Professor of Digital Education,
University of Edinburgh
I direct the Centre for Research in Digital Education and am based at the Moray House School of Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. I am also Assistant Principal Education Futures – all at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland UK.
My research is critical, creative and exploratory, focused on universities, technology, futures and utopias.
The best way to contact me is via email: see my contact page.
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...
Speculative futures for higher education #5:
Justice-driven innovation
Unrest arising from acute societal division and unequal access to wealth prompts radical political change, and pressure to develop new economic, social and governance models.
Universities’ ‘third mission’ – to create and share knowledge to address societal challenges – becomes their first mission. In the large research-intensive universities, disciplinary structures give way to radical transdisciplinarity focused on specific social challenge areas: poverty, climate, equality, governance and justice.
Universities collaborate to build their own open learning platforms as there is a mass move away from for-profit, data-extractive big tech infrastructure. This globally-accessible, digital open learning is woven through local, context-specific autonomous ecoversities and there are many strong, activist partnerships between higher education and community-based movements.
