Keynotes -

Keynotes

Dr Nashwa Ismail holds an MSc and PhD from the University of Southampton and is a Fellow of Advance HE. Her expertise lies in digital pedagogies, with a special focus on AI and Games-Based Learning.

She is currently a Research Associate at the Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship (CHERS), Imperial College London, where she contributes to a project on Generative AI (GenAI) for teaching and learning in higher education. She is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Education at Durham University. Additionally, she is Digital Education Convener for the British Educational Research Association (BERA) and is an Associate Editor for the journal Developing Academic Practice at the University of Liverpool.

An established scholar, Dr Ismail has published extensively on global digital education practices, AI literacy, and Digital Literacy and Pedagogies. She has delivered international workshops in the Global South, including countries in Africa (e.g., Kenya), the Middle East (e.g., Egypt, Kurdistan), and Asia (e.g., Thailand, Myanmar), fostering impactful educational practices, digital literacy, and learning transitions. She has taken leading roles in national and international research projects focused on digital education, AI in learning, and the impact of emerging technologies on pedagogy, contributing to strategic advancements in the field. She is also actively engaged in capacity building for academics in AI, supporting educators in integrating AI-driven pedagogies, ethical considerations, and digital transformation strategies into their teaching and research.

Dr Mia Ridge is the British Library’s Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections. As part of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team, she helps enable innovative research based on the British Library’s digital collections, offering support, training and guidance on applying computational research methods to historical collections.

In 2021, she co-authored The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. This followed her successful bid as Principal Investigator to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for ‘Collective Wisdom‘.

She was a Co-Investigator on the Living with Machines project (2018-23), where she led public engagement with digital scholarship and heritage collections through crowdsourcing. Living with Machines was a major inter-disciplinary historical and data science research project analysing digitised sources at scale to provide new insights into mechanisation in the industrial revolution. Her work engaged over 5,500 volunteers in research tasks related to the Living with Machines project. She co-curated the Living with Machines exhibition with Leeds Museums and Galleries, at Leeds City Museum July 2022 – January 2023.

Mia’s research on aspects of human-computer interaction and digital cultural heritage, particularly on crowdsourcing in galleries, libraries, archives and museums, has an international reputation. Her work in digital scholarship is informed by her PhD in digital humanities (Department of History, Open University), titled ‘Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research’. Her edited volume, ‘Crowdsourcing our Cultural Heritage’ (Ashgate) was published in October 2014 and subsequently issued in paperback. In 2021 she led the Collective Wisdom project in writing The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage.