I was privileged to be invited to an all-expense paid for trip to DigiFest 2025 earlier this month as one of Jisc’s ‘Community Champions’ (in recognition of my work promoting visual literacy across the sector). Here are my takeaways and thoughts from the conference.
First – wow you wouldn’t believe we are in the middle of a funding crisis! This was clearly a well-funded, unsurprisingly tech-driven, event at the impressive ICC in Birmingham – perhaps helped in its swank by having Adobe as a partner. Hundreds of delegates from across the FE and HE sector (and more accessing online too) came together to learn from each other ‘where today meets tomorrow’.
I came away with my head buzzing with ideas (not to mention a bar of Tony’s Chocolonely with a wrapper augmented with an image produced by Adobe Express AI at my prompt for a black cat, playing the cello in front of a piano!).
Keynotes
There were many choices of where to be and who to listen to but everyone was brought together for the five keynotes making up the conference spine. I will just share my thoughts on these in this post.
Brilliant Failures
The first keynote was from Paul Iske, from the fabulously titled ‘Institute of Brilliant Failures’ in the Netherlands. His keynote was definitely the funniest of the five (which is relevant as he introduced us to the creativity index which is Laughter x Questions) but he brought a serious message: that we can never be creative and learn fully from experiences if we are afraid of failure. In a sector where failure could have serious consequences – for our students, for our staff and for our institutions – this can be a hard concept to embrace.
However, Paul’s engaging talk certainly resonated with my creative mind-set and there were some great takeaways that I can use in my session teaching our research students creative thinking and problem solving. Failure is, after all, part of many a research process – as long as we can learn everything we can from it. I particularly loved his story of the bridge in Honduras that was left standing forlornly when hurricane Mitch hit, causing flooding that washed away the roads and then receded to reveal that the river had changed course and no longer goes under the bridge – a lesson that sometimes it is the problem that changes not the solution!
Transforming together – empowering institutional creativity through partnership
This second keynote was a panel discussion and the partnership in question was Adobe and Jisc (and member institutions who had taken up the offer to become Creative Campuses and deploy the full version of Adobe Express for all their students). The session was sponsored by Adobe and was, in essence, a massive sales pitch.
Now I am a fan of Adobe products and couldn’t do my job with the Creative Cloud suite – and I would like nothing better than for us to become a Creative Campus and work to make all our staff and students more creative – right up my street if you know me and my love of all things visual! However, though I understand there is a CHEST agreement with Adobe to make it cheaper, I suspect this will not be happening at Hull any time soon. In fact, when we checked to see how much it would cost there is just a message stating, “This agreement is now closed to new entrants and license amendments for current subscribers until the summer of 2025.”
There is a reasonable version of Adobe Express that is free and we could encourage students to use that for some projects – likewise things like Canva – but they have AI at their heart which I suspect will make a few people uncomfortable. Having said that, I am a true-believer that our students should be able to use AI effectively and ethically during and beyond education. I suspect there are many out there who are far more sceptical but with other institutions embracing this – do we want to be left behind??
AI - Where are we today
Time to bring out the big guns – the closing keynote of day 1 was delivered by Sana Khareghani, professor of practice in AI at Kings College London and former head of UK Government Office for Artificial Intelligence. This woman knows her AI stuff! I am not sure I understood it all but here goes…
After a quick potted history (who knew the term has been around since 1955?) Sana emphasised the government’s position on AI [and this metaphor is mine not hers so it might get convoluted] - it’s moving fast, and we need to be driving the bus not waiting at the bus stop until we have decided if we want to go where it’s headed. Not only that, but we need to be preparing students to be at least on board the bus if not learning to drive it themselves. There are challenges, but we need to embrace them – especially through diversifying those working on AI. The environment should not be forgotten either and we need researchers to be looking at how to mitigate water use by big servers etc.
Legislation is in its infancy and there are key differences between the EU and UK approaches. In essence, the EU has brought out new legislation and is using the horizontal approach (it applies to all applications and is government led), the UK does not feel new legislation is necessary, and instead adopts a principles-based vertical approach to regulation (it applies to specific applications/sectors and is industry led)… and we are still waiting to see which way the US will go.
For organisations such as universities, it isn’t all about preparing students, but also ways we can use it to improve our systems - both administration and student/academic support (potentially incl. AI marking/feedback etc). The question will be whether this creates productivity gains that mean we can do more – or whether it is seen as a way of saving money and laying off more staff. In the current climate, I would fear the latter in many institutions.
Where today meets tomorrow
This was another panel discussion based around the main conference theme. The panel included leaders from Universities and FE Colleges (including Debra Gray from Hull College who is vice chair of the Jisc board). They answered questions on where we would be in 5 years, what future learners will expect, what we can do for a sustainable future and what we want from Jisc for 2030. This was obviously far reaching and can be summed up by my notes:
I thought they were rather conservative really – and some things, like stackable micro-credentials, seem to have been talked about for years with little movement. The idea of Jisc providing trusted AI skeletons for institutions for their admin (and potentially other) processes was interesting (and I think would have had some of the industry stall holders twitching a little).
Humanity +
A vision of the future in the closing keynote by Prof Andy Miah – chair of science communication and future media at the University of Salford. Andy has huge interests in the ethics of AI and technological change and in this talk he looked a lot at where technology and biology meet – some science fiction ideas on the verge of becoming science fact as we augment humanity with tech.
My notes only captured a fraction of it.
Andy really captured the speed of change and I love the idea that gameplaying is so essential to human development.
Final note
I do need to finish with a brief mention of the amazing work that my fellow champions are doing around the country – all sharing great practice with various cross-sector communities. And that was probably my main takeaway from the conference as a whole – how lovely it is to be reminded that we are a community who genuinely want the best for all students not just our own. With recruitment being so crucial to institutional success, and the competition that it naturally creates, it was great to be in conversations that were truly collegial and community spirited. I look forward to a time when attendance at such conferences once again becomes the norm rather than the exceptional experience that this was.