Teaching and Learning Conference 2026
Showcasing the Clinical Education and Digital Culture Course
This page brings together the conference materials for the Clinical Education and Digital Culture course, including the key course aims, learning outcomes, and introductory media.
Conference Overview
About the course
This course helps participants gain critical awareness of technology's contribution to the learning, teaching, training and practice environment, and invites reflection and evaluation of what it means to be a clinical educator and practitioner within a highly digitalised culture.
Resources, posters, examples, readings and more from the posters at Teaching and Learning Conference 2026 are gathered here. Please note QR codes will only work for University of Edinburgh members via their University account.
Conference Poster Triptych
Open the poster PDF in a new tab
Co-Creating the Course and Conference Contributions
The three posters were created to showcase the course and provoke questions and dialogue with educators attending the conference.
Poster 2 - Imploding Clinical Education: Exploring Digital Culture through an Object-Oriented Pedagogy and Co-Creation
Poster 2 presents how the course was structured. Co-creation can be challenging: creating freedom for exploration and self-directed learning while ensuring equity of assessment and scaffolding for that learning. Luck and a good network of connections for inspiration are key.
An STIS seminar on deconstructing devices by Alice Street and Millie Webb from the After Single Use project introduced the "implosion method", a pedagogical approach developed by Joe Dumit that asks students to identify a specific object and then ask a series of questions. This provided exactly the sort of flexible open framework I was looking for to give an open topic and then a set of questions to ask and explore in answering it.
Implosion Questions
These are taken from Dumit's (2014) paper "Writing the Implosion: Teaching the World One Thing at a Time" at https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.09.
Labor dimensions: How was it produced and who is involved in its production? Are there stages in its production? Where has it traveled to and from? What are the histories of its productions? Who maintains these processes of production? Where are they maintained? How is it used and how is using it seen as labor, or not? What forms of labor and work incorporate it or make use of it? Is it used up? If not, how is it passed on, transferred, communicated? What routes do these processes take? What kinds of actors (human and nonhuman) are involved, and what kinds are excluded?
Professional/Epistemological dimensions: How is knowledge of the process and its production demarcated and professionalized? What kinds of knowledge count in talking about it? What kind of professionals are involved in making expert decisions regarding its development, production, and dissemination? How are each of these stages funded? In projecting its future use? What kinds of controversies of this knowledge are happening? Who is involved? In what kinds of institutions do they work? How is it articulated by medical, legal, governmental, religious, psychological, engineering, military, economic, academic, new age, and educational professionals? What are the political-economic histories of this?
Material dimensions: What materials are involved in its production and maintenance? Where have these materials come from? How are they disposed of? What hazards are considered among these materials? What are the labor dimensions of these material productions? What are the global, economic, and political dimensions of their use? What are the histories, sciences, and political dimensions of these materials? How do these help constitute it?
Technological dimensions: What kinds of technologies and machines enable it to be produced and maintained? What technologies are joined with it? Who has access to these machines and technologies? What are their histories? What sorts of information technologies are involved? What are the political, economic, bodily, labor, and historical dimensions of these technologies? How do they help constitute it?
Context and situatedness: Where does it appear in the world? How does it appear and next to what or in what? What activities or ways of life enable one to come across it? What kinds of audiences is it addressed to? Who is excluded in these addresses? When can it appear? What is the rhythm of its appearance? How does this matter?
Political dimensions: What kinds of local, national, and international bodies claim jurisdiction over it? What bodies play a part in approving it (e.g., lobbyists, patents, corporate sponsorship, etc.)? What are the histories of regulations concerning it? How do these regulations help constitute it? How is it understood in terms of political positions in the world? How can we articulate the ways it is understood with political discourses? How is it hegemonic, in what ways can we see it as marshaling our consent to dominant orders? What kinds of legislation affect it? How do political considerations make use of it? What are the political positions as seen through the lens of this artifact (they often vary by artifact and moment)? How does this matter?
Economic dimensions: The process as commodity: how is it marketed, purchased, consumed? Where and by whom? How is it involved in a world marketplace? What kinds of capital, debt, credit, and labor relations are involved in producing, marketing, and circulating it? Who sells it? How are costs calculated? How are risks calculated? By whom and when? What are the histories and materialities of those relations? Who is involved at each stage and how are differences in power situated? How do these help constitute it?
Textual dimensions: What texts are involved in it? What texts refer to it? What kinds of texts? Who produces them and who reads them? Where and in what organizations and institutions are the texts produced and read? What are the histories of these texts and how are they funded? What kinds of textual associations can be made? How does this matter?
Bodily/organic dimensions: How are bodies related to it? What forms of attention, affect, emotion, and cognition are involved? Are there particular ways in which we think of ourselves that also involve or sustain this process? What kinds of bodies, including nonhumans, and bodily relations are involved in producing it? What kinds make use of it? How are these bodies and relations gendered? Are there racial, gendered, differently abled, or other group identifications that help construct these bodies? What ways of life are involved? What are the histories of all these relations? How do these help constitute it?
