A few things to highlight from the last academic year, as we head into a new one.
Fiction and futures
I did some writing about the use of speculative fiction this year. First – and it was online in 2025, but the full special issue, including the great editorial from the editors Stefan Hrastinski, Eamon Costello and Lina Rahm has just been published – a paper about using speculative pedagogies (in this case, ‘stories from the future’ with postgraduate students on my Culture, Heritage and Learning Futures course):
Ross, J. (2026). Stories from the future of lifelong learning: fiction, technology and speculative pedagogies. Learning, Media and Technology, 51/3. Special Issue: Fiction in Learning, Media and Technology Research. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439884.2025.2591697 .
The paper analyses fictions created by students, and argues that argues that bringing heritage thinking together with speculative fiction-writing can help unsettle the landscape of digital futures.
Second, Siân Bayne and I wrote a new AI scenario and micro-fiction for Stefan Hrastinski’s book, Education Fiction:
Bayne, S. and Ross, J. (2026). Crafting hopeful AI futures for education. In Hrastinski (S) (ed) Education Fiction. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003646563-6
This builds on our Higher Education Futures resource, and explores the possibilities of what Hayles describes as “technosymbiosis” for hopeful AI education futures.
I also used speculative fiction writing in a workshop for James Lamb’s Future Learning Spaces event in May 2026 in Edinburgh – stay tuned for more on the work on “privacy futures” that this was part of (and that I also talked about at the Postdigital Backlash conference in Zagreb in June, and in my inaugural lecture).
Responsible AI and the future of education
The AHRC-funded Bridging Responsible AI Divides project that was led from the Centre in 2024 (PI Judy Robertson) is still generating lots of discussions and outputs. I discussed it at the Anticipation conference in Milan in June, and will also be talking about it at a couple of online events in November. This year we published a chapter about the disconnect we observed between how young people perceived Generative AI (GenAI) and how they described education and schools, and what this might have to tell us about how we approach the use of futures work with young people.
Ross, J., Priyadharshini, E., Dyer, H., Atabey, A., Botta, C., Wilson, C. and Robertson, J. (2026). Imaginaries of responsible generative AI in secondary education. In W Holmes (ed), Handbook of Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education. Edward Elgar. https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/book/9781035335879/chapter23.xml
In early 2026, Janja Komljenovic and I hosted Dr Araba Sey, supported by an EFI visiting fellowship award, to visit the Centre for Research in Digital Education for several weeks. We knew Araba through her work as Deputy Director at Research ICT Africa, and during her visit she gave a great seminar (recording available) on Connections and disconnections in technological visions for development in sub-Saharan Africa. We had an extended conversation during this period about the relationship of university digital infrastructure to social sustainability, and this led to our newly published commentary:
Here, we argue that higher education institutions need to pay as much attention to social sustainability in their procurement, development and use of technologies as they do to financial and environmental sustainability.
Making new digital futures for education
A highlight of my year was the opportunity to deliver my inaugural professorial lecture in front of colleagues, friends and family from across the world. The lecture was livestreamed and recorded, and the recording, slides and reference list is available online:
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.
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.
I was really happy to spend the first part of the week at the online Networked Learning conference – this is one of my favourite research conferences, and it was a really good few days.
George Veletsianos and I facilitated a session on speculative methods in networked learning – building on work each of us have been doing in this area over the past few years. A few people asked for some insights into how to design speculative methods into a research project. I wrote a textbook chapter a few years ago on this topic, and I thought I’d summarise what I see as the key ‘ingredients’ of a speculative project (in digital education.)
First, it’s important to say that there are many ways to enact speculative or inventive method – and some are explicitly theoretical in nature (see Lury and Wakeford’s 2012 collection on Inventive Methods for examples of this). I am focusing here on more applied approaches, and specifically those that can be used to think about the future of education and educational technology. These are not methods that can be implemented by following a straightforward recipe; they have to be designed in relationship to the question they are seeking to illuminate or the topic they seek to develop new questions around (see Ross 2017 for more on this). However, there are some ingredients which are likely to be significant:
A speculative question.What will it mean to teach or learn with an automated process like a ‘bot’? What learning does learning analytics not capture (Knox, 2014)? How can communities be stimulated to reimagine or reframe their understanding of energy demand reduction (Wilkie et al., 2015)? These examples of questions that have been addressed through speculative method have in common a flexible orientation to a situation which is either on the horizon or missing from current thinking around a topic or practice. Speculative questions may often focus on the future, but a focus on the future is never only about the future – it is also about articulating what is currently valued by particular people or communities or in particular settings, and what may be absent or unspoken in privileging those values.
An ‘object to think with’ (Turkle, 1997).The researcher developing a speculative method must create something with which participants or respondents can engage – an ‘object to think with’. This could be a scenario or set of scenarios, a technology like an app, a design prototype, a narrative or a combination of these. The object should be designed to provoke responses that will illuminate the topic of the research, to help construct the horizons or become aware of the absences that the questions of the research are aimed at addressing. A pragmatic consideration is whether the project will require specialist skills to accomplish it, and how the researcher might access the resources they will need. Taking the making requirements of your method into consideration early on will help you ensure you can address your question.
