Many past dreams for digital technologies in education, including my own, foregrounded their capacity to foster meaningful connections and new forms of knowledge production. However, these technologies can also increase fragmentation, surveillance and extraction, and these negative capacities currently outweigh the positive for many people, ecosystems and communities around the world.
What is left of past positive aspirations, what visions of digital education do we currently need, and how can we create the conditions for better futures to flourish? In this lecture, I will reflect on my work over the past 15 years, including on open and online learning, digital cultural heritage engagement, and technologies of automation in education. I will share what I’ve learned about how digital technologies shape and are shaped by issues of power, audience, surveillance, trust and openness.
And I’ll argue that, to make new digital futures, it is necessary to speculate, imagine and experiment with technologies and the practices and relations around them.
I got covid a few weeks ago, and as a result I had to miss my favourite academic conference – Networked Learning – at which I was due to give the opening keynote. From what I heard, the conference was fabulous, and I appreciated the lovely messages from friends and colleagues through the week.
The disappointment of missing Networked Learning was somewhat compensated for by something great that happened the same week – I have been promoted to Professor at the University of Edinburgh! From 1 August, my title will be Professor of Digital Culture and Education Futures, and I am delighted.
Other nice news has been the acceptance of some pieces of collaborative work that I’m proud to have worked on – all in press and coming soon:
Bayne, S. and Ross, J. (in press) Speculative Futures for Higher Education. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education.
Wilson, A. and Ross, J. (in press). “Your U-Well-Being Journal is due today”: on some possible intersections between surveillance and student wellbeing in the future University. Studies in Higher Education.
I am also happy to share the assignment galleries of fabulous work of students on two of my courses in 2023/24:
As ever, I am endlessly impressed by the quality of imagination, thought and criticality of participants on these courses.
Another current teaching project is the five-week, online, Teaching Futures Thinking course that James Lamb and I are delivering this month along with our excellent teaching assistant, Ari Beckingham. The course is being run in collaboration with Professors without Borders, with particpants from all over the world (with an emphasis on the African continent), including Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia, South Africa, Uganda, Cameroon, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Malaysia, Lebanon, Germany, Switzerland, UK, Italy, the US and Canada. You can read more about the course on Linkedin, and we’ll be sharing our experiences and reflections once the course is finished.
by Khyati Trehan, from Google DeepMind on unsplash
With my Centre for Research in Digital Education colleagues Judy Robertson and Cara Wilson, a new, interdisciplinary and cross-Centre programme of research is under way. We are leading two projects this year that are investigating futures for generative AI in schools.
The first, led byJudy and also involving co-leads from the University of East Anglia, Esther Priyadharshini and Harry Dyer, is part of the BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) programme, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Our project is aimed at understanding how responsible AI principles of explainability, privacy and fairness might be understood by young people as part of possible futures for generative AI in secondary education. We’ll be drawing on the team’s previous work on AI literacies, participatory speculative design, digital sociology, critical education futures work, and speculative approaches in digital education, to develop and run speculative and participatory workshops with young people, create learning resources (including in an exciting partnership with Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh) and develop materials that will inform and inspire educators and policymakers about how young people want to see education unfold in a future that may include a lot more AI technologies.
The second, which I’m leading, will build on the work of Judy, Cara and me, and the BRAID project, to further explore AI futures for Scottish education. This is an ESRC Impact Accelerator grant, and will run from April. Our partner for the project (and also involved in BRAID) is Goodison Group in Scotland (GGiS), a futures-focused charity that provides a forum for educators, policymakers, businesses and the third sector to share thinking about education and learning throughout life. We’ll be working closely with GGiS to ensure that the work of both of these projects reaches as wide an audience and engages as many people as possible.
