We’re delighted to launch the Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Society.

Technology and learning are fundamentally entwined across our professional and civic lives, and formal education. The Centre exists to further our understanding of the dynamic relationship between technology and learning, across formal, informal, and professional education contexts throughout the lifespan.

Our research interrogates the new ways in which technologies enhance learning, and the changing learning needs of a technological society. Centre researchers work with stakeholders to conduct research on the dynamic relationship between technology and learning, reflecting that how we learn (with technology) is fundamentally intertwined with what we learn (about technology). You can read more about the centre at our Homepage. Here, we’ll be sharing more detail and updates on our work.

The centre emerged from our earlier STEM Education Futures research centre, launched in 2018 by Peter Aubusson and Sandy Schuck, and stewarded by Wan Ng thereafter. We’re incredibly grateful to them for this lineage, and Peter and Sandy’s continued membership as honorary associate members. Meet our members.

The revised focus reflects the present interest around the role of technology and data in society, and the implications of this for learning. It thus builds on our strong track record in understanding learning pathways for STEM subjects and Australia’s needs for these subjects. For example, centre members conduct research on developing quantitative skills, the changing skills needs for the Australian workforce, teacher use of mobile devices for professional development, and much more. Read more on our projects page.

The centre does this by working with you - our partners – and our interdisciplinary membership drawing academics from across UTS faculties. We take a sociocultural and human-centred approach to understanding technology in practice, and welcome partnership with varied stakeholders including school leaders and teachers, other researchers, government departments, professional development units within organisations.

We’ll be posting more about our research, and continuing to work with current and new partners over the coming months; we invite you to get in touch if you’d like to work with us.

Featured image is of UTS Building 2 ‘double helix’ staircase, by MDRX, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons