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.
Falling Walls nomination for Berlin Science Week
I didn’t win but was happy with my pitch, which made the point that resilient digital education futures are often assumed to be driven by the imaginaries of AI, personalisation and automation, but are in fact far more dependent on the creativity and conviction of faculty and students.
Manifesto seminar videos
Those of us in the author team of the Manifesto for Teaching Online gave a series of short seminars during September 2020 to launch our new book of the manifesto. This is my talk on the concept of 'campus envy', and you can catch up with the whole series here.
Countdown: The Manifesto for Teaching Online book is out in September
The Manifesto will soon be out in book form! Published by MIT Press, publication date is September 2020. Post-COVID, we find that the manifesto not only holds up but becomes even more necessary in its resistance to instrumental logics and its call to be bold and critical.
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.