I’m excited about developing speculative approaches in this setting and with these colleagues. I have been involved in and written about previous speculative work on automation in education, which provides a really good foundation here. I’ve also been speaking and sharing insights about AI futures over the past year, at the Scottish Parliament, Scottish Policy Conference, and Learning for Sustainability Scotland, with a forthcoming talk at the NHS Education Scotland conference, and an ‘in conversation’ session with Dr Wayne Holmes about the ethics and use of AI in social science research, for the National Centre for Research Methods (NRCM).
There is so much AI activity going on in education right now, as in many other sectors, and there is a risk of overstating the importance of particular technologies or allowing techno-determinist thinking to swamp other conversations that are needed. Thankfully there is also a strong strand of critical approaches to AI in Education.
Our projects are aiming to be critically creative – to experiment, explore, and imagine a range of futures with and beyond generative AI, while asking a lot of questions and keeping a focus on the ethical risks and the harms that may come if the responsible AI divide between theory and practice can’t be sufficiently bridged.
It’s now been eight months since the publication of my book, Digital Futures for Learning (Routledge, 2023), and I’m using this post to gather up a summary of what’s been happening, as well as a few resources and interesting discussions that have emerged.
Future of AI event at the Scottish Parliament, June 2023
I’ve had the chance to talk about the book and about speculative approaches to researching and teaching education futures with people in a number of settings, including:
a workshop in Jönköping, Sweden on the topic of Storytelling as a method and approach to exploring future(s) of education in Nordic countries
the Computers and Learning Research Group seminar series at the Open University
the Conversations in Education series at the University of Bristol
a workshop at Unidistance in Switzerland on using speculative approaches to design online assessment
A collection of workshop materials spotted in Brig, Switzerland, including a copy of the book!
I’ve been involved in writing projects that have drawn from the book, including work on data cultures, postdigital speculation, postdigital research and surveillance futures[1], and I’m co-editing a special issue of the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, on the theme of “Higher Education Futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology”, with George Veletsianos, Shandell Houlden, Sakinah Alhadad and Camille Dickson-Deane (the call is still open, until the end of October).
In the coming months I’ll be returning to Sweden to give a keynote at a follow-up workshop in Stockholm, attending the Irish Learnovation summit as a featured speaker, taking part in an ‘in conversation’ event with Professor Mike Michael during the National Centre for Research Methods e-festival, and in May 2024 I will have the honour of being a keynote speaker at the Networked Learning conference.
I have learned so much from the conversations, questions and ideas that have been shared with me since the book launched, and from the ways that people continue to take up, use and develop the speculative approaches I discuss (both in the book and earlier work). Some of the work that is currently influencing my thinking about where to go next includes:
Ceratto-Pargman, Lindberg and Buch’s (2022) paper on futures-oriented methods in education. This is a really important piece of work that attempts to map the landscape of methods currently in use for education futures work. Ylva Lindberg makes connections to this paper in her review of my book in Postdigital Science in Education.
Henrietta Carbonel and her colleagues’ work at Unidistance in Switzerland, on using speculative approaches to support the redesign of teaching and learning – see for example this report on designing online assessment.
Carey Jewitt and colleagues’ work on using speculative methods to explore sensory possibilities for interactive skin technologies.
Robinson’s exploration of assistive writing technology, using speculative critique to examine the resurgence of an “autonomous” model of literacy that was critiqued by New Literacy Studies but is now re-emerging in new forms.
Also, I have been greatly inspired by the speculative work of doctoral researchers I’m co-supervising, including Sharon Boyd, Joe Noteboom, John Morrison and Nicolás Ruiz. Students on my Culture, Heritage and Learning Futures course at the Edinburgh Futures Institute also use speculative methods to develop their “Stories from the Future”, and you can read some of the stories from 2022 here.
Altogether, I’ve been really appreciative of the opportunities for discussion, debate and imagination the past eight months have brought, and I’m looking forward to the months ahead.
[1] Knox, J. and Ross, J (2023). Afterword. In Data Cultures in Higher Education: Emergent Practices and the Challenge Ahead. Eds: J. Raffaghelli & A. Sangrà. Springer.