An audience to engage with. It is possible to make the object itself the focus of the research, without a strong focus on participant response and reaction. More commonly, however, the object, which might in its own right take considerable time to design and create, is put into a context in which it can be used, or can serve as a provocation, irritation or invitation. This context might be online, offline, or a combination of the two. The speculative object and its design, along with the responses to it, form the data from this method, so the identities and expectations of participants or respondents need to be carefully considered, along with the ethics of the approach to the object.
A way to capture and analyse design decisions and responses to the object.In some cases the responses to the speculative object can be integrated into the object itself – as in the case of an app that gathers data, or a twitter stream involving a bot. In other cases, responses need to be captured for analysis via other approaches – for example, making a video or audio recording of a workshop; asking participants to keep a written or photo diary of their interactions with the object; or conducting interviews or surveys. Analysis of speculative method should analyse both the object and the responses it generates. Decisions about how the object has been designed should be captured so that the object and the considerations informing it can be understood and shared. It may be helpful to consider the speculative object as both an instrument and an outcome, and keep notes about the design process accordingly.
Speculative method can be a powerful approach to generating and examining new perspectives and questions, and to helping understand and shape complex topics, especially those that deal with the future. For researchers aiming to understand emerging ideas or technologies, the ability to work with uncertainty is a key benefit of such an approach. It requires, however, a willingness to take risks with the design and implementation of a research project – moving away from approaches which are well-established with clear protocols. Nevertheless, I think it’s an approach that can be carefully designed, and well-justified in terms of both quality and rigour – and I’m excited to see more such research emerging in our field.
adapted from Ross, J (2018). Speculative Method as an Approach to Researching Emerging Educational Issues and Technologies. In L Hamilton and J Ravenscroft (eds) Building Research Design in Education. London: Bloomsbury.
References:
Knox, J. (2014) ‘The “Tweeting Book” and the question of “non-human data”’, TechTrends, 59(1), pp. 72–75. doi: 10.1007/s11528-014-0823-9.
Lury, C. and Wakeford, N. (2012) Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social. London: Routledge.
Ross, J. (2017) ‘Speculative method in digital education research’, Learning, Media and Technology, 42(2), pp. 214–229. doi: 10.1080/17439884.2016.1160927.
Turkle, S. (1997) ‘Computational technologies and images of the self’, Social Research, pp. 1093–1111.
Wilkie, A., Michael, M. and Plummer-Fernandez, M. (2015) ‘Speculative method and Twitter: Bots, energy and three conceptual characters’, The Sociological Review, 63(1), pp. 79–101. doi: 10.1111/1467-954X.12168.
One of the four main strands of research I pursue is about digital cultural heritage engagement and learning, and lots has been happening!
In London for the Critical Heritage Futures conference.
The Artcasting project continues to generate great speaking, writing and conversation opportunities – most recently at the AHRC and Association of Critical Heritage Studies’ Critical Approaches and New Directions conference in London in early October. My colleague Michael Gallagher and I gave a talk about mobilities, mobile technologies and heritage futures. Particular highlights for me from the event were Chris Whitehead‘s keynote, and Hayden Lorimer’s fascinating overview of work at St Peter’s Seminary at Kilmahew. It was also fantastic to see so many of the people I first met last year at the ACHS conference in Montreal, and to hear that Liz Stainforth is going to be spending a few months in Edinburgh as an IASH fellow at the start of next year.
Also re Artcasting, I’ve just finished and submitted a paper about hospitality and digital co-production; and the team recently reconvened with a number of others who have helped us a lot in thinking about Artcasting futures, to talk about a whole bunch of fascinating issues still to be explored. There is a summary of these on the Artcasting site blog.
Beyond Artcasting and its ripples, London also allowed a bit of time for Koula Charitonos and I to talk through some ideas – including to propose a symposium for next year’s ICLS conference on museum visitor experiences in the digital age. We hope this will be able to come together!
Here in Edinburgh, the new academic year has brought a number of new members to the Digital Cultural Heritage Research Network – not least our new chair of digital cultural heritage, Melissa Terras, who joined the University of Edinburgh this week. We’ve already tempted her to get involved with a couple of projects in development – it’s going to be great to have her here. Sian, Chris, James, Kirsty, Melissa and I hope to organise a few DCHRN events in the new year.
Serendipitously, I’ve got the opportunity to supervise not one but two masters students this year who are exploring aspects of 3d printing, scanning and visualisation in cultural heritage contexts – I look forward to learning lots from both of them about this topic.
I’m spending the day with a fantastic group of artists, youth organisation representatives, researchers and arts experts for a workshop at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, aiming to collaboratively explore and develop ideas for a project to explore the potential of contemporary art to raise awareness, provoke thought and motivate change in relation to youth inequalities. I’ll post some notes and other materials later, but we’ll be using the hashtag #artineq.
