Inaugural Lecture Jen Ross: What does it take to make new digital futures for education? Many past dreams for digital technologies in education, including my own, foregrounded their capacity to foster meaningful connections and new forms of knowledge production. However, these technologies can also increase fragmentation, surveillance and extraction, and these negative capacities currently outweigh the positive for many people, ecosystems and communities around the world. What is left of past positive aspirations, what visions of digital education do we currently need, and how can we create the conditions for better futures to flourish? In this lecture, I will reflect on my work over the past 15 years, including on open and online learning, digital cultural heritage engagement, and technologies of automation in education. I will share what I’ve learned about how digital technologies shape and are shaped by issues of power, audience, surveillance, trust and openness. And I’ll argue that, to make new digital futures, it is necessary to speculate, imagine and experiment with technologies and the practices and relations around them. Tags Education events Research centres, groups and networks Conferences, seminars and lectures Jun 10 2026 17.15 - 19.00 Inaugural Lecture Jen Ross: What does it take to make new digital futures for education? This public lecture will be delivered by Professor Mark Wilson, head of Public Health and Sport Sciences at The University of Exeter. This hybrid public lecture, hosted by the Sport Related Research Hub at Moray House School of Education and Sport, is part of the Stewart Alan Robertson Lecture Series funded by the Robertson Endowment. Edinburgh Futures Institute, 2.55 and Teams (online joining link will be emailed to all attendees alongside booking confirmation) Register
Inaugural Lecture Jen Ross: What does it take to make new digital futures for education? Many past dreams for digital technologies in education, including my own, foregrounded their capacity to foster meaningful connections and new forms of knowledge production. However, these technologies can also increase fragmentation, surveillance and extraction, and these negative capacities currently outweigh the positive for many people, ecosystems and communities around the world. What is left of past positive aspirations, what visions of digital education do we currently need, and how can we create the conditions for better futures to flourish? In this lecture, I will reflect on my work over the past 15 years, including on open and online learning, digital cultural heritage engagement, and technologies of automation in education. I will share what I’ve learned about how digital technologies shape and are shaped by issues of power, audience, surveillance, trust and openness. And I’ll argue that, to make new digital futures, it is necessary to speculate, imagine and experiment with technologies and the practices and relations around them. Tags Education events Research centres, groups and networks Conferences, seminars and lectures Jun 10 2026 17.15 - 19.00 Inaugural Lecture Jen Ross: What does it take to make new digital futures for education? This public lecture will be delivered by Professor Mark Wilson, head of Public Health and Sport Sciences at The University of Exeter. This hybrid public lecture, hosted by the Sport Related Research Hub at Moray House School of Education and Sport, is part of the Stewart Alan Robertson Lecture Series funded by the Robertson Endowment. Edinburgh Futures Institute, 2.55 and Teams (online joining link will be emailed to all attendees alongside booking confirmation) Register
Jun 10 2026 17.15 - 19.00 Inaugural Lecture Jen Ross: What does it take to make new digital futures for education? This public lecture will be delivered by Professor Mark Wilson, head of Public Health and Sport Sciences at The University of Exeter. This hybrid public lecture, hosted by the Sport Related Research Hub at Moray House School of Education and Sport, is part of the Stewart Alan Robertson Lecture Series funded by the Robertson Endowment.
