Pink Underlay

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

by Michael Gallagher

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.

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:

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.

Which eventually culminated in this, the Near Future Teaching blockchain:

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?

by Michael Gallagher

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.

Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Campaign

https://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/representation/liberation/bme/

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.

by Michael Gallagher

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.

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?

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 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…

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.

by Michael Gallagher