Announcing a New Series on The Edtech Podcast in Partnership With Salesforce

By: Sophie Bailey, Founder, The Edtech Podcast

Past podcast series have included Future Tech for Education, Education 4.0, and The VocTech Podcast, Learning Continued, and I’m delighted that our current work spans K-12, Higher Education, and Adult Education, taking in formal learning and lifelong learning in equal measure.Featured on iTunes new and noteworthy, The Edtech Podcast seeks to improve the dialogue between ‘ed’ & ‘tech’ through storytelling, for better innovation and impact. Currently, 2000 listeners from 145 countries tune in every week to hear passionate leaders debate the issues of the day. 

My role as the founder and host of the podcast is to develop the conversation around change in education. I’m not an unquestioning evangelist of edtech; I’m more interested in opening up points of view, and sharing and connecting listeners and their work through the podcast for deeper exploration.

We’ve been going for over three years now, and during that time we’ve taken The Edtech Podcast on the road to events including SXSWEDU, ASU GSV Summit, GESF, and the Next Billion Edtech Summit. As an industry mentor and advisor, I’m lucky enough to see early-stage ventures and initiatives through UCL Knowledge Lab’s EDUCATE, the Adult Literacy XPrize, Reimagine Education and the GESA awards, as well as among peers in the Edtech50 and Edtech Digest selections.

This year, 2019, I moderated a discussion on “How to develop the teams which make change possible” with a range of Higher Education leaders, advocating variously for centralised or decentralised action plans, better collaboration between academia and professional services, and development of professional development for everyone, including the board. On the panel was Jane Armstrong, Senior Director, Higher Education at Salesforce.org. We got chatting afterwards about how to surface the stories of some of those Higher Education leaders who weren’t always visible. Later, we bumped into each other again at the European Edtech Network launch (a collaboration between IE University, University College London, KU Leuven and Oulu University of Applied Sciences) and formulated our ideas further. 

The result of these discussions forms the basis for our latest podcast series, supported by Salesforce.org: The Edge: Innovation & Intelligence Imperative.

The Edge; what does this mean? 

Edge computing, is “ushering in the need for more intelligence, computing power and advanced services at the network edge”. For me, The Edge is also the liminal spaces between groups where change happens. My thinking on “The Edge” is highly influenced by my early podcast recording with the then Chief Information Officer, Federal Communications Commission, David Bray. Around in the early days of the internet, Bray’s thinking is very much that it is at the edges (not in the formal centre) where new ideas are formed and developed. ‘We need to change how we train future managers and leaders. If we try and be top down we will not be able to keep up.’ ‘In a rapidly changing world, the edge often knows better what is happening than the ‘top’’.

It is with this ethos that we dive into The Edge podcast series, seeking out the stories of Higher Education leadership among people doing things differently, collaboratively, and bending away from the status quo. Who are these people? We don’t always know yet, but we look forward to finding out! Broadly speaking we will be covering the following areas across a seven-part series, with a couple of LIVE recordings thrown in for good measure:

• Creating a Culture Open to Change
• Exploring Equity, Equality & Diversity in Higher Ed Leadership
• Changing the story with the Ubiquitous University
• Looking at 2019 and beyond
• Serving Next Generation Learners
• Lifelong Learning for the Future
• Driving Equity, Equality & Diversity in Higher Ed

I’m interested in how we might excel in leadership, based on our human and humane qualities, whilst in an era of dizzying advanced computing.

The podcast series launches in October at the Horizons event in Paris on the 10th October, where our first episode will be recorded LIVE with guests from the Said Business School at Oxford University, ISDI, and California State University, East Bay. We’ll be looking at the implications of admissions in a digital age, including:

• Accommodating digital methodologies alongside academic culture
• Looking sideways at the impact of digital marketing in politics.

The Horizons event also hosts Graham Brown-Martin. Graham is a leader in the field of foresight and anticipatory research, bringing together social, political and technological trends to consider how we might prepare ourselves for the future. I’m looking forward to interviewing him on how he sees re-skilling in our various societies playing out and the role of state, education institution, workplace and individual on each of us “keeping up to speed” (without burning out).

Listeners to The Edtech Podcast can niftily get 50% off the Horizons ticket by using our special code “EDTECH50” via this registration link. What better excuse to come out and see our first recording for the series live and connect with others getting things done among our European Universities?  

 

REGISTER TODAY

 

As always, I’m keen for The Edtech Podcast to be an open conversation. So, if you know leaders doing things at the edge, bringing people into new ways of doing things then please get in touch. 

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