Author: Jen Ross

Update: Sian’s inaugural lecture is now available to watch on Youtube: Professor Sian Bayne, The Trouble with Digital Education

An invitation to tune in to Professor Siân Bayne’s inaugural lecture, being livestreamed on Wednesday at 5:15pm UK time. The lecture will be available to watch later, too, but if you’re available at that time and would like to join us, Sian would be delighted to have you there virtually (or in person if you happen to be in the Edinburgh area!).

Tune in here:

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/humanities-soc-sci/news-events/lectures/inaugural-lectures/sian-bayne

We’ll use the hashtag #troublediged to discuss the lecture as it unfolds.

The trouble with digital education

Digital technologies in education are often considered in terms of the promises they seem to offer: for enhanced efficiency, for ‘more relevant’ teaching methods, for higher levels of engagement in the classroom, for ways of reaching new groups of students or revolutionising universities. Almost equally often they are viewed as a threat: they do not take into account the value of embodied, co-present teaching, they replace scholarly community with isolation and automation, they are complicit with cultures of surveillance, homogenisation and teacher de-professionalisation.

This lecture will navigate a pathway through the promises and the threats, to consider the interface between education and the digital in terms of ‘troubling’. Looking at some of the trends and trajectories of the last decade of digital education, it will show how it has worked to challenge some of the core ties-that-bind within the academy: the links between author and text, between university and campus, between human and non-human. It will argue that we need the digital to keep educational practice fresh, critical and challenging.

For Innovative Learning Week 2015, the Global Justice Academy, the MSc Social Justice and Community Action and the MSc Digital Education have organised a student competition to imagine and represent the politics of knowledge production and the struggle of who gets recognised as a knowledgeable and knowing agent.

‘Knowledge’ is a key site for debates about social justice. The processes by which a given society decides which knowledges are valuable, how some individuals and groups are constructed as ‘scientific agents’ and how particular ways of knowing are legitimated are deeply political questions. Indeed, the power of many of liberation struggles is not only in their transformations of the material conditions of marginalised groups but by challenging the social order through radical new ways of seeing and understanding the world.

For this competition, we invite undergraduate and postgraduate students to create an image related to the theme of ‘Whose Knowledge Counts’. A selection of images will be debated at a roundtable event from 1pm-3pm on Thursday 19th February at the Chrystal MacMillan Building, Seminar Room 5, where we will also announce the competition winners. This event will be livestreamed and recorded for distance education students.

Upload your image to the competition’s Padlet wall by Friday 13th February 2015.

Further details and signupcan be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/whose-knowledge-counts-rethinking-justice-in-knowledge-production-tickets-15270327962