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.
Teaching in Higher Education
I'm on the new Executive editorial group of the journal Teaching in Higher Education since last year. Previously, Sue Clegg did an amazing job of leading this journal, and now she's stepped down it's taking 6 of us to fill her shoes. Penny Jane Burke at Roehampton is...
New MOOC project with National Museums Scotland
We're very pleased to be working on a new MOOC project in partnership with our colleagues Alison Morrison-Low and Christine McLean at the National Museum. It's to run in tandem with a major new exhibition coming up in Edinburgh in June 2015 called Photography: A...
Autumn talks
I've got three talks and keynotes lined up for this autumn, all of which I'm really looking forward to. In September I'm going to the European Association for International Education conference in Prague, to talk alongside the EC High Level Group on the Modernisation...
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.