Historical dimensions: What concepts refer to it? What are the histories of these concepts? Was it invented, when and by whom? Are there different and competing versions of its histories? Who tells these histories? How has it traveled historically? Repeat the above dimensions for each aspect of its history. How do these help constitute it?
Particle Dimensions: How can the process be divided up? What are its parts? What are its stages? Treating each part or stage as a process, repeat the above analysis.
Educational dimensions: How does it appear in our socialization? When do we learn about it in school? During the rest of life? What kinds of people/bodies get to learn about it? How much do we learn about it? What aspects of it are avoided? What are the histories of teaching about it? How does this matter?
Mythological dimensions: What roles does it play in fantasies? What kinds of national narratives make use of it? How does it appear in entertainment? What other grand narratives, stories, and strong associations involve it (e.g., progress, risk, joy, fear, science, militarism, success, decline, horror, self-improvement, financial security, nuclear family, motherhood, fatherhood, independence, adolescence, democracy, origin stories, stories of difference, privilege, death, pornography, sports)? How do these matter?
Symbolic dimensions: What are the many different ways in which it can be taken as a symbol? How does this process serve in symbolic systems? What sorts of ideas, metaphors, movements, ideologies, and the like are associated with it? For whom are these relevant, to whom do they matter, and what contests over meaning are they involved in? What are the histories of these meanings and contests over meaning? How do they matter?
Using Miro Boards
Rather than use Blackboard Learn discussions, Miro boards were suggested by the eProgramme Support Officer, Femke, based on her experiences as a student on the MSc in Digital Education. Student responses were positive. The poster presents some of that work and feedback from students. Miro provided a flexible space.
We also used Miro for course readings on a different collaboration board where PDFs were added and guest speakers including Max Perry and Tyler Harvey from STIS could select readings and share artefacts to annotate and discuss during live conversations via Teams.
Poster 3 - Student reflections and presentation links
Poster 3 reproduces text submitted by students on the course from their written reflection, together with QR code links to their submitted presentations.
Students chose topics of interest and relevance to their clinical education area. They then created two 8-minute presentations: one outlined the problem space. The second responded to it. Students were free to select their tools and approach. Minnie made mini-documentaries using a smartphone and CapCut video editor. Luke explored the origins of the heart surgery live case, then vibe-coded an eLearning platform using real video and text entry analysed by an LLM against a model answer. Learning to code or create an eLearning platform was not the task; however, AI vibe-coding enabled an incredibly creative and thorough response. The video link is to his explanation of the process. Shady explored neurosurgery, making extensive use of AI images, while Niamh took an analogue response to a digitally saturated training area. I ran out of time to showcase the other brilliant presentations but hope to add more here in the future.
Poster 1 - AI as New Dawn? Or Death knell?
We seem stuck in a new binary - where AI is presented either as an almost magical/transformative/unknown and unknowable magical or alien thing that will change everything for the better, or on the verge of disaster - a death knell for thinking and learning.
This was designed by Steve as a provocation** after readings that seemed to exemplify this binary.
Why the monolith? Well, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen's "Techno Optimist Manifesto" presents humanity as "poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. ... Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone - we are literally making sand think. ... Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver."
This seems to channel "the monolith" from 2001 and, after (re)watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and the famous opening scene where primitive humans are "enhanced" by the Obelisk - learning to use tools for the first time, resulting in the even more famous transition sequence. These are the visual language and metaphors of Silicon Valley around AI, ripe for subverting.
Adapting text to look like the other famous SF opener - the Star Wars "crawl text" was an opportunity to cite one of the most thought-provoking and influential blogs and blog posts for the course design - The box and the module from Stephen Fitzpatrick's Substack: "Teaching in the Age of AI", where he explores the shift to agentic AI and how design thinking resembles teaching, arguing that "agentic AI introduces something fundamentally different. I can now craft an interactive learning experience - deciding what it should do, how it should be organized, who would use it, and what problem it needs to solve. That's a much different - and more involved - cognitive activity."
However, this design thinking seems to stand in contrast to a framing of AI use as the death knell of thinking and critical reasoning. While Edinburgh has a much more positive engagement with AI generally, the framing of it is still generally within academic misconduct and risk.
I was reminded of the defining shock of the 1987 public service advert AIDS: Don't Die of Ignorance, which was easily amended to read AI.
Adding the text about cognitive offloading and coding here was again a provocation - it seems to assume that you want or need to "become expert at doing this yourself" rather than this being an opportunity to engage in design thinking and prototyping without having to master those skills.
Tim Fawns, who used to lead the CEDC course, has recently explored this meaningfully on LinkedIn. This poster seeks to visually call for moving beyond binaries and to embrace potential critically AND creatively.
** it was also to make some wall art for our almost windowless office in Chancellor's ;-)
Course Media