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.
Actions toward digital education utopia
Utopia – what are we supposed to actually do?
New paper: Digital Education Utopia
My new paper, just out, uses Levitas’s ‘utopia as method’ as a way to approach the histories of digital education and its utopian possibilities.
Scorched earth technologies: work-in-progress seminar
The recording from my recent ‘work-in-progress’ seminar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities is now online. It’s on the theme of utopia, re-imagining possibility through Ruth Levitas’ Utopia as Method.
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.
