Imogen Casebourne
Associate Researcher (Research Lead DEFI Innovation Lab)
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Dr. Imogen Casebourne is the research lead at the Innovation Lab at Digital Education Futures Initiative (DEFI) at University of Cambridge. She has a DPhil in Education (Oxon) and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence, for which she developed an AI program that wrote short stories (Sharples & Pérez y Pérez, 2023 p.8-10). She recently co-edited a book for Springer on AI and Education and co-authored a paper on AI and Collective Intelligence (forthcoming). In 2023, she designed and taught a short introductory course on AI and Education for students at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is currently a co-convener of the BERA special interest group dedicated to AI and intelligence, and works alongside UNESCO Futures Chair Dr. Abu Sitta, on DEFI’s Horizon Scanning and Futures thinking projects.
Imogen is interested in the design, development, deployment and evaluation of educational technology, and particularly in the role technology might play in supporting experiences of community, dialogue and serendipity in learning. Prior to joining DEFI, Imogen consulted for multiple organisations, including a leading Business School, Wikipedia and the NHS. She is also an award-winning EdTech designer with projects including a Maths Revision App for Harper Collins, and a mobile authoring tool which went on to become GoMo learning.
Keynote
This talk will consider how 21st Century Competencies (sometimes known as future skills) and in particular collaboration and communication, are currently being taught and assessed in schools, as well as how they might be taught and assessed in the future, drawing on approaches that offer new forms of data as well as emerging technologies such as generative AI and wearables which open new possibilities for the creation of simulation and test environments. It will explore the tension between the promise of personalisation - often considered as a potential benefit of AI in education, and the need to learn to learn together and to learn to solve problems collectively. The advent of generative AI is prompting a renewed focus on dialogic approaches to learning, and the talk will consider the implications of this, as well as introducing techniques for coding dialogue to identify different forms of talk occurring in classroom conversations.
It will discuss opportunities and challenges (including ethical challenges), and introduce and discuss existing frameworks, frameworks in development and case studies from across the region and globally - projects that have sought to create new learning and assessment environments focused on 21st Century Competencies.
Future Skills, Emerging Technologies, New Directions?
Expert Workshop
Participants will come away with an important, interactive and timely introduction to the intersection of emerging technologies, innovative dialogic pedagogies, and future skills. The masterclass will begin with an engaging, exploratory introduction to generative AI, offering participants an experiential understanding of both its strengths and limitations. Building on this foundation, participants will learn to create multi-agent AI interlocutors designed to facilitate structured collaborative group learning. Through hands-on activities, they will capture and hand-code elements of the emerging dialogue, applying established frameworks. Participants will then go on to explore AI tools with the potential to support and streamline coding processes in the future. The session will conclude with a discussion about the effectiveness of novel approaches to assessment of future skills, offering insights and techniques to evaluate their utility.