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Future Fictions Texts (2): Works Emerging from a Recent Workshop Imagining the Future of the University
We have received a second batch of works emerging as a result of a recent workshop on Future Fictions for Near Future Teaching.
We are eager to present these here, two works imagining, in their own way, the future of the University of Edinburgh. Many thanks to James and Ana.
I once dreamt I had a surface
Here comes And. Or there goes And, depending where you stand.
Assuming you stand.
My phone will tell me if And has a gender today. And is part of a minority who usually choose to identify as male. Blip. There we go, and his phone will have alerted him to the fact I am simply ‘If’. Like most people I reserve my gender until certain conditions – biological, cultural, environmental– present themselves. Until then, I’m in-potential.
And wears blue overalls. And I hear my voice say, ‘Blue overalls, And’.
‘Thanks’, And says, ‘I want to look like I’m heading to the metal workshop, but really just got out of bed, but actually I’m on my way to a lecture on probability theory.’
I wonder if And had someone in mind when he concocted this description. Whose imagination did he want to pass through his bedroom?
I can’t believe I thought that into the cloud.
My voice just says, ‘Ha, wow.’
I always think that fashion and age work like the rings on a tree, but the other way around. Ask an older person about what they are wearing and you get an answer with relatively few rings. For example, last week my parent was wearing a teal coloured trench coat. When I commented on it they said, ‘it is in the style of 21st century retro kitsch, but really it’s a sign of my solidarity with the coup in Côte d’Ivoire.’
‘Ha, wow.’ I was used to the crashing together of soft-focus aesthetics and global politics. One week, daffodils and labour rights in Chile. The next, polka dots and food hygiene standards in Europe. My childhood education rested on louche apparel.
Ask a teenager what they are wearing and you get an answer like an onion. But this, but that, but the other. One recent trend is to describe what you are wearing in a cyclical way, ending where you started. It’s meant to suggest you are ceaselessly intangible, a Mobius strip of becoming.
Someone else joins me and And on the concourse. So now it is me, And and And.
I know you want me to tell you about the future of digital education and probably expected me to add my thoughts to the cloud from a lecture theatre or tutorial. But the concourse is where the changes are happening. We don’t exist in rooms any more, little static islands of being. On the concourse everyone enters into a kind of Brownian motion, the lines drawn from the nearby buildings disperse to become part of a hazy people-ness.
Everything you hear now in the media is about this motion. Although these theories and slogans go back a long way. There’s a shabby sign outside my dorm that must have been put up by a company ages ago, and then forgotten. ‘Come into being’ it announces into the dismal stairwell. The words match those on contemporary banners, so it isn’t them that seem important to me. It is the fact that through the woe begotten patina they say something else. They carry a history and speak of a faded promise. ‘At last we’ve come to terms with our transient reality,’ their statement hails the world. Then in the failed silence that follows, it has to repeat itself over and over, meaningless, ‘Come into being.’ But the world just is.
One of my reading assignments suggests that the Large Hadron Collider, completed in 2008, should be considered the ancient epistemic symbol of our era. It is built, like our society, upon the principle that particles are spectre that haunt a system of energies. It suggests that me, And and And are just the ripples arising from collisions. And of the millions of particle-people it’s only very few who are accelerated to the point where they become visible.
I looked up the word study so that I might better understand your assignment. It originally meant ‘to strive towards, devote oneself to, to cultivate.’ It speaks of a sense of agency that is utterly foreign. Can a particle of water act against the river of which it is part? Is there ever a ‘oneself’? And in this context to ‘cultivate’ seems to speak of an unforgivable ecological colonialism. Even ‘devotion’ seems uncomfortably anachronistic. As if anyone would make a solemn pledge to anything; in the age when wearing gingham can signal anarchy or a chambray shirt can announce one’s intention to read about the Suez crisis. But, but, but!
I’m distracted by the fact that And just mentioned And’s blue overalls. And looks up and says, ‘I want to look like I’m heading to the metal workshop, but really just got out of my warm bed, but actually I’m on my way to a lecture on probability theory.’
‘Warm bed’. I didn’t get that. I look to see how And receives the information, see if they register anything, see if they are at all enticed. But of course, they won’t yet know whether this description is reiterated throughout the day, the same for everyone. Maybe And just slipped up that time, or the time before when they said it to me and forgot the word, ‘warm’.
There’s nothing more frowned upon than an individual wanting an individual. ‘If’, I have to remind myself.