Ross, J. (in press). Postdigital Speculation. Encyclopedia of Postdigital Science and Education.
Ross, J. and Wilson, A. (in press). Reconfiguring surveillance futures for higher education using speculative data stories In Bonderup Dohn, N., Jaldemark, J., Öberg, L-M., Mozelius, P., Håkonsson Lindqvist, M., Ryberg, T. & de Laat, M. (eds.). Sustainable Networked Learning: Individual, Sociological and Design Perspectives. Springer.
Wilson, A. and Ross, J. (in press). Surveillance imaginaries: learning from participatory speculative fiction. Surveillance and Society.
References
Cerratto Pargman, T., Lindberg, Y., & Buch, A. (2022). Automation Is Coming! Exploring Future(s)-Oriented Methods in Education. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00349-6
Hrastinski, S., & Jandrić, P. (2023). Imagining Education Futures: Researchers as Fiction Authors. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00403-x
Jewitt, C., Barker, N., & Golmohammadi, L. (2022). Creative Probes, Proxy Feelers, and Speculations on Interactive Skin. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 6(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti6040022
Jewitt, C., Barker, N., & Golmohammadi, L. (2023). Feeling our way: Methodological explorations on researching touch through uncertainty. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 0(0), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2023.2173423
Lindberg, Y. (2023). Review of Jen Ross (2023). Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00396-7
Robinson, B. (2023). Speculative Propositions for Digital Writing Under the New Autonomous Model of Literacy. Postdigital Science and Education, 5(1), 117–135. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00358-5
As part of a collaboration around education futures, a group of colleagues led by George Veletsianos are co-editing a special collection for the fully open access International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. The theme of the collection is “Higher Education Futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology”. The journal works with a rolling submission framework, so papers are reviewed and (potentially) published as they come in rather than all at once. This is interesting from an editorial point of view!
The final deadline for submissions for this collection is 31 October 2023, but please submit any time before then.
The collection invites prospective authors to turn towards reimagining the futures of education, and to contribute scholarship that speculates what higher education at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology could look like. Read all the details of the call on George’s blog.
For me, this way of tackling digital education futures – connecting justice and hope – is potentially really rich, because it suggests the complexity of exploring the idea of ‘responsibility to the future’ (Adam and Groves, 2007, Facer 2021). My recent work around speculative methods has shown me how tricky this is – I’ve tended to think about this in terms of the balance of play and responsbility, for example:
Insisting on responsibility is not to overstate our ability to predict, but instead to recognise that what we do and say about the future matters. Regardless of the complexity involved, teachers and researchers, students and participants can be part of producing new things in the world, including beliefs, practices and technologies (Urry, 2016). In addition, it has implications for how we understand caring… [reframing] care of the future to take account of open-endedness. (Ross 2023, p.50)
I’m really looking forward to seeing the range of different approaches and responses to this call.
Editors for the special collection:
George Veletsianos: Royal Roads University, Canada Shandell Houlden: Royal Roads University, Canada Jen Ross: University of Edinburgh, UK Sakinah Alhadad: Griffith University, Australia Camille Dickson-Deane: University of Technology Sydney, Australia
References:
Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics. Boston, the Netherlands: Brill.
Over the past six months or so, I’ve been working with my great colleagues Siân Bayne and Michael Gallagher on a new set of resources for working with higher education futures.
Speculative Futures for Higher Education includes 8 scenarios, 8 tarot cards and 8 short stories builds on the 2017–19 Near Future Teaching project, which used design-based methodologies to co-create a vision for the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. Two short trend-mapping reviews were done as part of that project, and we returned to these reviews in 2022 to update them, identifying the 8 scenarios presented in this new resource.
Example of the higher education futures ‘tarot cards’ – “the universal university”
In addition to the 8 scenarios, the resource also includes 8 very short stories, written to evoke one form of the future proposed in each scenario.
