The Department of Cultural and Creative Arts (CCA) and the Graduate School (GS) will jointly organise a Lunchtime Seminar on the strategic use of utopia and crisis in Educational Policies, and AI and Artistic Creativity in Higher Education. You are cordially invited to join the seminar. Details of the seminar are as follows:

Date: 7 August 2023 (Monday)

Time: 12:00 noon - 1:30 pm

Mode: Face-to-Face, B1-G/F-20 /  via ZOOM*

*For ZOOM Participants:

Meeting ID: 991 7473 8908
Passcode: 715080

https://eduhk.zoom.us/j/99174738908?pwd=aWM1OGdNckRHaFZJNnQ0RGwrd3hPQT09

Abstract of Seminar: 

Dangers of Utopian Engineering in Education

An imagined future may set a positive and progressive stage for change, fostering judgment and critique of the present. An utopian perspective can also be set strategically to construct crisis challenging the legitimacy of existing knowledge, morals, arrangement and actors in education. The lecture will elaborate on the strategic use of utopia and crisis in educational policies. It will identify key traveling crisis constructions in educational policies worldwide. The lecture will also demonstrate how to challenge utopian crisis construction with a variety of critical recourses from rhetoric, political philosophy, and science theory.

About the Speaker:

Professor Trippestad is a pedagogy professor with a PhD in Science Theory. His research interests encompass education policy, reforms, rhetoric, teacher professionalism, and teacher and preschool teacher education. Professor Trippestad has previously served as the Director of the Center for Educational Research and the board of the University College of Bergen. Professor Trippestad was also a former member of the Teachers' Professional Ethics Council and is currently a member of the national steering group for preschool and teacher education recruitment.

Abstract of Seminar: 

AI and Artistic Creativity in Higher Education. 

In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with a widened recognition that online education can be both highly effective and woefully inadequate, a new educational issue has rapidly gained prominence in the public sphere: Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI had been predictably developing for decades, never before has so much interest and concern been voiced regarding its likely impacts in higher education, which many in 2023 regard to be a crisis. The following issues will be discussed: What are some theoretical and practical issues for AI in higher education, what implications do they hold for artistic creativity, and what steps may be taken so the application of AI will predominantly strengthen (rather than weaken) higher education?

About the Speaker:

David G. Hebert is a full Professor in the Faculty of Education, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. He also holds positions as Honorary Professor with the Education University of Hong Kong and Affiliated Professor with University of the Faroe Islands. Author or editor of 10 books, he has taught for universities on each inhabited continent, and currently serves as a Board member of the International Society for Music Education and Chair of ISME’s History Standing Committee.