I looked up the etymology of‘if’ too and ironically its origins are uncertain, though it is thought that it meant ‘doubt’ or ‘hesitation.’ I identify with that. It’s the flip side of our collective consciousness and being. Yet I think there is something in our nature that clings to something that requires individuality. In our culture the question of individuality is polluted by an incessant narcissism. People are always thinking, ‘I’m part of the collective, I’m more part of the collective than anybody else.’ But there is a serious concern here that doesn’t have anything to do with ego. It is about how we as organisms are autonomous systems. We need to recognise this autonomy. But so much has changed. The old world of home ownership, secure employment, retirement funds, long-term relationships have passed. The affordances of a society that once fed individual resolve are gone.
Sometimes it just makes you feel so porous.
You know that I once I dreamt that I had a surface. Like a shell it was at the edge of me. And my thoughts stayed within that cell, moved around within me rather than immediately joining the cloud. There was exchange, osmosis, I was affected by the world. But nevertheless, my membranes remained intact. In this dream my identity was fluid but I wasn’t just ‘If’, I was all possibilities, purposively happening. Pulled from the virtual concourse, a little spark flashing off in that Brownian field I was granted by own body. I came into focus, more real than I’ve ever been.
I like to imagine that dream keeps its surface as it traces itself through your system. It’s like an amoeba, a new simplistic lifeform that’s going to trade substances within itself, without itself. It’s going to grow and multiply and everything will start all over again. Blip.
James Clegg

The loud buzzing sound drilled into his ears and forcefully dragged his brain back into consciousness. Groaning, he pawed at the nightstand next to his bed until his fingers registered the familiar smooth surface of his smartphone.
He grabbed the device and held it over his face in order to read the display and swipe the correct button to make it shut the hell up. The moment he did so, the screen cheerily changed into a blinding white background,with the words “Your sleep summary” written in bright blue letters.
The sudden assault on his retinas triggered a primal flight-or-fight response that, due to his groggy state, turned out to be neither, and he stupidly dropped his phone. It slammed right into his face, eliciting a stream of swear words from the student.
“I’m sorry,” said the phone’s soothing feminine voice. “I couldn’t understand the command. Could you repeat that?”
“I said you can fuck off,” growled the student, rubbing at the sore spot on the forehead where the phone had hit.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t understand the command. Could you repeat that?”
The student manually turned off the voice recognition. His sleeping summary appeared back on the screen, telling him he had managed to sleep a whole three hours, with a total REM time of twenty minutes. He clicked the summary away, and a warning appeared on his screen.
This is the third time this week you’ve gotten less than 8 hours of sleep. Your PT has been notified and a counselling session has been booked.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, not again,” complained the student.Whoever had programmed the stupid Healthy Living app had clearly never heard offinals week. He clicked the message away and got up from bed.
He grabbed an animated t-shirt form the “not yet smelly”clothes pile and connected the small wire to his cellphone. He browsed some of the gifs, decided on a funny meme doing the rounds on social media, and put on the shirt, with blinked at him with cheerful colors.
A ping! emanated from the smartwatch on his wrist.
Have you logged in your breakfast?
The student ignored the message. Tired, cranky, he sat down at his desk and began working on the paper due before twelve. Not ten minute slater, he was interrupted by a pop-up on his laptop screen.
Have you logged in your breakfast?
Annoyed, he clicked it away. He still had to write two more pages; there was no time for breakfast.
Ten minutes later, another pop-up.
How about a Lucky®pizza bagel?
“I’ve got pizza bagels?” the student wondered, briefly distracted by the promise of food. He clicked on the app to see the list of food in the fridge, kept in real time by the sensors installed in it.
The list showed a paltry three eggs, a bottle of brown sauce, ketchup, a jar of jam and a bottle of milk with the tag WARNING, SPOILED in menacing red font. At the bottom of the list was the app’s suggestion: Lucky®pizza bagels for only £6.99, with immediate drone delivery.
Annoyed at the advertisement and disappointed at the lack of pizza bagels, he clicked back to his paper. He needed to focus.
Another pop-up:
You have not eaten breakfast in 3 days. Your PT has been informed, and a counselling session has been booked.
“For fuck’s sake!”
Ana Hibert Santana
Future Fictions Texts: Works Emerging from a Recent Workshop Imagining the Future of the University
As a result of a recent workshop on Future Fictions for Near Future Teaching, we have been fortunate enough to receive some of the work emerging from that event by several of the participants.
We present these here, four works imagining, in their own way, the future of the University of Edinburgh. Many thanks to Daphne Loads, JL Williams, David Creighton-Offord, and Anon for contributing their work here.
I’m a Beautician
I’m a beautician.
I studied language beauty for seven years at Edinburgh
I knew as soon as my dissertation sac started to grow
When it was just a little bluish pimple on my forehead, on the left side.
I knew then what I wanted to do.
I suppose I was about 8 when the words started to appear.
Pieces of declensions floating in the blue liquid.
