
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.
Our new special issue: Critical approaches to open education
Jeremy Knox, Jen Ross and I have been working on this special issue for a couple of years now, are thrilled to see it in press at last. We're very happy with the final collection, which features some cracking articles from Richard Edwards, Bonnie Stewart, Richard...
Teacherbot asks new questions about teacher automation
The Digital Education group have developed a simple twitterbot which has been teaching alongside us on the ‘E-learning and digital cultures’ MOOC. Featured in the Times Higher Education today , the ‘teacherbot’ was an experiment in thinking about how code, algorithm...
Latest run of Digital Education and Digital Cultures is finishing…
Jeremy Knox and I have been co-teaching this course on our MSc in Digital Education this semester and it's been a blast! Many thanks to all the students who've done such interesting work over the last few weeks. The course is a bit unusual in that it's delivered 'in...

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.