Helen Beetham discusses the need for universities to rethink how knowledge and thinking are practiced in their curriculums in a post-pandemic world. She argues that curriculums should value sustainability thinking, decolonization, digital practices like design thinking and coding, and data literacy. Universities also need to foster critical thinking about technology and its impacts. To prepare students for uncertain futures, curriculums should incorporate futures thinking exercises to imagine alternative futures and the knowledge needed to thrive in them.

1. after the pandemic
When the pandemic is
over…?
A provocation on
(post-)digital thinking
Helen Beetham
@helenbeetham
www.digitalthinking.org
D i g i t a l l y E n h a n c e d E d u c a t i o n W e b i n a r J u l y 2 0 2 1
Thank you - delighted to follow on from Louise and to be in this company of International thinkers. Like everyone I spent last year supporting the
emergency pivot with various organisations, but in recent months been able to get back to my research with academic teaching staff and curriculum
experts about the future curriculum and particularly about thinking and knowledge practice in the curriculum.

2. • “The university [is] the institution that links the
present to the long term through the kind of
knowledge… it produces and through the
privileged public space it establishes, dedicated
to open and critical discussion”
• De Sousa Santos (2006)
Postcolonial scholar De Sousa Santos teach us that the curriculum is a story about the future - like the stories we are telling today. It’s a story about what
kinds of knowledge, thinking and intellectual practice will matter. Garuba talks about creating or developing people who think in a particular way. And
thinking about that is itself a form of critical practice that universities - uniquely perhaps - have space to do. Not all the time! But on days like today.
Bobby, maker space at UCT

3. • “The university [is] the institution that links the
present to the long term through the kind of
knowledge… it produces and through the
privileged public space it establishes, dedicated
to open and critical discussion”
• De Sousa Santos (2006)
• “A curriculum determines the academic
formation of a new generation. That is, it helps
to create people who think in a particular way
about particular subjects and talk about them in
a particular language and idiom.”
• Harry Garuba (2015)

4. ‘Thinking in a particular way’
Rational, analytical, abstract
Individual thinker/knower
Discrete subjects, with philosophy
at the apex (truth as the measure)
Produced and reproduced through
text (often heavy!)
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Of course there is not one way of thinking in the university, and won’t be just one post-pandemic university, there will be many, and hopefully that diversity is
a powerful resource. But at the moment, we have had several hundred years in which the kinds of thinking valued and institutionalised have been these.
Large texts both the medium for and the sign that this kind of thinking was taking place. And our global universities are, in reality, judged against how much
of this kind of thinking they produce, and how powerfully they get to reproduce it.

5. Sustainable
Sustainability
Embodied, interconnected
Vulnerable - no one is safe
until everyone is safe
Collective, species-wide,
existential threats
Interdisciplinary
Re-cycling rather than
accumulation
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We didn’t have to wait for a global pandemic to see this kind of thinking come under citique. But the pandemic, I would argue, has intensified that critique.
First, what is often called sustainability thinking. (Embodied, etc). This means not just talking about climate change, but thinking in a different way -
interdisciplinary of necessity, because the challenges break out beyond disciplinary boundaries. The opposite of abstract - these problems involve us
intimately - they refer to the common grounds of our humanity, that we think from. Also, they break the link between knowledge and accumulation.
Sustainable knowledge leads to better forms of inter-relationship, circular exchanges. (Intellectual property, is the problem, not the goal. Link to open
movement also.)

6. decolonise
Decolonisation
No neutral viewpoint
Knowledge practices historicised
and politicised
Indigenous and ‘subaltern’
knowledges re-valued
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Pandemic heightened our awareness of inequality and the need for social justice. But the decolonisation movement had already highlighted a need to
attend to what we learn as well as who has access to it. It interrupts university’s preferred ways of thinking with a challenge to historicise and politicise it.
Ways of thinking - that Gyatri Spivak calls subaltern knowledge— may not be based on text but orality, narrative, gesture, material forms of culture. Often
also not individualistic but highly connected and collective and shared.