If people came up close they could hear scraps of lamentations.
When I got to that awkward stage, when it was just dangling there,
I kept thinking it was going to burst or drop off.
But if I used a mirror, I could see the strange fragments
Of a bigger picture,
The whole sound.
People always say, it will happen when its’s ready.
But I thought it would never crystallise.
Then three days before I was due to graduate,
It started to change.
It went cloudy, then clear, then as hard as glass
And it came off in my hand.
And then, at graduation
When all the dissertations were piled up,
And they fused together
That sound, the Music of the Spheres
Wow.
Daphne Loads

there was no time and time itself
don’t we always swallow a little more when the breath massages the spine
here in this classroom there is a notion that the nation exists
grasping toward the past it was the future held the coral chalice up to the light (poor coral whitened as the sea waves unto death)
what you will teach is
you broke that notion with your greedful mining time it was always and anyway
that golden classroom when the light pierced the beaker her glass a trembling concatenation of quantum realities as when the first burning torch was raised as now the first equation which makes light possible always always always is
a whole nation’s notion exists the gulf was crystal when we were kids diving to kiss on the banks of this nymph grotto weighted with tyres now floating polystyrene the green bottles blue bottles clear bottles holding my breath
what you will teach is what you believe
waving flinging the keyboard popping the button on your shirt shining desk pounding wet heads with first person second person third person south against north against east against man against woman against computer against robot i want to lift up without needing any tools
what you will teach is a dream no reality a notion no a nation
holding my breath forever is the same as breathing into the endless utopia of space
you will open your hand and (gold wire diamond glass plastic silver laser)
data is water time is light

Examinability
The wikitech access lockdown field clicked in as I strolled into the McEwan-examspace™ for my final exam for the Humanidata Googlebasics Bachelors programme. I started to feel the ‘exam pill’ surge, a burning, brain-swelling, actioning sensation and an opening up of memory – a creativity blast designed to optimise exam performance but also – and this cost me a fortune – to bypass the drug checker scan routinely implemented now at the entrance to the McEwan-examspace™.
At the exam consoles it was notable that many students – or their parents – had forked out on the CTD headwear which the Stangoogle analytics team had uncontestably demonstrated, in a paper published the previous month, were effective in boosting exam performance by 32%. This kit costs thousands. The University Enhancement Tribunal just can’t stay ahead of the advances Stangoogle are making in the enhancement space.
Justice, poetry, philosophy and history personificationsclustered on ceiling of the McEwan-examspace™, interspersed by the Googlebasics Centaur logo, as though we – the examinees – needed to remember and respect the privilege associated with being a member of the elite Centaur group of Googlebasic City-Universities. If I can kill this exam, my future as a Humanidata researcher and academic is pretty much in the bag. I click open the exam console and begin to address the question.
Anon

Empty Halls:
The room echoed, its emptiness expressed as resonance
The lines of chairs caked in dust and soft sibilance
The hiss of the lone mature student sitting down, the rustle of their bag
As they unpack, connect, buffer, and adjust for lag
They slide their glasses on, insert their ear pieces delicately
As the dark lecture hall now fills with ghosts awakened electronically
Connected now, the space is more illusion than reality
The students flicker in and out, avatars without integrity
False identities configured from vanity
Amalgams of fashion, celebrity, monstrosity
As the loading bar spins they watch the lecturer refresh
“Was she ever human?” They gossip. “Has she ever known flesh?”
Information is imparted, man’s input still audio visual
But with API and SQL this became residual
A habit from a time before we became maths, a time of individuals
As our dying bodies were left behind, our children became virtual
Leaving empty lecture halls and one joker’s faded desk inscription
“Transhumanism.
New man is new algorithm.”
David Creighton-Offord
Virtual Reality event at the uCreate Studio: the role of VR in reducing risk and building empathy
A recent event organised by our colleagues at the Institute for Academic Development for the Future Teacher initiative explored the use of virtual reality currently and its potential use for teaching and learning in the future.
It was held at the uCreate Studio, the University of Edinburgh’s Community Makerspace. The event was kicked off by Matt Ramirez of Jisc. Matt is the Futures senior innovation developer at Jisc working on a host of projects including AR-Sci, a 3 year EU funded project aiming to enhance science secondary education and ultimately inspiring students to work with STEM in their future careers.
Exciting discussions on the use of VR in education and what values it may hold in the future! #VR @Jisc_AR @IF_Edinburgh
— Elaine Ford (@ElaineDFord) 2 November 2017
Participants were from across the university and represented potential for a host of disciplinary and interdisciplinary uses of VR: Social and Political Science; Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences; Design; Health; Engineering; Geosciences; Veterinary Medicine; Law; Social Work; Maths; Informatics; Innovation Studies & Biological Sciences; Digital Skills and Training; Population Health Sciences; and Education. The range alone suggests a technology that is perceived to have significant potential for teaching and research across the university.

