(Keynote recording is available on YouTube [42 min 2 sec])
(Presentation slidedeck is available in Google Slides)
It was a pleasure to give the opening keynote at the ‘Go Wild to Stay Well: Digital Learner Wellbeing in an AI age’ Hackathon in DCU on the 10th Nov. The Hackathon (profiled here) is part of the Digital Education Hackathon (DigiEduHack – @DigiEduHack), which involved students in institutions across Europe engaging in Hackathons to tackle different identified challenges relating to digital transformation in education.
My keynote, Rewilding digital ‘learning to be’: Techo-deterministic dystopia versus open and hopeful futures set the scene for the student who had come to think through the challenges of ensuring digital learner wellbeing in an age of digital transformation and identify solutions to those challenges.
My aim in giving this talk was to combine the very practical with the need to link practical, short-term solutions that can facilitate learner well-being with utopian visions of what the future of education can look like. The practical side of the presentation drew on the existing literature on student success, student wellbeing, and also toolkits for professional self-care such as Burns, O’Mahony, and ’s (2018) SPARK self-care toolkit designed for social workers. As well as highlighting some practical aspects of managing wellbeing, for example, feeling like you belong, managing workload within one’s studies as well one’s overall lifeload, etc., I was keen to highlight the importance of linking short-term practical actions, such as those designed to improve digital learner wellbeing, to longer term ‘real utopian’ visions (drawing on the work of Dr Rikke Toft Nørgård – see her keynote at the EDEN conference hosted by DCU in June 2023, starting at 41.25)
When highlighting aspects of the broader context for the students engaged in this hackathon, I first wanted to highlight that wellness in higher education can be viewed as being an ecosystem that needs to be ‘rewilded’, and that in that context certain potential solutions that may seem sensible will look damaging in that light. For example, it could be argued that one way to facilitate digital learner wellbeing would be to layer on more supports from staff in the institution. Coming from a student-as-consumer perspective, this may seem to make sense, but using the ecosystem metaphor it can be seen that this solution may just shift pressure on wellbeing from one part of the institution to the other, given the documented issues with higher education staff mental health and wellbeing. I encouraged the hackathon attendees to focus on ideas that would help everyone in higher education to flourish and be well.
To further broaden out the context, I drew on Prof. Sian Bayne’s 20203 article, ‘Digital education utopia’ in order to highlight those voices that call out for a change in how we think about digital education. These voices highlight how, over several decades, digital education has largely changed from being seen as a strong emancipatory force to a view of digital education as a driver for human capital development, with “the neoliberal subject for whom lifelong learning has become both ‘a duty’ (Biesta 2022) and an internalised project of self-reinvention (Lee, 2022)” (Bayne, 2023, p. 8). I drew the hackathon participants’ attention to authors such as Neil Selwyn and Felicitas Macgilchrist and related ideas on: a planetary health imperative to cut back on use of digital technology, digital degrowth, sustainable computing, and the rewilding of digital education.
Finally, I left the attendees with a call to engage in their hackathon with what Dr Rikke Toft Nørgård calls a hopepunk imagination, where we can work towards more hopeful digital eduction futures with an insistence on hope, humanity and virtuousness, even in the face of bleak present realities or grim visions of the future.
#DigiEduHack
References
Bayne, S. (2023) Digital education utopia. Learning, Media and Technology. DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2023.2262382
Brunton, J. (2023) Rewilding digital ‘learning to be’: Techo-deterministic dystopia versus open and hopeful futures. Keynote presentation, ‘Go Wild to Stay Well: Digital Learner Wellbeing in an AI age’ Hackathon in DCU, 10th Nov 2023. Digital Education Hackathon (DigiEduHack – @DigiEduHack).
Burns, K., O’Mahony, C. and O’Callagan, E. (2018) SPARK: A self-care tool for professionals. IDEA Project, University College Cork. Available online: https://ideachildrights.ucc.ie/resources/tools/SPARK-Tool-Final-UCC.pdf
Nørgård, R. T., (2022) What comes after the ruin? Designing for the arrival of preferable futures for the university. In Bengtsen, S. S. E. & Gildersleeve, R. E. (eds.), Transformation of the University: Hopeful Futures for Higher Education. Abingdon: Routledge, p. 156-174.
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