When I started my stay at the Connected Intelligence Centre, I wrote that I didn’t want to come to Australia to do exactly the same things I do in Murcia, only 17,500 kilometres further away.
Educational Optics wasn’t part of the plan then. The idea emerged here, while talking with Simon about what I could share from what we do in Murcia, and how I could do that in a place that doesn’t necessarily share our references, our vocabulary, or the way we frame problems. At some point I thought that perhaps I needed more than one seminar… and, you know, once you start adding, why stop? (yes, the Muchness dear Alice), so four emerged: The Prism, The Lens, The Mirror and The Telescope.
But the seminars didn’t exist. I built them here from scratch: the arguments, the connections, the questions, the metaphors and every single slide, the visual identities, the fonts, the colour palettes… And that process ended up becoming a much more important part of my stay than I had expected.
I even had to think about how to introduce myself… I had great fun making slides that introduced me through the metaphors themselves (I’m particularly proud of the ones in the first two seminars). The Prism forced me to think about what I actually wanted to do with our work on the dimensions of AI, beyond simply presenting a framework. The Lens made me return to PLEs and ask myself what I can see in them now that I didn’t see in quite the same way a few years ago. The Mirror started with teachers’ digital competence and ended up connecting it with institutional digital transformation and educational judgement. And while preparing The Telescope, I realised that the story I wanted to tell wasn’t really the story of the different things I’ve been doing with AI in my teaching but, as I ended up saying in the seminar, the evolution of the problems I needed to solve and of what I needed to be able to see.
Each seminar was also being built while the stay itself was still unfolding: through conversations, questions, meetings, and the seminars that came before it. Some connections emerged precisely through trying to explain my work here and listening to what other people could see in it.
When I planned the series, I talked about it as an exercise in translation: reformulating my work so that it could enter into conversation with people who don’t necessarily belong to my field. What I hadn’t thought enough about was that translating your work for others also forces you to look at it again yourself.
I haven’t discovered that everything I’ve done over the last twenty years was secretly connected — fortunately — but connections and questions have emerged that I want to keep thinking about. In fact, there were things I wanted to do and was absolutely sure I would do that, after working through these seminars, I’ve now decided to do differently. And some I’ve decided not to do at all…
So Educational Optics hasn’t been a series of four seminars that I came to Australia to give. It has been one of the things I built during my time here.
And that difference matters to me. It is a fundamental part of what I’m taking away from this time here… As you can see, things are starting to wind down… although, in the end, nothing ever really comes to a complete close. There is still a lot to do. Let’s get on with it.