7. digital practices
Digital practices
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And then there’s the area I do actually know something about which is digital forms and knowledge practice in the curriculum. At a personal level I watched
two teenagers learning - and often not learning - during lockdown, and witnessed how profoundly and often uncomfortably digital changed their habits of
mind. Reading, writing, note-making, collaborating. I’m not suggesting emergency online learning represents the best we can offer, even today, of digital
knowledge practice…

8. Design
Design thinking
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• Learning through (digital) production
• Solving real-world problems
• User focus
• Collaborative process
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D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E
But I have had the privilege of interviewing over 30 academic teaching staff now about this issue. And I want to share four features of digital knowledge
practice that seem to me challenging to our current ways of thinking. First, the primacy of design or use value over philosophy or truth value. Design is an
applied form - it is about learning through making, solving real world problems (that can be very local problems). It is user centred and collaborative…It
has been in our universities for decades through professional subjects such as architecture, engineering, computer science. But now, arguably, it is there
in every discipline in new modes of assessment through digital production. In education, we even think about the curriculum in terms of design now, as
much as philosophy.

9. Design
Design thinking
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• Learning through (digital) production
• Solving real-world problems
• User focus
• Collaborative process
“Design is the new Philosophy”
Vu Quan Nguyen Masse (2016)
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D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E

10. Computation
Code and coding
•Algorithmic thinking
•Coding and making
•Hackathons
•Impact of machine
learning and AI
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D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E
Second, of course, thinking through code. Code can be treated as a text, especially when writing it, but it also functions as a tool, a heuristic for thinking
with, and even an environment for thinking in. You don’t need to have all the resources of coding and writing algorithms to participate in these forms of
knowledge - but you do need to participate if you are not going to be just a downstream user of other people’s code.

11. Computation
Code and coding
•Algorithmic thinking
•Coding and making
•Hackathons
•Impact of machine
learning and AI
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“Program or be programmed: The real
question is, do we direct technology, or do
we let ourselves be directed by it and
those who have mastered it?”
Douglas Rushkoff (2010)
D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E

12. Data
Thinking through data
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• Human / non-human analysis
• Visualise, present and persuade
• ‘Seeing’ patterns in data
• Human values in the use of data
(privacy, human rights, human
decision making)
“We need people who can
work with data… But we also
need people to critique the use
of data, understand its
constraints and its impact on
society.”
Jeni Tennison, Open Data Institute
(2020)
D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E
Data is changing knowledge practice in all our disciplines, and in different ways. But generically, data represents a completely different philosophy of
knowledge to text. Spatialised versus temporal. Dynamically produced. Also generically, data and algorithms are designed to support non-human as well
as - perhaps more than - human forms of processing. That is precisely the benefit they offer. EU definition of AI clearly includes simple spreadsheets as
well as machine learning. And this is a huge challenge to the idea that human beings are the only agents of knowledge and thinking. But there are still
human capabilities that no machine can match or perhaps ever could. One of those is deciding what values we want around data, algorithms.

13. Hybrid media
Multi- and hyper-media
A new culture of making?
A new oral culture?
Sensory richness, immersion
Connection adds value/is value
Ideas in constant circulation
Writing no longer privileged
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D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E
Most obviously, perhaps, we are thinking with new media. And I would like to suggest that as well as supporting a more visual culture, as is often remarked,
digital supports a culture of making, possibly a newly oral culture. My teenagers don’t text or email, they share snippets of audio and video - they bypass
text entirely. In some universities we are offering students audio feedback because especially at the preset time it feels more personal, and therefore it can
be easier to respond to positively and reflectively. Digital media is layered, hyper, it always points elsewhere. Constant beta is a feature, not a bug. It’s
intrinsically connected. And the fact we can access digital media through the same device(s) means that even when we are using text, the question is
always there… ‘how shall I express this?’

