Webinar:
DiP Spotlight Session: Jen Ross ‘Digital Futures for Learning’
Date: February 29, 2024 - 14.30-16.00 CET
Venue: Online via Zoom (link to join will be sent out on the day)
Fee: Free
Webinar Chair: Rikke Toft Nørgård
Deadline: February 27, 2024 - 12:00 CET
The SIG-webinar is open to all.
DiP Speaker
Dr. Jen Ross, Senior Lecturer, Digital Education, The University of Edingburgh
About the speaker
Jen Ross is Senior Lecturer in Digital Education, co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education, and programme director of the MSc in Education Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, at the University of Edinburgh. She researches, teaches and publishes on online and open education, digital cultural heritage engagement, and digital cultures and futures. She’s one of the team behind the Manifesto for Teaching Online and the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC, and co-ordinates the Digital Cultural Heritage cluster in the Centre for Data, Culture and Society, as well as co-leading the Higher Education after Surveillance network. Her recent book, Digital Futures for Learning (Routledge, 2023), explores speculative approaches to researching and teaching about the future.
jen.ross@ed.ac.uk
Home page: 
http://jenrossity.net/blog/
Centre for Research in Digital Education: https://www.de.ed.ac.uk/people/dr-jen-ross
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjenross/
Bluesky: jenr.bsky.social
Abstract for DiP webinar
Technology-related predictions and promises in digital education and learning contexts work to open up certain futures and close down others. Predictions and promises have a big impact on what is seen as possible and desirable for teachers, students, and learning communities and organisations, as we are seeing with predictions around the rapid rise and apparent disruptiveness of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT. But predictions also underplay the emergence, complexity and uncertainty of the future. Speculative approaches to digital education futures work with the future as a space of uncertainty, and use that uncertainty creatively in the present. This talk will open up a conversation about using speculative approaches to shape how we understand the digital university. The particular focus here will be on curiosity about the future, and how sensitivity to a situation which is either on the horizon or missing from current thinking around a topic or practice can open up possibilities and defamiliarise current understandings by foregrounding less-visible forces in higher education and digital pedagogy.
Resources for the Spotlight Session
Ross, J. (2023) Digital Futures for Learning: Speculative Methods and Pedagogies. Routledge.