Postdigital Learning Journeys (commentary)

Since spring 2024, I’ve been having conversations, mostly with Laura Bissell (Royal Conversatoire of Scotland) and David Overend (University of Edinburgh), around the idea of the ‘postdigital learning journey’. This is a term that David, Laura and I conceived as a way of exploring ideas of the learning journey within our postdigital times. We have collected together some of these conversations through a commentary that has now been published (open access) in Postdigital Science and Education.

​As we explain in the commentary, ‘learning journey’ is a term that works both literally and metaphorically, and can be found in use across disciplines and educational contexts. Among other things, it can refer to field trips, mobile learning, the personal acquisition of knowledge, and the path that a student pursues through a course or programme. While we might immediately associate journeying with pleasure and excitement (school outings, the Grand Tour, urban excursions like flanerie), some journeys are trepidatious and undertaken forcibly (precarious employment that uproots early career academics, the challenges of undertaking education as a displaced person).

Photograph from one kind of learning journey in London, January 2015, and written-up here. 

With this being a new concept, we conclude our commentary by opening ‘postdigital learning journey’ to exploration and scrutiny. We suggest this might be done, for instance through questions around environmental sustainability, inclusion and access, and politics and power.