The Digitalised Imagination

Just over 2 years ago I decided I wanted a bit of adventure in the tail-end of Covid, and gave up a slightly depressing management position at the University of Liverpool, and became a post-doc on a project on curriculum digitalisation at the University of Copenhagen. I thought at the time that digitalisation was the most important undercurrent in education, and I knew that it was a difficult thing to move towards. My best achievement had been at the Far Eastern Federal University in Russia, which I wrote about here: Digitalization and Uncertainty in the University: Coherence and Collegiality Through a Metacurriculum (springer.com). The Copenhagen experience was nowhere near as good as the Russian experience, and I left Copenhagen for Manchester with a much deeper appreciation of what I had done in Russia. I just wished I'd done it in Switzerland!

During this time, and for seven years previously, I had been deeply involved in a medical diagnostic AI project whose innovation I was co-inventor. It was obvious that AI was a tidal wave that was about to hit education, and much of my frustration in Copenhagen was that very few people were really interested. They are now, like everyone else. 

There is a risk that AI sweeps the digitalisation agenda away. After all, why teach the kids to code when the computer will do it for you? This kind of statement underpins errors in the ways that digitalisation was conceived - particularly in Copenhagen and many other European universities. It also underpins the difference between the institutional approach of Copenhagen and the approach I took in Russia. 

Digitalisation is not about skill or competency. It is not about "digital literacy" (whatever that means!). It is about imagination. This was understood by the Russians, and dogmatically avoided in Copenhagen. The deep problem is the sanctifying of "competency" within European education, and the EU has been particularly pernicious in pushing this. However much the sheer lack of insight as to what "competency" is (ask anyone to define it!), it is continually asserted that this is the thing education must do. 

Now in the new AI world that is opening up in front of us, the biggest threat is not technology, but poverty of the imagination. And imagination today means (partly) the "technical imagination". It is about understanding the realm of possibility under the surface, behind the interface - it is the Freudian unconscious of the technical world which through the working of creativity can find expression in the interfaces we produce. 

With an imaginative collapse, humanity becomes enslaved. While the demands of the technical imagination are going to encompass a huge range of disciplines, skills, ideas, relationships, we will need our new tools to oil the wheels of our discourse and knowledge and find new ways of organising ourselves. It is in steering this process to which education needs to direct itself. But ironically, the university as it is currently constituted is geared-up for imaginative collapse and corporate takeover. 

Digitalisation is about changing this. It's not going to be easy.