| Speakers: |
Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Dr Mmantsetsa Marope, Skills and World Heritage Group Executive Director and former head of UNESCO International Bureau of Education |
| Date: |
21 Jan 2021 |
Venue: |
Online
|
| Time: |
12:00
-
13:00
|
| Type: |
Webinar |
Fee: |
Free of charge |
On 21 January 2021 Jane Mann, Director of Cambridge Partnership for Education, will host the launch of the Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI) at Cambridge at a live online event. Professor Rupert Wegerif from the Faculty of Education and Director of DEFI will talk about his hopes for the new initiative. As part of the launch you can hear from Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Dr Mmantsetsa Marope, Executive Director of the World Heritage Group, and Honorary President of the Indian Ocean Education Societies.
The Digital Education Futures Initiative has been created to work with partners in industry, policy and practice to explore the field of possibilities that digital technology opens up for education. It is both a centre for this kind of close-to-practice research and also an initiative to create a new institute at Cambridge to serve as a global hub and thought-leader in this area. Arm and EPIC Games have provided some initial enabling support. While DEFI will never be an uncritical advocate for the use of more education technology it has a role as a catalyst for innovation and development.
DEFI will map the educational logic of the new internet age through research that explores the pedagogical affordances of new technologies, which means the ways of teaching and learning that they make possible for education, ways which were either not possible or more difficult to implement before. While some of these affordances have long been noted in the literature, not enough effort has yet been put into research into how they might or might not transform education in the future. Design-based research implements these affordances in working models of education in order to investigate their consequences.
The core work of the centre is collaborative research projects with industry partners. Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press will be among the partners working with the centre to develop innovative ways of assessing important ‘future skills’ and competences.
Full detail on how to register for the event can be found on the DEFI website.