(Getting to) The Heart of Education

Prof. Flodström is the Chief Education Officer of EIT Digital and a member of the Management Committee of EIT Digital. 

Prof. Flodström started his career in Palo Alto, USA, as a member of research staff in Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Since 1985 he is professor in physics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. Prof. Flodström has been the Secretary General of the Swedish Research Council for Engineering Sciences and President at Linköping University (LiU), Sweden. He was President of the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm until July 2007 when he was appointed University Chancellor for Swedish universities.

Flodström is member of the Swedish Academy for the Engineering Sciences (IVA). He is also honorary doctor at Riga Technical University in Latvia, honorary doctor of Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and honorary professor in Dalian University of Technology in China. He is a member of the advisory board of Karlsruhe Technical Institute (KIT) and a former Chairman of CLUSTER and Baltech - a network of technical universities around the Baltic Sea. He has also been guest researcher at HASYLAB/DESY in Hamburg, Germany as well as in National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Gaithersburg, USA.

Esther Wojcicki is an internationally known journalism teacher and the founder of the Palo Alto High School Media Arts Program, a program that focuses on empowering students through the use of media (newspaper, magazine, yearbook, websites, video production, photography, radio, & television). The program started in 1984 with an already established (1918) 6 -8 page newspaper and 19 students; it has grown to become one of the most distinguished and the largest scholastic media program in the nation today (2016) with 600+ students, five additional teachers, nine publications, and a new 25,000 sq. ft Media Arts Center (2014).

Esther is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at MediaX at Stanford, a 2009 MacArthur Foundation Research Fellow, ; the 2002 California Teacher of the Year by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing; the 2011 Charles O’Malley Award recipient from Columbia Scholastic Press. In 2013, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Palo Alto University, and in 2016 an honorary doctorate from Rhode Island School of Design. In November, 2016 she was awarded the MyHero Award for her work in global education. She has been a speaker at multiple conferences including TED (2015), G20 Summit, and Singularity University Summit. She co-authored popular education book on blended learning entitled Moonshots in Education: Launching Blended Learning in the Classroom (2015) that explains a way to revolutionize education for the digital age. Her focus is give student agency in the classroom to empower their creativity and innovation skills. She is also the mother of Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, Janet Wojcicki, Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF Medical School and Anne Wojcicki, CEO of 23andMe. She is married to Stanford Physics Professor Stanley Wojcicki. She and her husband are proud graduates of UC Berkeley. They have nine grandchildren.

Dr Ben Williamson's research traces the connections between educational policy, digital technologies, and practices in schools and universities. 

He is the author of Big Data in Education: The digital future of learning, policy and practice (Sage, 2017) and over 30 research articles and chapters. Recent topics of Ben’s research include data analytics, algorithmic decision-making, coding in schools, behavioural apps, and the development of performance metrics in the schools and HE sectors.

He is especially interested in examining how digital technologies and data are brought into education policy and practice through the involvement of policy networks of government agencies, think tanks, consultancies, policy labs and software companies. His current projects focus on ‘intimate data analytics’ such as wearable technologies,  and on the ‘data infrastructures of higher education’ that are required for performance measurement of universities.

Ben is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling, maintains a public research blog at https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/, and on Twitter he is @BenPatrickWill.

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I am an eminent educator with twenty-five years in higher education: building extensive national and international networks, an encyclopaedic knowledge of the sector and leading on university-wide programmes of portfolio and curriculum development, organizational transformation, strategic planning and global engagement.

As an entrepreneurial leader, I have been an attractor for significant inward and external investment supporting infrastructure development, education improvements impacting ~95,000 students and promoting academic development for over 3,000 academic and professional staff in Australia and the UK. I have led on ten cross-university initiatives, including: three major curriculum and portfolio development programmes, transnational, blended learning and infrastructural education programmes operating with large capital (< $40,000,000) and revenue budgets (< $5,000,000).

I have held responsibility up to Deputy Vice Chancellor level for portfolio areas including education and student support, and as a Director of Research raising over £5,000,000 in applied research, development and innovation funding through 56 projects and programmes, supporting numerous UK businesses, changing policy and delivering regional growth and research advance. Career highlights include: making gains of 8% in student retention and raising $7,300,000 in revenue from targeted learning interventions.

My frameworks, case studies, models and academic work are captured in seven books and over 200 conference papers and journal articles, garnering 8,000 citations (44H index). My most recent book: Education in Computer Generated Environments came into paperback in 2017 and was published in the Routledge Research in Education series, outlining a ‘new learning’ paradigm.

Currently, I am advising internationally-leading educational institutions and agencies as an Executive Consultant, supporting EdTech start-ups as a Board Advisor and continuing to develop internationally-leading research as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of London (Birkbeck).

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