Time: 04:00 PM
Location: Teams
CIC is delighted to welcome Prof. Linda Castañeda as a visiting scholar June-Sept. 2026. Linda is Professor of Educational Technology, University of Murcia, Spain, and will present a 4-part seminar series: Educational Optics: Four Instruments for Seeing and Shaping Learning Spaces
4-5pm AEST • All welcome on Teams • This will be recorded and replayable
Overview: Optics, of course, has two meanings in English — the instruments through which we see, and how something appears from the outside. This series is unapologetically about both. Each of the four seminars introduces a different instrument — a prism, a lens, a mirror, a telescope — not as metaphors for their own sake, but as ways of seeing something that matters: the spaces people build to learn, the spaces institutions inherit rather than intentionally design, and the spaces that AI is quietly reshaping whether we decide to or not. The question running through all four is deceptively simple: what do we want learning spaces to look like — and who gets to decide what they become? These conversations are grounded in research, policy work and practical experimentation across higher education systems and contexts.
Seminar 3 — The Mirror: Teaching is Deciding: What Digital Competence Reveals About Higher Education
Abstract: Higher education is asking urgent questions about its own future: How do we teach in the age of AI? How do we prepare students for a world we cannot fully anticipate? These are the right questions. But they are almost always asked without acknowledging a more uncomfortable truth: that universities rarely make conscious, collective decisions about how they teach. Teaching happens. By inertia, by tradition, by default. Neither institutions, nor teachers, nor students have typically sat down to decide what kind of learning they want to make possible — and why. This seminar argues that this non-decision is itself a decision. And that it has consequences. We use digital competence not as a solution to this problem, but as a mirror — because when universities are forced to define what good teaching with technology looks like, they cannot avoid asking what good teaching looks like at all. What that mirror reflects is rarely comfortable. But it is always revealing. The discussion draws on large-scale initiatives on digital competence and academic development, as well as research into how institutions and educators negotiate educational change.
Bio: Prof. Linda Castañeda is Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Murcia (Spain) and Visiting Scholar at the University of Technology Sydney. Linda’s research explores how people learn, teach and make educational decisions in contexts of technological change. Her work spans personal learning, academic development, digital competence, educational leadership and the educational implications of artificial intelligence, always with a particular interest in agency, professional judgement and institutional transformation. Over the past two decades, she has led and contributed to numerous national and international research projects, developed conceptual frameworks that have informed educational research and practice, and collaborated with universities and public institutions on digital transformation and professional learning. Her current work brings together theory, policy and educational design to help educators make sense of AI beyond instrumental narratives, with a particular focus on teaching, assessment and professional judgement in higher education. More about her research, publications and ongoing projects can be found at www.lindacastaneda.com.