Matt walked us through the use of VR and how it has evolved over the years from early 1990s sci-fi to now, highlighting its movement through the Gartner Hype Cycle over the years culminating in its emergence in 2017 out of the trough of disillusionment into the slope of enlightenment. VR didn’t take off initially largely due to a lack of appetite, a lack of portability, and a general lack of content. There were physiological issues: in earlier iterations, everything was in focus leading to difficulty focusing on any one thing in particular; there were cases of nausea and discomfort. Matt pointed out that he rarely goes longer than 20 minutes in a VR session at any one time.

Matt was careful to place VR amidst a larger Mixed Reality (MR) continuum from the physical environment to augmented reality (AR) to augmented virtuality (AV) to virtual reality (VR).
While this event focused on VR, for teaching and learning we can see a range of potential across the larger continuum. 2017 sees VR in a progressive space: use cases are beginning to emerge in museums, in medicine, and beyond; accessible content (Sketchfab, in particular); the use of haptic feedback in simulations, explorations of Tutkanhamen’s tomb with Oculus, and the rise of very low-priced headsets like Google Cardboard, along with some openly and quite visible content like the Guardian’s VR content.
We discussed potential use cases for the university itself. VR as planning tools for the development of learning spaces. Virtual field trips to support disciplinary activity. Virtual apprenticeships where students can use VR to explore potentially hazardous experiences: surgery, disaster response, nuclear hazards, and more.
A study was mentioned that pointed to a study on racial bias with VRand how the results show that adopting a certain virtual race, regardless of the real one, has an effect on certain unconscious behaviours towards virtual people with the same color. Stanford is pursuing a line of research on this racial dimension as I write.
We then cascaded into the UN short VR film Clouds Over Sidra, which follows a twelve-year-old girl named Sidra in the Za’atari camp in Jordan — currently home to 84,000 refugees from the Syrian civil war.
Themes emerged here that could inform both our values driving forward with this technology and potential use cases, and arguably the most tangible were perception and empathy. How does what we see feed into what we believe to know, how that confirms existing bias. How could VR develop empathy, to allow us to critically explore the role of empathy on untangling some of these seemingly intractable issues? Experiencing life as a refugee waiting for asylum, experiencing virtual immersions in autism, perceiving the world as an infant might, all available now in VR. All potentially shaping our shared vision of the future of digital education here at the university. Elaine summed it up nicely.
Exciting discussions on the use of VR in education and what values it may hold in the future! #VR @Jisc_AR @IF_Edinburgh
— Elaine Ford (@ElaineDFord) 2 November 2017
Blockchain: designing the future of value and credit
This session was delivered by Chris Speed and Kate Symons from the Centre for Design Informatics.
Chris and Kate have made a fine art of the blockchain workshop they’ve developed to get people thinking creatively, and critically, about the implications of distributed ledger technology.
Blockchain round 1! @NearFutureTeach pic.twitter.com/o7BqdhYWkn
— Sian Bayne (@sbayne) 27 October 2017
Opening up the prospect of significant changes to the ways in which we record, share and exchange value, Blockchain has some potentially profound implications for the ways in which universities might organise and assign credit, and their function as trusted gatekeepers of academic value. For a quick overview of what these might look like, see this piece on the Times Higher Education blog:
Universities and the blockchain in the THES: a bit of reading prep for tomorrow's @NearFutureTeach workshop https://t.co/qGJkt25Xgn
— Sian Bayne (@sbayne) 26 October 2017
Chris started us off with some bitcoin and blockchain background, foregrounding its significant, scary, energising and generative implications for the ways in which we conceive of value. We were a mixed group with colleagues and students attending from Geosciences, Engineering, the Usher Institute, Biology, Education, Psychology, and Science, Technology and Innovation Studies

We then conducted as a group three rounds of peer-to-peer trading using lego to build and materialise our ledger of exchange: each transaction made between peers was given provenance (hence the initials on the stickers in the images below) and added to the ledger (the blockchain). Each stage involved different events: simple peer to peer trade, resource scarcity, and value-driven and openly negotiated transactions. Each stage produced a blockchain, which was then closed, only to build the next chain in the subsequent stages.
