we might move forward politically and collaboratively.
So I added a section to the paper on this in the paper conclusion, and during a recent talk condensed this into the slide here. It’s just a starting point, but worth sharing as part of the wider conversation I hope we can have about building better digital education.