e-learning futures: live writing for 'Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age'

Tomorrow I'm meeting with some old friends/collaborators (and a few new) to collaboratively write a final chapter for the second edition of Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. I'm slightly nervous about the collaborative writing aspect - coordinating people across several timezones and a larger number of theoretical perspectives to produce a coherent text in a few hours will not be easy. But I'm excited to be focusing on 'the future of e-learning', with all its risk of egg-on-face.

Topics I hope will be included in our final piece:

- the open vs closed internet, and specifically how that impacts on the opportunities for open educational practices to evolve and spread
- digital literacy, and specifically how we develop critically techno-literate individuals with an awareness of how digital systems design our world and actions in it, as well as offering themselves for use
- mobile technologies and specifically the convergence of real and virtual space through ubiquitous connectivity and the use of geolocational data

I'm hoping to gather more ideas from the twitterverse and also on a live googledoc that you can access here.

Guardian 'Digital Literacies in HE' live chat

It's always great to be on a panel with Josie Fraser and David White, not to mention the other excellent bloggers whose fingers will be racing over the pages of the Guardian's live web chat tomorrow. I'll post more when the dust has settled, but just to say that I'm hoping debate will cover:
- what it means to be critical in a digital age
- open scholarship and the identity of the public intellectual in a digital age
- the intersection of academic and digital practice - and the cutting edges of both
I'm also hoping for opportunities to mention the excellent work being done by projects in the JISC digital literacies programme, particularly of course Exeter's Cascade project which I'm lucky enough to be project managing, jointly with Liz Dunne, but also projects at Plymouth and Greenwich where I have been more peripherally involved. Very different examples of whole-institution approaches but all concerned with the lifelong, lifewide impact that digital literacies will have in the near future.

Over our cascade coffee mugs this morning we were debating why raspberry pi should be on the menu for all school children. Not because everyone needs to be excited by coding or want to develop apps for a living, but because everyone needs to know how the tools and environments we live by are designed for us, and design our world for us. Just as everyone needs to know how to add up to survive in a monetised economy, or in our visual culture needs to know how images of women are manipulated, or how documentary films are edited and framed. Yes the curriculum is already crowded, but the part that is given over to ICT should not be dedicated to learning the programmes that will make students productive workers in the five years after they leave school.