March was a very active month for the Imagined Futures Workshops, and Digifest 2024 was a significant highlight.
Our team facilitated an Imagined Futures Workshop on each day of the Digifest event. With the aim of constructing a vision for the future of education and only 45 minutes available to do it in, these were ambitious workshops. But the participants rose to the challenge – and they did so by tackling unique sets of challenge cards.
The Imagined Futures workshops revolve around challenges or mini scenarios that depict things that could happen in the future and drive change in education. Workshop participants think about the potential impact of each challenge and discuss their ideas for how to prepare and react. They imagine a future where risk has been mitigated and opportunity maximised.
We have developed over 100 of these challenges. Here are some examples:
- Institutions become accountable for the carbon cost of their learners.
- Traditional teaching tools like screens and whiteboards have been completely replaced by virtual reality and hologram teachers.
- A data protection act bans all use of student data for analytics and surveillance.
At Digifest, it wasn’t just the workshop participants who could take on these challenges. Our team hosted a much-visited collaboration space in the Innovation Hub in the main hall, where delegates were able to interact with them too.
Overall, we had a huge amount of engagement and many ideas put forward. Thank you very much to all the Digifest 2024 workshop participants that attended the sessions and to all those who visited us in the Innovation Hub. We are busy working through all these contributions and look forward to sharing the resulting imagined futures soon.
If you are interested in hearing more about about these imagined futures, or the workshop resources, please subscribe to our Imagined Futures Workshops Jiscmail.