For those of you who don’t know (until recently I was also in that boat), Digifest is an annual conference run by JISC to promote their products and discuss the hot topics relating to digital technologies. This year the theme was “Where today meets tomorrow”

About Digifest 2025 – Jisc

I attended the conference online, and from the comfort of my desk I sat through hours of insightful people talking about the topics they know best. I finished day one with a quiet optimism for the future of digital capabilities in higher education, and have felt a burning need to sit with some of these concepts and what they mean for my role, my institution, and for the future of the world I want to live in. I’ll be honest, I didn’t start day two as engaged as I should have been. I didn’t pay enough attention to the opening keynote of the day, but what struck me in stark contrast from the previous day was this content seemed a lot more about “the business” of education. We were listening to professionals with “CEO” in their titles rather than educator. The next session I attended was basically a sales pitch. Day two definitely had a different vibe.

The key themes

After the two days I left with a strong sense of three key themes:

• collaboration
• digital transformation
• playing

Collaboration

While Digifest is designed to bring higher education and business professionals together, almost every speaker highlighted the importance of collaborating with REAL people (often contrasted with the recent boom in Generative AI technologies). There was an emphasis on the importance of collaboration on an institutional level, but also on an individual level within our organisations. The pace at which digital technologies continue to develop, the lasting success of any change projects we embark upon relies on the individual people we work with coming along the journey with us. Often as educators we forgot what it is like to be a novice in our subjects, and sometimes we need to be reminded of what it feels like to learn something new for the first time.

Ideas about collaboration weren’t just focused on stakeholder management, and bringing rockstar project teams together. The talk of collaboration focused on centring the human element of living in a very digital world. With Generative AI technologies being front and centre of many minds in the past year or so, it was heartwarming to hear so many different experts refer back to the benefits of working with other humans to achieve success. The better we work with our teams, our learners, and other institutions, and the more transparent we are with our communication the easier change is for all of us. Which brings me to my next theme…

Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation underpinned the entire conference (it was hosted by a technology company after all!) Many institutional leaders spoke about their recent, ongoing, or planned transformation projects to better incorporate digital capabilities into their organisations and/or curriculums. On a surface level it was exciting; we have so many opportunities to create a truly fabulous curriculum for our students. Unfortunately they were all a bit light on the actual details of what this all meant, and how they went about it.

A few days on I am still mulling over these questions:

What are digital capabilities? What does it mean to be digitally capable?

For some years many of us (the “us” possibly including millennials and older generations, but also Gen Z themselves) made the dangerous assumption that young people (e.g. Gen Z) would develop the digital skills through more through a process of osmosis, than in the conscious ways millennials, and those who came before us, did. How wrong we turned out to be! Janet Lord (Deputy pro vice chancellor, faculty of health and education, Manchester Metropolitan University)  summed it up perfectly by stating that  “many students are quite good at making TikToks, but if you ask them to collaborate on a Google Doc they had no idea how to do that. That was a bit of a surprise to many colleagues.” We see that just like different professions require differing skills and knowlege, the skills you need in digital spaces are vastly dependent on the context in which you are engaging. How as educators and professionals tasked with providing the skills of the future are we to assess what does and what does not need to be taught? How do we make learning opportunities available to students to support their specific digital learning needs? How do we help our learners to identify the skill gaps they have?

How do we ensure that digital transformation stays relevant?

Universities are large and devolved organisations: large-scale change projects literally take years to complete. As those of us delivering these projects, how do we ensure that the finished product is fit for the present it is delivered in, and not just an improvement on the past when the project plan was written? Keynote speaker Paul Iskar spoke about the benefits learning from failed projects, and notes that insights we have gained from the past are not necessarily applicable for the present or the future. So how do we trust that we have made informed decisions?

Perhaps we need to embrace the beauty of the future not being set in stone, we get to decide what it will be, and therefore what skills will be needed. This puts a lot of power in our hands. Perhaps there is nothing wrong with the good old trial and error approach? Afterall, it can be fun…

Playing

Playful learning has been fundamental to early education and is increasingly being brought into secondary schools and higher education.

Playful Engagement – We will play, innovate, and creatively share knowledge

There were a number of sessions delivered on e-sports, roleplaying technologies; with other presentations having an underlying current of just having a go. In the context of digital transformation many speakers reinforced the importance of trying new approaches, technologies and tools with an open mind, and without the fear of wasting time, resources, or money. Learning (and work) is allowed to be fun. Sometimes seeing what is possible with different technologies relies on giving different groups of people access to it and observing what they do is far more valuable then trying to explain, suggest or enforce what the producer intended for it to do. Innovation and creativity go had in hand. I think it is important they we continue to foster learning and working environments that encourage play.

So what now?

Perhaps the most valuable lesson I took away from Digifest 2025 was a reminder that I love to learn. It is so easy to get weighed down with the cyclic nature of BAU tasks that it is easy to not prioritse time to engage in learning experiences. I thoroughly enjoyed having an extended period of time to listen, reflect, and then discuss with my colleagues the suggestions, lessons, and sales pitches I had been exposed to over the two days. At the very least, this experience has reminded me to renew my commitment to regular professional reflection.

Digifest 2025 – Thoughts, Questions & Reflections / Learning Lines by Tess Higgins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0