Meet the OEB26 Speakers: Helen Beetham

We are delighted to welcome Dr Helen Beetham, Lecturer in Digital Education at the University of Manchester, as a keynote speaker at OEB 2026. Helen has spent decades examining, and challenging, the promises made for technology in education. Her work asks difficult questions about AI, agency and sovereignty: who controls the systems on which learning increasingly depends, what new dependencies they create, and what we risk losing when technological change is treated as inevitable.

What was your first thought about this year’s conference theme “Sovereign Learning: Trust, Agency & the Education Reset”?

I’ve written recently about AI ‘sovereignty’ as a collective condition and also about AI ‘agency’ as a personal accomplishment. I find both ideas problematic, but it’s interesting to put them in dialogue. As educators we are always trying to develop people’s agency. Dependency and interdependency are less talked about, but they are the pre-conditions for agency in the learning theories I use. So I’m looking forward to discussing what ‘sovereignty’ and ‘agency’ might say to each other. Also what ‘trust’ means in the context of untrustworthy systems.

If you could look into the year 2046, what do you envision learning will be driven by?

Nearly twenty years ago I worked on a project, Beyond Current Horizons, to advise the UK Government on educational futures. We asked dozens of experts to look ahead to the year 2025. In the end we concluded that the shape of things to come had more to do with social than technical factors, especially whether we were focused on learning as personal capital or learning as social renewal. Of course, people will always disagree about what that demands, but it’s hard to imagine social renewal in 2046 won’t need young people to learn about climate collapse and its mitigations, about how to care for their communities and planet, and how to survive war, conflict and exploitation. In my ideal vision for 2046 the sustainable development goals will drive what it means to learn, across all our different learning cultures.

Which learning technology has recently impressed you?

I’ve been working in edtech a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of promises fail. But I am still finding good uses for live classroom technologies. Things like polling and word clouds, posting boards, shared annotation environments and low-tech virtual worlds. They allow students to build understanding together and they help me to teach adaptively. I also use physical design materials for the same reasons. I’m always impressed with good material and space design, how it enables learning without setting limits. The real world is an infinite canvas!

Which book should everyone read?

Empire of AI by Karen Hao.

What was your most significant learning experience?

I’m grateful to have studied AI in the 1980s and even more grateful to have read and listened to people who found it a troubling project. I’ve kept that learning close, but it’s only been in the last few years that its significance has become clear. On the other hand, learning to keep hens and bees and to grow food communally is probably going to be more important in the longer term.

Which question is asked too rarely when we talk about learning?

Why learn at all? At least AI brings some energy and jeopardy to that question.

What would be the title of your autobiography?

I struggle with the titles of blog posts so I doubt I will ever nail the story of my life! It also doesn’t interest me very much to narrate myself publicly. When I was working as a poet and writing teacher, I won a prize for a poem called  ‘Lessons in falling’, and I think that still sums up what it’s been about.

What are you looking forward to the most at this year’s OEB?

Finding that the OEB community is ready for the big ‘reset’. I am daunted to be speaking in such a significant arena, but there are a lot of people here with the power to change things, so this is where critical issues need to be heard.

Thank you, Helen! Helen Beetham will be speaking at OEB 2026.