highlights

Jeremy Knox and I gave the DT&L opening keynote this year, beautifully illustrated by Will Santino.

Our annual report covering our work during 2020-2021 is out: we are proud of all we’ve done through the pandemic time.

Our new position paper from the European university alliance UNA Europa Future UniLab describes the future university as built on a clear statement of values, a commitment to sustainability and a re-thinking of the way we understand university space.

In the 2020 Annual Drapers’ Lecture, I talked about the future of digital education and how this traumatic last year might shape and change the way universities teach.

Since Brexit it’s obviously more important than ever to us to keep our connections with our friends and partners in European universities. Michael Gallagher and I have been working as Edinburgh leads on a UNA Europa programme of work called the Future UniLab, tasked with conceptualising a preferable future for Europe’s universities.

I didn’t win but was happy with my pitch, which made the point that resilient digital education futures are often assumed to be driven by the imaginaries of AI, personalisation and automation, but are in fact far more dependent on the creativity and conviction of faculty and students.

Those of us in the author team of the Manifesto for Teaching Online gave a series of short seminars during September 2020 to launch our new book of the manifesto. This is my talk on the concept of 'campus envy', and you can catch up with the whole series here.

The Manifesto will soon be out in book form! Published by MIT Press, publication date is September 2020. Post-COVID, we find that the manifesto not only holds up but becomes even more necessary in its resistance to instrumental logics and its call to be bold and critical.

We have just published our research centre report for the last year. It celebrates our collective output, our projects and our amazing people. A new visualisation from our graphic designer, peakfifteen, details our global reach over the last year and celebrates the diversity of our students.

My talk discussed the Near Future Teaching project we ran here at Edinburgh between 2017-19. This project took on the task of trying to find ways to collectively imagine desirable futures for teaching in our own university, express the values that underpin these futures, and work toward their confident articulation.