Blockchain round 2! @NearFutureTeach pic.twitter.com/lc2XQxJEXA
— Sian Bayne (@sbayne) 27 October 2017
Which eventually culminated in this, the Near Future Teaching blockchain:
Blockchain round 3! @NearFutureTeach pic.twitter.com/8sBVImof09
— Sian Bayne (@sbayne) 27 October 2017
We then split into groups to discuss and ideate around how blockchain could be used in (higher) education. Themes emerged ranging from the dull to the radical, the full-of-possibility to the deeply troubling:
peer to peer or decentralised accreditation
the dissolution of the university as gatekeeper of academic value
boring blockchains to rethink student records management
the need to maintain the ability to lie, or to amend error
the risk of reducing every aspect of learning to a form of (economic) capital
the possibility that students might assign each other social and academic credit, that assignment of credit might move away from the university, and away from individual lecturers
the possibility that students might craft their own learning pathways, accredited by peers and bypassing the university entirely

The emphasis of the Near Future Teaching project on how values should drive future planning for digital education was brought into very stark focus here: distributed ledger technology has potential to allow us to radically open up the university (a promise we’ve heard frequently in the digital education space) or to radically to lock it down. How should we respond?
Digital and material design, the uCreate Studio, and Near Future Teaching
Get hands-on with 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality and more, discussing what technologies might be used in future classrooms at the University of Edinburgh, and discuss how our values can influence the decisions we make about technology for teaching.
The Near Future Teaching project held a recent event with the uCreate Studioin the University of Edinburgh’s Main Library.
uCreate Studio is the community’s makerspace with a host of facilities and technologies for virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), 3D Printing, CNC Milling, 3D Scanning, and more. Run by Mike Boyd, who led the session with us, it is a great facility and a very open, encouraging environment to turn ideas into virtual or material reality.

We were interested in using the uCreate Studio as an environment to stimulate thinking around the future of teaching at the University. By getting hands-on with kit, we wanted participants to think creatively about the future of the university and how teaching might change in years to come through access to material and maker technologies, spaces and pedagogies.
Hands on the future of teaching: Mike kicking off our @NearFutureTeach makerspace session https://t.co/YKs5M5yDK4 pic.twitter.com/3sMUaleFb5
— Sian Bayne (@sbayne) 24 October 2017
Mike introduced the space, discussing ideas that the makerspace has put into play: putting museums on display, new research in the analytics around the material elements of creation and product design, virtual educational tools, and product manufacturing. With that little bit of explanation, away we went.
Academic colleagues and PhD students from Medicine, Geosciences, Science and Technology Studies, Informatics and Psychology came along and spent the time playing with the kit, discussing how they might use them in teaching and recording a few vox pop interviews.

We toyed with Skanect to make 3D scans of humans; Sketchfab for exporting 3D scans to VR; Autodesk RECAP for reality capture. We learned about Thingiverse, a database of digital design; Cura, the printing software needed to make it all go. Easel: Inventables for 3D carving.
Ideas emerged for a range of potential applications in teaching: medical simulations with VR, actual surgery with AR, using 3D models and printing to explore law and intellectual property, creating bespoke research instruments for particular projects. Using 3D models to explore intricate anatomical structures and haptic systems to explore treatment and surgery in these high risk environments. VR and AR for exploring sympathy and empathy in psychology.
Ultimately, the question that we keep circling back on is how do these technologies create new teaching practices? How do they expand on our vision of what is possible at the University, in our disciplines, and across disciplines? Some spoke to new teaching practices, some to new research practices, some to new event and field learning activities. All spoke, at some level, to the value of curiosity in this process, to dig deeper, to learn more.
A few key takeaways were:
VR clearly has many applications in the classroom and for distance learning, but we need to be able to scale it up in an affordable way (Google cardboards for classes of 20+)
Kit is only a fairly small part of the issue: another one is simply time. How do we make time for academics and postgraduate teachers to use, adapt and develop curriculum which enagages some of these technologies for teaching?
Problem-based curricula and teaching methods are likely to really engage students by using 3D printing, scanning and milling to craft and materially express products and artefacts, so we might want to look at creative exploration of problem-based learning across disciplines for aspects of our future teaching.
VR and immersive methods for the teaching of, for example, psychology have clear uses but future teaching would need to carefully design for immersion and its potential emotional stresses and ethical nuances: again, kit is far from being the only issue to address here.
Maker spaces imply presence on campus, so what about distance learners? We can draw on projects like the OU’s Re:Form to understand how remotemanufacturing can help us educate by making at a distance.
What the future of teaching should look like: discussions with the BME Liberation Group at Edinburgh University
“You are kind of left in the wilderness to scurry around and find yourself.”
Earlier this year, Anouk Lang, Near Futures Teaching project task group member and Lecturer in Digital Humanities, ran a discussion session with members of the Edinburgh University Students’ Association Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Liberation Group.
