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 Centre report 2020 is out
We have just published our research centre report for the last year. It celebrates our collective output, our projects and our amazing people. A new visualisation from our graphic designer, peakfifteen, details our global reach over the last year and celebrates the diversity of our students.
Edinburgh University learning and teaching conference keynote 2020
My talk discussed the Near Future Teaching project we ran here at Edinburgh between 2017-19. This project took on the task of trying to find ways to collectively imagine desirable futures for teaching in our own university, express the values that underpin these futures, and work toward their confident articulation.
Podcast: my conversation with Neil Selwyn on post-digital education
Neil Selwyn at Monash University recorded a podcast interview with me, in which we talk about why digital education matters, ways of understanding it, and where it might be headed. The interview is part of a series Neil produces...
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.
