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.
Near Future Teaching project
I have a new project running this year, along with the wonderful Jennifer Williams, Michael Gallagher, Lucy Kendra and colleagues, which aims to 'design the future of digital education at Edinbugh'. Through a series of events, workshops, thinktanks and...
Digital sanctuary and anonymity on campus: article on WonkHE
After my Alt-C talk this September, which discussed the social value of anonymity within universities, David Kernohan from the excellent WonkHE kindly asked me to write a blog post covering some of the...
Edinburgh Futures Institute
This year I'm going to be quite heavily involved with the new Edinburgh Futures Institute, which will be doing new kinds of interdisciplinary research to tackle complex societal problems, bring the social sciences and humanities to bear on data science, and develop a...
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.