This group, convened by Esme Allman, offers “a safe space within EUSA where self-identifying BME students (including those of African, Asian, Arab and Afro-Caribbean descent) can come together, discuss the issues affecting them, and campaign to improve their student experience.” In addition, members of other EUSA liberation groups – the Disabled Students’ Campaign, the Women’s Campaign and the LGBT+ Campaign – also attended.
The discussion was around what teaching should look like at the university in the coming decades and what that might entail for BME students. The discussion started from the premise that what university teachers and administrators might see and what students might see is very different, with this disparity likely to be particularly pronounced for those identifying as minorities. Some of the issues raised are summarised here.
The role of space: Students appreciated having a range of learning and study spaces – individual and social spaces, common rooms, graduate spaces, undergraduate spaces – and being able to move between them, for instance to avoid the silence that causes anxiety for some but focuses others.
Technology and the role of social media emerged in discussion as a means of forming, and finding, welcoming communities, and making for a more holistic experience of everything university has to offer. There was a sense that social media could be used as a way to help fellow students be more inclusive – for instance to help them to understand how particular ways of speaking about minority students are racist and distressing – but also are cognition that it is valuable to keep some ‘safe spaces’ – ie. private spaces for particular communities – insulated.
Whatever the future of the university might be, these space considerations will not disappear: we need to engage them and the technologies used to support their creation and regulation.

Discussing the importance of student support and induction, many expressed the desire for a better induction structure, particularly the need to raise awareness of the specific kinds of support that are available, and for practical and technological concerns: How do I get help? How do I do this? Where do I go? There is a need for induction that helps students to familiarise themselves with the university’s various online systems, and for digital literacy more broadly, as well as training about consent and unconscious bias. Staff, too, needed to undertake training in unconscious bias as well.
There was discussion around the role of the library, the role of resource lists and recorded lectures in facilitating learning and support, and potentially mitigating some of the confusion that might result from navigating such a multitude of technological systems and idiosyncratic teaching and administrative practices. Navigating such systems, particularly complex and distributed ones, is something that requires explicit guidance.

The session concluded with the students creating a manifesto to help guide the NearFuture Teaching project going forward:
Teachers should be educated better to better educate us. The future must be as inclusive as possible. No one should feel othered or alone. The university should be a space for learning and unlearning.
“Inherent”biases and prejudice should be challenged through critical engagement with literature which is diverse in race, gender, sexuality, ability. The university experience should constantly aim to decolonise and deconstruct systems of oppression so people feel included and represented. University should be inclusive, representative, and caring.
An institution that cares for its most marginalised members. Co-curricular and students as partners. Place the student’s wellbeing at the forefront of everything. Thou shalt not condone racism, sexism, homophobia etc through thy silence or ignorance, especially if thou art a lecturer. Education should be diverse, accessible and human. The university must be representative and intersectional. Making education accessible for everyone.
Fresher’s Week shouldn’t be the best week of a university experience. That level of support needs to continue. The university should be inclusive: intellectually, pastorally, physically and otherwise. It should be better structured to support all students’ education and experience.
With thanks to all the participants and to Rianna Walcott (Project Myopia and LiberatEd) for help in organising the session.
DIY Filmmaking at the University of Edinburgh: Imagining future teaching through a smartphone
Notes from a recent Near Future Teaching event at the University of Edinburgh
I had been looking forward to the Near Future Teaching DIY Film School event since I first saw Stephen Donnelly give a demonstration of some of the very cool mo-jo (aka mobile journalism) kit that Media Services at the University of Edinburgh have invested in for staff and students to make use of in their work and study, and play.
The equipment generally allows a mobile phone to magically morph into a pimped-up fully functional hand-held video camera. Items such as the BEASTGRIP give you a more stable base and allow you, if you wish, to attach to a tripod, and then you can pop on a RODEVideoMic and a portable Commlightand you’re ready to go.
Making Films & Video Art w/Smartphones, parallel to today's @NearFutureTeach event on DIY Filmmaking @EdinburghUni https://t.co/KXSAWMGtMC pic.twitter.com/R2u7uR2l9O
— Michael Gallagher (@mseangallagher) 5 October 2017
I had been looking forward to the Near Future Teaching DIY Film School event since I first saw Stephen Donnelly give a demonstration of some of the very cool mo-jo (aka mobile journalism) kit that Media Services at the University of Edinburgh have invested in for staff and students to make use of in their work and study, and play.
The equipment generally allows a mobile phone to magically morph into a pimped-up fully functional hand-held video camera. Items such as the BEASTGRIP give you a more stable base and allow you, if you wish, to attach to a tripod, and then you can pop on a RODEVideoMic and a portable Commlightand you’re ready to go.
