Following on from the first Near Future Teaching workshop last month, we gathered again recently to continue our design of the future of digital education.

Here, our focus was on convergence with the core values the university community would like to see defining our future teaching. The 19 opinion cards that were created from the interviews and insights from staff and students over the last year were summarised into 4 core values:

  1. Experience over Measurement
  2. Exchange over Instruction
  3. Diverse and Inclusive
  4. Participatory and Transparent

The workshop was again designed and led by Santini and Zoe from Andthen, a studio specialising in futures thinking and design research. We began by reviewing the four future world scenarios we developed through the first workshop. Briefly, these were:

In groups, the workshop began mapping the four core values to each of these worlds, trying to understand how they might be played out in each.

Using a blank jigsaw manufactured by Zoe and Santini, each group built layers around one of these worlds. The first encapsulated how the four values might be manifested, based on group discussion.

The second layer provided speculative examples of what digital education specifically might look like for each of these ‘value’ quartiles. Sian provided a brief brain dump trying to encapsulate something of what we mean when we talk about ‘digital education’:

Finally, we used props to begin to illustrate the speculative examples of digital education devised by each group: using playdoh, toy robots and plastic fruit we attempted to bring these worlds to life. The groups narrated their scenarios to one another and the workshop concluded, taking us another step closer to the co-design of a values-based approach to our digital education futures.