Photo by Riley McCullough on Unsplash
I’ve spend the early part of this week in a writing retreat with my colleagues Bill Johnston and Keith Smyth for our upcoming book around the digital university. Keith has written an excellent overview of where we are including our proposed title “Conceptualising the Digital University: Intersecting policy, pedagogy and practice”.
The book isn’t about future predictions. We are trying to map out an alternative view towards higher education development. One that takes a more critically informed perspective to counterbalance the current neoliberal political pressures the university sector faces, particularly in the Global North. Unsurprisingly, we have been looking to critical pedagogy, Freire and in particular his work on critical consciousness. However there has necessarily been quite a bit of discussion about how we could help frame future developments/discussions. As part of these discussion we were talking in general about ” future prediction type stuff” that had influenced us personally and indeed society – Arthur C Clark and Philip K Dick both featured.
It was during one of these that I came up with the title used in this post. I’m kind of wishing we could us it for the title of the book but you know how it is, the best ideas always come too late! Maybe we’ll just save it for a future paper . . .