Recently I gave a short presentation at the University of Edinburgh for a very select audience (it was internal) but I realised that some of it actually begins to encapsulate where I feel digital education is headed in the coming decade(s), assuming increasing government and private surveillance hasn’t eroded trust in it, or that governments haven’t banned it outright. That might sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but really not so much. Assuming it is still in place, this internet, then I suspect some of these predictions might hold true as they are general enough to escape being compartmentalized. They might not mean all that much on their own, but I expand on the salient points a bit in the captions. I inserted the slides below (left to right) as well as the comments I had for each. Many of the stock images were taken from Unsplash and the icons embedded in them were taken from the Noun Project, both resources I use often.
So basically all of these are responses to the following: in ten years’ time, digital education at the University of Edinburgh will be…
Distribution is the operating force here and it can inform all our pedagogy (as it already does the structure of digital education). Imagine distributed, rigorous pedagogy; distributed geography and place considerations; distributed (and more than likely ephemeral) constructions of sociality and identity. This great unmooring we are living through shows no signs of abating, despite many attempts at consolidation.
The university is increasingly, and in some instances, predominantly, international. That has profound implications (or it should) on new pedagogies and new curricula (pushing further afield than merely decolonizing it). The numbers here speak to 2017 student populations for total students (left) and those in digital education programmes (right). The number equates to the % of the total that are non-UK.
Again, distribution springs to mind here. Distributed simulations for practitioner-based disciplines; distributed collegiality and mobile fieldwork; the emergence of a rigorous and innovative synchronous distribution to complement the considerable work done in the asynchronous.
This great unmooring needn’t be fatal; it can be productive if we seek (actively) to redefine citizenship and community orientation. How do we do this at scale in distributed models? How do we model this ourselves as academics?
This one has felt like the easiest one for years as the world becomes increasingly mobile, as mobile traffic outstrips other traffic in many nations, as the remaining unconnected of the world will come online primarily, if not exclusively, through mobile. Ignore at your peril.
Springboarding from the mobile, if we aren’t mitigating the divide, we are engaged in an ultimately futile fight. We can uphold in digital education the values of our respective universities, redefine them in the digital context. We must do so strucutrally as well as programmatically, strategically as well as tactically. Is empathy a goal? I have resisted it generally, but I want to know if it can be defined in the digital towards this mitigation.
Hard to avoid this one and we need to prepare for it, design curricula and pedagogy with it embedded at the onset. There are positive pedagogical and research responses to surveillance, ones that actively seek to make ethical (and critical) use of it but we need to work these out more carefully than we have.
Support isn’t a bolt-on; support is defined broadly; support is both there and not there. There are pathways here to build capacity; it’s not alchemy. Develop world class centres of support. They are equal partners here.
My hope, ultimately. Persistent and highly visible transition. Rigorous and critical appraisal. Forthright, sincere, critical, caring. The hallmarks of viable digital education, I would think.
Just my closing image so no future prediction, but some lovely drawings from my sister, with whom I collaborate often.
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About Author
My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.
The future of digital education (at least in my take) https://t.co/Ugixa6NdF9 #elearning #mlearning https://t.co/WrieHCvjge