Professor Siân Bayne, Personal Chair of Digital Education, delivers her inaugural lecture entitled, The Trouble with Digital Education.

Digital technologies in education are often considered in terms of the promises they seem to offer: for enhanced efficiency, for ‘more relevant’ teaching methods, for higher levels of engagement in the classroom, for ways of reaching new groups of students or revolutionising universities. Almost equally often they are viewed as a threat: they do not take into account the value of embodied, co-present teaching, they replace scholarly community with isolation and automation, they are complicit with cultures of surveillance, homogenisation and teacher de-professionalisation.

This lecture will navigate a pathway through the promises and the threats, to consider the interface between education and the digital in terms of ‘troubling’. Looking at some of the trends and trajectories of the last decade of digital education, it will show how it has worked to challenge some of the core ties-that-bind within the academy: the links between author and text, between university and campus, between human and non-human. It will argue that we need the digital to keep educational practice fresh, critical and challenging.

Recorded on 11 March 2015 at the University of Edinburgh's 50 George Square building.