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While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.

This paper explores a possible future of postdigital education in 2050 using the means of social science fiction. The first part of the paper introduces the shift from 20th century primacy of physics to 21st century primacy of biology with an accent to new postdigital--biodigital reconfigurations and challenges in and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The second part of the paper presents a fictional speech at the graduation ceremony of a fictional military academy in a fictional East Asian country in 2050. This fictional world is marked by global warfare and militarization, and addressed graduates are the first generation of artificially evolved graduates in human history. The third part of the paper interprets the fictional narrative, contextualizes it into educational challenges of today, and argues for a dialogical, humanistic conception of new postdigital education in a biotech future.

This paper is a complete student-led, student-edited collective writing project (CWP) conducted virtually in Spring 2022 throughout the course Knowledge Socialism taught by professor Michael Peters for the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal university. The CWP involves 4 international, 5 domestic Ph.D. students, and 2 senior Western scholars as reviewers, revealing their thoughts, arguments, understanding, and criticisms towards the creative economy status in East Asian countries (Japan and China mostly) higher education as reflected in the knowledge socialism narratives. Xiyuan as the lead author, co-editing with Woraport and Stefan, assigned each section to other authors and successfully devoted themself to organizing, proofreading, and revising the paper. Through a month of collective work, the final version of the paper elaborates on the contribution of East Asian creative universities and the economy as a whole to the knowledge socialism through co(labor)ation, with implications to the creative labors cultivation and shifted roles of students.

Taking credit for digitalization and platformization, China has initiated its open science infrastructure implementation and made an effort to focus on open access (OA) journals and data sharing over the past two decades. With the continuous development need, issues and concerns have caught in attention, including data accessibility, research transparency, general population awareness and communication of science, public trust in science, and scientific research and innovation efficiency. This paper has unfolded the maze of open science stance in China and elaborated on its current economy, openness and freedom extents, and future innovation potential towards a global open science community, within depth and scope of both the Chinese and Western scholars' interpretations.

This article explores ways in which higher education (HE) slogans, together with related frameworks and policies, increasingly invade the personal, cultural and positional values of individual staff and students. After a quick exploration of examples of embedded university values that are expected to be 'lived', the article outlines some epistemic implications in areas including epistemic positioning, epistemic injustice, epistemic space, data epistemologies, epistemic dominance and epistemic violence. Concluding that epistemologies are always lived, the article explores slogans at the intersections of biology, information and society using the case of excellence. Finally, the article briefly opens up the question of consent. Slogans, frameworks and policy texts exist as all other data assemblages that are subject to regulation. Should they also need to conform to such, or similar, regulations?

This article develops a post-determinist and a post-instrumentalist understanding of education and educational research through the lens of postdigital theory. We begin with historicizing current postdigital research by showing its intellectual ancestry and recognizing its rapidly changing nature. We move on to current state of the art, which we present in three wide themes. The first theme is the great convergence of various lower-level techno-scientific convergences, such as analogue--digital, physics-biology, and biology--information, which results in new epistemologies, ontologies and practices. The second theme is some consequences of the great convergence for education and pedagogy, which result in new postdigital ecopedagogies. The third theme is postdigital research, which is reconfigured by the great convergence towards a closer collaboration between traditional scientific fields and disciplines. We briefly outline four such reconfigurations (multidisciplinary, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and antidisciplinarity) and their implications. The article concludes with a brief list of directions for future work in the field.

The figure of the public intellectual and the act of public pedagogy are fairly central to varieties of critical pedagogy. Public intellectuals have historically been those who speak truth to power and challenge dominant ways of thinking, and critical pedagogy argues that academics have to take up this call, leaving the ivory towers and entering the public sphere. Critical pedagogues are not alone in their concern about the retreat of intellectuals or academics from public life, yet to what extent are these notions of the public intellectual tied to a pre-digital age, and how might the digital age undermine these notions? In this paper, we argue that the digital has facilitated the death of the traditional public intellectual as the means of intellectual production have been dispersed throughout society. Turning to Paolo Virno's writing on potential and history, we examine the pedagogy of the public intellectual and present a new configuration of learning and studying that emphasizes the infinite potentiality of history and the present. Whereas most scholarship defines learning as the actualization of potential, we show that potential is never fully actualized. Such a configuration introduces the need to historically saturate political acts with meaning, which we argue is the new task of public intellectuals in the postdigital age. In order to do this, however, academics who wish to contribute to social movements must embed themselves and operate within social movements, joining the leadership of organic intellectuals and professional revolutionaries, and even viewing their own critical work not as the production of new knowledge but rather the amplification of existing knowledges generated through these struggles, shifting the educational register from epistemology to ontology, and the educational mode of operation from teaching to collective studying.

Purpose: This paper aims at exploring politics of contemporary knowledge cultures and possible directions for responding to the postdigital challenge. Design/Approach/Methods: This paper researches history and present of several prominent strands and readings of the knowledge economy. Following Caruso's work (2016), it examines more closely the differences between the managerial paradigm and the cognitive capitalism paradigm. Recognizing the postdigital nature of contemporary knowledge cultures, it points towards a postdigital merger between the managerial paradigm and the cognitive capitalism paradigm. Findings: The paper identifies individual and social tensions between industrial and post-industrial modes of production and rapidly changing dynamic of social development. It examines the relationships between knowledge cultures and digital technologies. Based on recent insights by the father of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee and his non-determinist views to digital technologies, it identifies knowledge cultures as sites of political struggle against various (material and non-material, technological and non-technological) closures over access to information and knowledge. Finally, it briefly outlines possible directions for responding to the postdigital challenge of knowledge cultures. Originality/Value: The paper provides an original contribution to theory of knowledge cultures and its relationships to the postdigital condition.

This article starts with a brief analysis of what it means to be an intellectual within the US tradition of critical pedagogy. Pointing toward important socio-technological transformations which have taken place in the past few decades, the article situates the concept of the intellectual into the contemporary postdigital context. The article looks into two main areas of intellectual work which seem to have undergone significant transformations--automation and post-truth. It develops possible responses to recent challenges in these areas and shows that contemporary intellectuals working in the tradition of critical pedagogy need to take technology seriously. Heading toward the conclusion, the article promotes Greta Thunberg as an important example of a postdigital intellectual. Our analyses show that critical pedagogy has an important role in the development of contemporary intellectual work. Aiming at constantly transforming challenges, however, old theories require constant reconceptualization in and for our postdigital context. Within this mash-up of questions and answers old and new, we identify a starting point for this reconceptualization in the notion of critical praxis.