Using phones to make movies @NearFutureTeach DIY Filmmaking event @EdinburghUni https://t.co/qObGCLfEw4 #mlearning pic.twitter.com/pyq69cSb9Q
— NearFutureTeaching (@NearFutureTeach) 9 October 2017
Stephen talked us through all the equipment, some top tips for how to get started on your first videos, and showed us some examples of really stunning short films made with iPhones such as this beautiful film commissioned by Bentley Motors.
Then the teams were sent out with the equipment and they each had about an hour to make their first film. To our surprise one group even managed to do some editing of their interview, and you can take a look at it here.
We were so impressed by the participants who jumped right into the process and not only explored this remarkable, empowering and accessible high/lo-tech equipment, but who also managed to incorporate Near Future Teaching-inspired questions about the future into their vox pop interview.
Near Future Teaching DIY Filmmaking in action! @NearFutureTeach #uoe_nft pic.twitter.com/Aoh9yXF70c
— NearFutureTeaching (@NearFutureTeach) 5 October 2017
If you work or study at the University of Edinburgh and are interested to learn more about and use this equipment and to get involved in the Near Future Teaching vox pop conversation, get in touch!
Near Future Teaching Collider
The first Near Future Teaching event of the year happened in partnership with Design Informatics.
Led by Chris Speed, the event brought together three speakers to deliver provocations loosely aligned to the theme of near future teaching, and finished with a series of collaboratively produced design approaches to our teaching futures.
Be fearless. Explore the connections. The invitation for today's Design Collider from @chrisspeed @NearFutureTeach @DesignInf pic.twitter.com/XPsi8mnTRh
— Johanna Holtan (@JoHoltan) 15 September 2017

To get us going, Michael Rovatsos, who researches AI in the School of Informatics, asked us to think more about not ‘stand alone’ AI but about hybrids of artificial and human intelligence and how we might work with them. He ended with the definitely-provocative provocation: let’s get rid of universities. After all, teaching and learning requires people, knowledge and resources all of which can be sourced globally, matched and managed digitally. Michael asked, ‘can we imagine global, digital universities that are completely co-created? And what would those look like?
Jo Holtan from the Edinburgh Mastercard Scholars Programme then completely re-focused us by moving away from our tendency to ‘think big’, to think ‘small’: to consider the individual humans who join the community of scholarship represented by the university, how they benefit, and what our duty as an institution is to them. In discussing the Edinburgh programme, she emphasised the value of students co-creating and co-designing their programmes of study.
Finally, Fionn Tynan-O’Mahoney from the Open Experience Centre at the Royal Bank of Scotland came at us from the industry perspective, talking about how user engagement is designed for RBS services. To finish, he sparked a lively discussion on the benefits and threats of Open Banking and increased data-sharing between individuals and the banking services they use.
Sian Bayne then spoke as ‘problem owner’ and set the design challenge for the workshop: how do we design university teaching for a creative, risk-taking, values-led digital future?
Will exams still exist? Will essays be marked by software? Will performance enhancement be routine? @sbayne pic.twitter.com/U7H9YsllvZ
— Design Informatics (@DesignInf) 15 September 2017
Around 30 participants then worked in groups to address this question, designing speculative interventions in teaching for digital futures. These focused for the most part on the structural, curricular dimensions of university teaching rather than on teaching methods, and many of the ideas were genuinely inspired.
The first group designed a Random Curriculum Generator which would force students and academics out of their disciplinary silos. What if part of the first year of every university experience was a randomly selected pairing of subjects designed to shake students into new ways of thinking? Architecture with Sanskrit? Chemistry with Sociology? Public Health with History? We would place the decision with the Random Curriculum Generator and benefit from a post-disciplinary understanding of the world to take forward into our future studies.
The Random Curriculum Generator. Our contribution to the @NearFutureTeach Design Collider thanks @sbayne @chrisspeed pic.twitter.com/b7jS7acaPV
— Anne-Marie Scott (@ammienoot) 15 September 2017
The second group played with the idea of personalisation and intimacy of the university experience, by developing an idea based on Intimate Apparel. Buy your special VR glasses, jacket, hat and be immersed in your own, unique version of the university journey. Lectures delivered in a forest, an urban learning experience driven by music and sound, an essay built through dance….
Next, we had group three presenting a speculative mobile device called the Edinburgh Wayfinder. Designed to push students into understanding that university isn’t just about eventual employment, but about forming and building identity, the Wayfinder works as a device for connecting each individual student to a vast network of support from peers, alumni, communities within the city, and academics. Feeling lost and isolated? Ask the Edinburgh Wayfinder for help and its geosocial functionality will link you to a passing alumnus who can take you for coffee and a chat. Feeling stuck on a particular topic? Ask the Wayfinder which will link you to just-in-time support from a friendly academic. Shake the device and all the personal data associated with your exchange is erased: the Wayfinder is built upon an architecture of forgetting…
Wayfinder offers the students resistance to the imperialist institution and turns them from pandas into people @DesignInf @jar @sbayne pic.twitter.com/IY3QI7O3C5
— chrisspeed (@chrisspeed) 15 September 2017
Finally, group four presented an innovative, banking-informed approach to research-led learning and micro-credit, in which all individuals – students and academics – bring their expertise to bear on pressing global, curricular, community challenges in a loosely-linked system of flow. Expertise ‘assets’ can be re-used to get funding, pay, or recognition in the form of credit.
