After 11 weeks in Finland (well in and out…but mostly in!) I am now in Nice, France for International Digital Week, at the Universite Cote D’Azur. This is a European-based event including guests from places such as Australia (I think I am the only one!), Canada, Brazil, and the UK. I attended this event last year and loved its internationalism and passion for improving digital learning in higher education and future-focused participants. The image below shares the diversity of participants.

This year I was invited to be a Day 1 Keynote (see below), and I also collaborated with the organising team to design a 1-day whole event collaborative, team-based workshop. More about that in my next post. The event has three strands:

• Digital Transformation in Higher Education
• Teaching Skills for Educators in a Digitalized Environment
• Enhancing Internationalization through Digitalization

As I move from one strand to another across the week. I am enjoying the energy of the presenters and workshop leaders, and the willingness of the participants to interact and voice opinions and experiences.

Terrible image of me below….but it acknowledges I am there!

One purpose of this keynote was to ask participants to consider different scenarios and rethink the impact and role of AI for learning and teaching. Not only did I share ideas but I encouraged positive and collaborative approaches leading into our workshop this week.

Here is a summary of my keynote, adapted from NotebookLM.

Dr. Julie Lindsay’s keynote, “Building Digital Bridges: From Possibility to Partnership,” challenges the conventional fear surrounding AI in education, urging a shift from constructing “walls” to building “bridges”. She provocatively suggests that instead of asking, “Will AI replace humans?”, we should inquire, “How will AI help us become more human?”. Inspired by Azout (2025), Lindsay advocates for reframing AI’s perception by renaming “OpenAI” to “Open Collective Intelligence,” transforming the narrative from “cheating” to “resourceful.”

Her vision moves beyond “defending against the future” to actively “designing it,” emphasizing creative leadership over reactive measures…. The speech confronts “false dichotomies,” revealing that true innovation stems from diversity, and global engagement can amplify local wisdom rather than erase it. Central to her address is the “Cosmogogy Learning Ecosystem,” a framework embracing a Human-AI-World mindset where AI acts as a creative partner, facilitating unprecedented collaboration and moving education from passive consumption to active co-creation. Attendees are called to be active architects of this future, fostering Human+AI +World partnerships.

Workshop: Digital soft skills: Design and future thinking

Of the many excellent sessions so far this week I want to acknowledge this workshop by David Mauffret & Katja Danska from Haaga-Helia, University of Applied Science, School of Professional Education, Helsinki, Finland. It seems Finland will follow me around the world….or vice versa. There is a large contingent in Nice from the Haaga-Helia institution and collectively they are vital and innovative group. The university belongs to the Ulysseus group in Europe, and many others in Nice also come from one of the eight universities in this group. The image on the right shares all members of Ulysseus.

David and Katja led us through a process of future thinking based on the Sitra Megatrend cards. Sitra is a Finnish organisation that supports a variety of events and provides tools and resources for groups to ponder and plan the future. We didn’t use the cards as such, but you can access them online via the link above. Or create your own!

Working in a group of four we were charged with imagining the ‘future of education’ in 2050. I inwardly groaned as it seems so far away, and to be honest I may not even be here by then….but away we went. This is important work for those of us who have thought about education and where it could or should be going over the last 4 decades.

This is what I wrote:

I want to strengthen cross-border collaboration and flexible learning opportunities so that in 2050 to enhance student choice and socialised global learning. The world will be flatter and glocalised to advantage everyone.

Then we discussed ideas and our group wnated to try and show what this would look like (we had to do a 1 min. ‘presentation’). So….I employed Claude to come up with an image representative of our thinking. We had about 5 min to do this image….the online result is interactive, and the static version is shown on the right.

Essentially we are trying to show fluidity and absence of technical barriers for cross-border connection and collaboration and learning. We even talked about whether there would be country-based institutions by 2050 or a much more open approach to learning with and from, as I talk about often. I am a little pessimistic about that direction of course.