14. Hybrid media
Multi- and hyper-media
A new culture of making?
A new oral culture?
Sensory richness, immersion
Connection adds value/is value
Ideas in constant circulation
Writing no longer privileged
“Shall I express this with sound or
music? Shall l say this visually or
verbally?”
Gunther Kress, Multimodality (2001)
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D I G I T A L P R A C T I C E

15. digital thinking
Digital thinking?
But of course I’m not suggesting that the challenge presented by digital forms of thinking is a necessarily positive or progressive one, as I think
sustainability and social justice are. Silicon Valley is the new hegemonic form of knowledge. It has been threatening to disrupt the university for a quarter of
a century, sweeping away minority disciplines, cultures and knowledge practices as well as those represented by Erasmus and his book. Many features of
the university as it has evolved since Erasmus, especially its commitment to democratising access, we would want to defend from these forces.

16. digital thinking
Digital thinking?
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17. data platform algorithm
The platform university?
H o l o n I Q : T e n c h a r t s t h a t e x p l a i n t h e g l o b a l e d t e c h m a r k e t , 2 0 2 0
You only have to look at the rising influence of ed tech investors in our universities to know that new actors are influencing our curricula by influencing the
environments we teach, learn and research in.

18. non-humans
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Thinking with non-humans?
You only have to look at the graduate jobs market to see that non-human thinking threatens as much as it promises

19. critical thinking
Critical thinking
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So what all my interviewees have emphasised is that we need new critical ways of thinking about digital technology and its impacts on us, as well as
thinking critically through these new digital tools and media. This also brings together sustainability, social justice and digital critiques of established ways
of knowing. They can’t be three separate checklists we consult when a programme comes up for review. They have to be integrated into a ongoing
questioning of what we teach and how, of what knowledge matters and why…

20. futures thinking
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Futures thinking
That means being able to imagine different futures. Different technologies, different uses, different forms and directions of human development. I think
everyone should have access to resources of futures thinking - and permission to use them - and not just on days like these, but regularly, within our
discussions about the curriculum and within the curriculum in our exchanges with students. These are the questions I would leave you with.

21. futures thinking
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What futures do our students want and fear?
How can we prepare them to thrive in alternative
futures?
What forms of knowledge will matter?
Futures thinking

22. critical digital
Relational spaces
Creating and enabling spaces that are:
safe + challenging; interactive + reflective;
structured + participative;
becoming open
Critical digital thinking
Critical activities
Framing what students do and why: task
brief, scaffold, tools, rationale, inputs,
outcomes
Thinking media
Supporting students to read, write, decode,
recode, argue, annotate, record, re-edit,
analyse and present ideas in specific
media and genres
Dialogical moves
Extending students’ thinking through
questioning, feedback, recontextualising,
challenging, prompting, speculating
(These were extra slides, outlining my own research…)

23. futures thinking
Thinking across boundaries
(Also suggesting that we need to bring learning technologists, policy makers, educational philosophers and curriculum teaching staff to the same table.
When do they sit down together? How do they manage the power play, if they do? I see ALT’s development of an ethical framework for technology use as
hugely positive.

24. futures thinking
Thinking across boundaries
Who is in the room when these
conversations happen?

25. Slogans for 2021
Thinking (of/for)
the future
D o u g l a s C o u p l a n d , A r t i s t / W r i t e r
2 0 1 1 - p r e s e n t
‘ S l o g a n s f o r t h e 2 1 s t C e n t u r y ’
This is just an activity I like to share in workshops - write your own slogan.

26. Slogans for 2021
Thinking (of/for)
the future
D o u g l a s C o u p l a n d , A r t i s t / W r i t e r
2 0 1 1 - p r e s e n t
‘ S l o g a n s f o r t h e 2 1 s t C e n t u r y ’
W r i t e a s h o r t ‘ S l o g a n f o r t h e 2 1 s t
c e n t u r y ( u n i v e r s i t y ) ’ i n t h e c h a t