Dr. Maren Deepwell
Leading Beyond Digital: Human-Centred Leadership for the Next Era of Higher Education
Bringing a strategic perspective to her keynote for ASCILITE 2026, Maren will share new perspectives on the future of education informed by research for her forthcoming book. The starting point for this research is a generation of Educational Technology professionals moving into senior leadership roles, bringing a high level of critical, digital literacy to navigating a fast-paced, constantly changing Higher Education landscape. Yet since 2020 this landscape has continued to undergo seismic shifts, from the impact of the global pandemic and the rapid adoption of AI tools to socio-economic and environmental changes. To respond to these challenges, leaders at all levels need a new skillset of reflective, practical and human-centred capabilities that go beyond established digital capabilities.
Drawing on interviews with leaders conducted over the past three years as well as skills frameworks and best practice examples, we will explore how we can foster capabilities which enable us to:
- Lead effectively in a blended context that includes everything from analogue to AI and balance the affordances of digital technologies with the priorities of a human-centred future;
- Increase awareness of digital sustainability for individuals and organisations and find practical ways to minimise digital waste and promote the responsible use of technology;
- Be authentic, creative leaders that set our own cadence for collaboration and communication instead of following the frantic pace of digital productivity.
Dr. Rene Kizilcec
Worth Showing Up For
Declining attendance at lectures and office hours predates generative AI, but AI has sharpened the question underlying it: why should students come to campus when a model can explain the same material on demand? For information transfer, the model is often the better offer, and this reveals less about the technology than about how transactional much of higher education had already become. Yet the work students are preparing for is fundamentally collaborative, conducted in and across teams where competent AI use is assumed and where the differentiating capabilities are relational: building trust, communicating under pressure, repairing misunderstandings, and maintaining ownership of one’s ideas when a model can generate a plausible substitute. Universities are well positioned to cultivate these capabilities, but doing so requires giving students problems worth doing together rather than mandating presence. In this keynote, I argue that conversational and simulation-based AI is unexpectedly well suited to creating such problems, drawing on research from my lab on clinical communication training, language learning, and AI-supported teaching. I will also examine what remains unknown: which designs actually improve learning, for whom, and under what conditions, and the evidence infrastructure the field needs to answer these questions credibly.
Associate Professor Trish McCluskey
Reflections of a Cyborg Boomer
After more than three decades navigating the intersection of tertiary education and digital technology, Trish McCluskey describes herself as being in the departure lounge of her career.
She had imagined this might be a time to reflect wistfully. Instead, AI arrived and raised some of the most profound questions of her career.
Trish has spent decades as a “cyborg” educator, adapting alongside successive waves of digital change, from DOS and the early web to social media, MOOCs and now AI agents. In this keynote, she reflects on what that history of enthusiasm, experimentation, resistance and shoehorning might teach us about the moment we now find ourselves in.
Blending humour, storytelling and hard-earned insight, Trish explores why trust, care and connection may matter more, not less, in an AI-infused university. Rather than asking what AI will do to higher education, she explores what is worth protecting and amplifying?
Reflections of a Cyborg Boomer is a reflection on what decades of technological change can teach us about what comes next, and why the future of higher education may depend as much on what we choose to preserve as what we choose to transform.