Bringing it all together were a few themes (thanks to Michael Sean Gallagher) for these!
The first was an implicit or explicit values-centred design. Many of the groups emphasised values overtly. Second was the emphasis, for the most part, on intimacy or development of relationships towards, presumably, resilience and identity formation. Many of the groups chose interactions at the beginnings of the student lifecycle (matriculating, adapting to different social environments, preparation). Third was the repeated emphasis on identity formation. Most of the groups seemed to favour approaches that allowed for the formation of an identity through personalisation and exposure to an evolving set of inputs (curriculum, for example). Technologically, many favoured personalisation, such as AI assistants to help broker relationships, make students aware of opportunity, or provide a kit they choose to create a sense of ownership and engagement.
My main takeaway from the @DesignInf collider on @NearFutureTeach many thanks @razzrboy @chrisspeed @JoHoltan and all pic.twitter.com/IYBRwfmowI
— Sian Bayne (@sbayne) 15 September 2017
Near Future Teaching Autumn Events
Online and In-person, so many ways to connect!
Thought provoking…
Will robots take over the jobs of teachers in the near future? https://t.co/feQQmg941R#robots #teachers #schools #AI #edtech pic.twitter.com/9sgszeQhmR
— IGFL (@IGfLEE) 21 July 2017
We are delighted that our programme of events for Autumn 2017 is coming into focus. We will have many ways for you to engage with the project and share your thoughts about the future of digital education at the University of Edinburgh. Keep an eye on our Events page for ways that you can take part in person, and add your thoughts, links, images, videos and ideas to our Near Future Teaching Community Padlet page. Come along to our Near Future Teaching Collider event:
Let's collide with the future of digital education: https://t.co/JeItWppLJg
— NearFutureTeaching (@NearFutureTeach) 17 August 2017
And you can always find us on Facebook @NearFutureTeach and Twitter @NearFutureTeach, and use our hashtag #UoE_NFT to get in touch. If you missed it, you might also enjoy this round up of the brilliant Playful Learning Conference that took place in July, where we captured a number of vox pops which will be going up on our Video page soon:
Loving this overview of the fabulous Playful Learning conference: https://t.co/Mvuuj2Mzto #elearninged
— NearFutureTeaching (@NearFutureTeach) 26 July 2017
Near Future Teaching Pilot Workshop 2
Festival of Creative Learning 2017
For our second Near Future Teaching Pilot Workshop, we hooked up with the Festival of Creative Learning.
The model was similar to our first, though we decided to skip the intros to digital technologies at the beginning and instead to have prompt cards on each table that the participants could read and react to at various points in the workshop if they needed inspiration.
Some responses that came out of our final discussions included the following:
- The University of Edinburgh is very research-focused, maybe a broad educational model isn’t useful for Edinburgh?
- How do we address discussion across disciplines in a university like Edinburgh?
- If computers are doing the marking, feedback could be quite challenging.+
- Global collaboration with other universities to fund the implementation of expensive technologies?
- Always being online and available, students have less separation between university and home.
- The University should be teaching students how to separate work and non-work time, and time management skills.
- Design space, technology and curriculum to support learning.
- Green screen and hologram teacher, students have massaging seats and sofas.
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Lecturer using visualisations, material can move around in 3 dimensions, physical interaction with things is still important.
So, quite a lot was raised that was provocative and fascinating, and will help us going forward with the project as we try to get a sense of what staff and students might want from digital learning technologies in the future. Here are some of the conclusions that we discussed at the close of the session:
- What are the values and what is the purpose of the University?
- What sort of education do we want to provide?
- What should a University be?
- Focus on the individual student and consider mental health.
- How do you create an environment that supports students throughout their entire journey?
- How can technology help students to be more comfortable and visualise concepts?
- How can technology be helpful and personalise the learning experience?
Overall, it was a stimulating and intriguing workshop, where we learned a lot about not only what students think about technology but also about how we might develop our Near Future Teaching sessions as we continue with the project.
Join the Near Future Teaching conversation by responding to any of these topics here and/or on Twitter by using our hashtag: #UoE_NFT and our Twitter handle @NearFutureTeach.