Ina Fourie
Department of Information Science,
University of Pretoria, South Africa
From Competence to Consciousness: Embedding Mindfulness, Reflection, Social Responsibility, Agency, and Adaptive Thinking in Digital Literacy
On-Site Keynote
On-Site in Edinburgh, UK: coming soon
Contemporary societies confront students with growing cognitive, emotional, and ethical demands, requiring them to develop capacities for coping, sense-making, and responsible participation in their studies, future workplaces, and everyday life. They face increasing pressure to balance self-care and mental health with competitiveness, creativity, and an ethical responsibility to confront historical and ongoing injustices, including decolonisation, inclusivity, and the countering of marginalisation. Contemporary digital literacy must respond to such societal complexity and personal pressures by supporting sense-making in a world that prioritises success, competitiveness, and constant change. Coping, complexity, social responsibility, humanness, mindfulness, and authentic reflection are, therefore, core concepts.
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Reading and literacy, information literacy, critical evaluation and ethical use of information, and metacognitive awareness have long shaped discussions in library and information science, education, and discipline-specific digital literacy initiatives. In many contexts, such training has become compulsory and even credit-bearing. Yet accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) environments, widening socio-digital divides, and the emotional turbulence of digital life make expanded forms of literacy more urgent than ever. While technological developments have intensified pressures, they have also created new possibilities for learning, participation, and empowerment. Despite these opportunities, much digital literacy training remains focused on procedural skills, tool mastery, or compliance, often neglecting the emotional, ethical, and relational dimensions that shape how people engage with information. Digital literacy thus needs to go beyond technical training to support human resilience, agency, and reflective capability.
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This keynote examines how critical 21st-century capacities can be meaningfully integrated into digital literacy training—beyond technical proficiency and discipline-based content. It highlights the potential of embedding mindfulness, authentic reflection, and social responsibility to cultivate more grounded, ethically aware, and socially responsive digital citizens. Several theoretical lenses will be used, including human agency, transformative learning, and theories of coping. The intention is to position digital literacy not merely as a skillset, but as a reflective, human-centred, and value-driven practice that attends to global and local inequities, historical harms, and the need for digital practices that support decolonial, inclusive, and socially just information environments. Mindfulness and authentic reflection are presented not as abstract ideals but as practical capacities for cultivating presence, intention, and ethical discernment in fast-moving digital ecosystems. In reimagining digital literacy as a conscious, value-driven practice, we are challenged to recognise that the future of information work depends not only on what we know, but also on how we understand ourselves—and on who we choose to become as responsible digital citizens in a complex society.
Murray Pittock
School of Critical Studies,
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
From Analogue Edinburgh to Digital Futures: Enlightenment and the Smart City legacy and brand
On-Site Keynote
On-Site in Edinburgh, UK: coming soon
The increasing wealth and cultural capital of major global cities and their hinterlands, based on diversity, infrastructure and the knowledge economy, is recognized as both an opportunity and a threat to political consent and civic engagement in Europe and the US. This keynote demonstrates that the ‘Smart City’ concept belongs to an analogue as much as to a digital era, and explores the circumstances of its development in early modern Edinburgh (the same modelling can be applied to other C18 and C19 cities providing enough data survives). Focusing on two areas, creativity and innovation (cf the work of Florida and Rogers), the keynote concludes with an examination of digital innovation in the creative economy in today’s Paris and Vienna, and its effect on income and economic growth.
Heidi Julien
Graduate School of Education,
State University of New York at Buffalo, United States
Reflections on Moving Towards a Digitally Enlightened Society
On-Site Keynote
On-Site in Edinburgh, UK: coming soon
Heidi Julien, Professor of Information Science at the University at Buffalo, has been thinking about information and digital literacy for 30 years, exploring these concepts and investigating efforts to develop information skills. The conference theme, “Moving Towards a Digitally Enlightened Society” is appropriately future-oriented but also, perhaps ironically, evokes the optimism and values of the enlightenment era. Her iConference talk will explore the idea of “digital enlightenment” and the challenges she sees to achieving that goal, particularly in our AI-obsessed context. Intentionally provocative, Julien will tackle the assumptions we may bring to notions of digital enlightenment and will consider the so-called solutions we are pressed to accept.
Tom Mackey
Department of Arts and Media
in the College of Arts and Sciences
Empire State University, United States
From Information Literacies to Metaliteracy: Learner Agency in an AI-Mediated World
Virtual Keynote
Virtual: Monday, 23 March 2026: 9:00am - 10:30am (UTC-4 - New York)
The Enlightenment established enduring commitments to reason, education, and the ethical use of knowledge. These ideas continue to shape how literacy, learning, and public inquiry are understood in libraries, universities, and democratic discourse. They have also carried forward assumptions about whose knowledge was valued and whose voices were included. In today’s AI-mediated information environment, these tensions are intensified as algorithmic systems increasingly influence how knowledge is interpreted, circulated, and taken as credible.
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This keynote argues that evolving approaches to information literacy, AI literacy, and digital authenticity require a shift beyond discrete or skill-based methods toward a more comprehensive and reflective model of learning. Rather than positioning AI as a standalone competency, metaliteracy operates as a holistic pedagogical approach that centers the self-aware learner. It is grounded in metacognition, ethical reasoning, and active participation in AI and emerging technology environments.
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The talk explores key components of metaliteracy, including learner roles, learning domains, and characteristics that emphasize reflective and social learning. Particular attention is given to the learner as producer, not only as a consumer or evaluator of information, but as an ethical creator of knowledge whose choices shape meaning, authority, trust, and authenticity within complex digital systems.
Ultimately, this keynote presents metaliteracy as a lens for rethinking how plural information literacies respond to complex, AI-mediated problems. In doing so, it offers a pathway toward more inclusive, active, and human-centered learning grounded in learner agency, intentionality, and responsibility.
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