The Scottish Futures Forum hosted the final seminar in a 4-part series sponsored by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute (SUII) at the Scottish Parliament on 19th November, bringing together academics, practitioners, businesses and policy-makers to take stock  of the discussions in earlier sessions and suggest priorities for 'next steps' in maximising the opportunities for Scotland from developing digital technologies.

The seminar opened with a link-up with the Mareel Arts Centre in Shetland co-ordinated by broadcaster Tom Morton and bringing together college students and staff in Shetland with members of the seminar in Edinburgh to impressively demonstrate the benefits in increased educational opportunity, the quality of learning,  economic spin-offs and the cultural life of the community in Shetland from the connection of the centre to high-speed fibre-optic broadband links (ironically through the Faroe Islands!).  For more on the Mareel centre see http://mareel.org .

Previous seminars had focussed on the emerging features of digital work,  overcoming digital exclusion and education to facilitate 'future proofing' the Scottish workforce.  Details of the seminars and papers from them are available on the project website at http://digitalwork.computing.dundee.ac.uk .  The programme of the SUII is at http://scottishinsight.ac.uk.

The final seminar highlighted a number of issues which need to be addressed, ranging across infrastructure development and access (the availability of adequate broadband across many areas, and especially rural areas in Scotland remains very uneven,  the quality and ease of use of on-line products,  and the approaches which need to be developed in schools, in work-based learning and adult educationand lifelong learning to minimise digital exclusion and allow all sections of the community to cope with the rapidly changing face of digital technology.

Discussion highlighted some of the dilemmas which are arising in aligning education and emerging work patterns.  Whilst it is difficult to predict what new applications of technology will be, trends are apparent in emerging working practices towards flatter hierachies, collective teamworking working, more remote working away from the business base, the importance of extending and applying learning to solving new problems and so on, which emhasise different skills from the individual-based skills focus often dominant in formal education. Whilst there are exciting developments in learning with technology, there remain issues of encouraging 'digital creators',  and facilitating critical and responsible internet use. Whilst the 'convernted' can demonstrate lots of exciting examples  of good practice,  the norm is not reaching these levels.

And there remains a significant proportion of households and people in Scotland who do not have, or indeed do not want, internet access. We need to understand more about why people discontinue internet access despite the benefits claimed from participation.   

The final report from this programme is now being prepared and will be available in 2013.

There is more on the Scotland Futures programme here http://scotlandfuturesforum.org ..