highlights
UNA Europa Future University Lab
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.
Falling Walls nomination for Berlin Science Week
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.
Manifesto seminar videos
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.
Countdown: The Manifesto for Teaching Online book is out in September
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.
Our Centre report 2020 is out
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.
Edinburgh University learning and teaching conference keynote 2020
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.
Podcast: my conversation with Neil Selwyn on post-digital education
Neil Selwyn at Monash University recorded a podcast interview with me, in which we talk about why digital education matters, ways of understanding it, and where it might be headed. The interview is part of a series Neil produces...
New paper on the Manifesto – Critical approaches to valuing digital education
Jen Ross, James Lamb and I have a new paper out in Digital Culture and Education. The paper gives an introduction to the Manifesto for Teaching Online, and looks in particular at its academic reception as a non-traditional academic output. The paper comes out ahead of...
New paper – Machine behaviourism: Future visions of ‘learnification’ and ‘datafication’
Jeremy Knox, Ben Williamson and I have just published a new paper in Learning, Media and Technology as part of a Special Issue on Education and technology into the 2020s: speculative futures. It argues that current trajectories for the future of education may be...
Near Future Teaching final report
The Near Future Teaching project ran between 2017 and 2019, with the goal to develop a values-based vision for the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. The final report is now published - please do download it, read, enjoy and get in touch with...