Registration now open for AIT’s 2025 Forum on Norms for the Digital Age

AIT 2025 Forum: Norms for the Digital Age from Students to States – Tuesday 28 January

Places are now available for the Archives of IT (AIT) 2025 Forum on Norms of the Digital Age from Students to States. The Forum will take place from 10am-5pm on Tuesday 28 January 2025 at the Livery Hall of the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists and online. The Forum will bring together a high-calibre, multi-disciplinary set of academics to meet with practitioners and leaders from civil society, business, industry, and government.

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View the full Programme 

Read participants biographies

Setting the scene:

Norms are accepted standards or ways of behaving or doing things with which most people agree. And with the progess and adoption of new technologies our contexts of use have shaped the norms governing these different information and communication technologies, such as the internet, social media and the smartphone. Now with the addition of generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, experts at our Forum will discuss how together they are affecting professionalism, journalism, education and international cyber security.

Introduction

AIT’s Chair of Trustees, John Carrington will be joined by our CEO Tola Sargeant (pictured left) to welcome attendees to the Forum. Tola, who is a trained journalist and spent several decades as an industry analyst covering the UK tech market, will also chair a session on how norms have affected Journalism in the Digital Age.

During our day-long event we will explore the following topics:

Evolution of Norms

The first keynote speech of the day will be given by Professor Rich Ling, who was the Shaw Foundation Professor of Media and Technology and is a published author and editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. He will examine the evolution of norms regarding various digital domains, such as remote work, remote education, and online shopping, before, during and after COVID. Many of these applications were first conceived in the 1980s and ‘90s as digitalisation was developing. With the return to the ‘new normal’ after the pandemic, he argues we were again forced to choose the degree to which we would retain the norms that have shaped the use of these technologies as they continue to be central to our lives.

Professionalism in the Digital Age

Early in the IT industry, there was a high value placed on professionalism in programming and the design of IT. Has the norm of professionalism been eroded by the personal computer and more general and high-level programming languages? Have IT disasters, such as the Post Office Fujitsu Horizon Scandal, created new demands for professionalism in IT?

This Roundtable Discussion will feature distinguished speakers, Sir Kenneth Olisa OBE (pictured), IT entrepreneur and Lord Lieutenant of London and Paul Martynenko MBE, former IBM senior technical executive for Europe and a BCS Past President.

Journalism in the Digital Age – Changing Roles and Norms

Journalist and technologiest Bill Thompson, who was co-presenter of Digital Planet on BBC World Service for 20 years, will give a keynote speech on Journalism in the Digital Age: Changing Roles and Norms. He will argue that digital media have created networked amateur or citizen journalists, some of whom have been perceived as a challenge to professional journalists. New media has also changed what journalists need to be able to do, such as to be able to communicate online, and even be more like an influencer, than an objective reporter. So, he will pose the question: What does it mean to be a professional journalist in the digital age?

Norms for Students of the Digital Age – From Calculators to ChatGPT

What should students be permitted to use in the classroom and in their writing and other creative work? What norms should guide students and teachers in the classroom of the digital age? What will that classroom look like? How will students be judged and evaluated?

To answer these questions we will hear from Ravi Chagger, Trust Assistant Headteacher Osborne Co-operative Academy Trust and AIT’s Education Outreach Programme Lead as well as Kieran Gilmurray, CEO of Kieran Gilmurray and Company, a globally recognised authority on AI, automation and digital transformation.

Paper Session from Multiple Disciplinary Perspectives

This session will include papers from the following:

Kate Bradley – Telephone helplines in Britain, 1965-1999: Countercultural DIY activism to professional welfare services over the phone
Kate is a Reader in Social History and Social Policy at the University of Kent, where she teaches and researches criminal justice and social policy history in Britain from the early 20th century to the present.

Patricia Esteve-González – Contextual Factors Shaping the Application of UN Cyber Norms, a Cybersecurity Capacity Study
Patricia is an Oxford Martin Fellow and a Senior Research Associate at the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre, University of Oxford, where she approaches research questions on cybersecurity from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

Dr George Zoukas and Dr Jonathan Foster – Towards Assuring Data Fairness in Trustworthy Machine Learning
Dr Jonathan Foster is Senior Lecturer, Information School, University of Sheffield and Dr George Zoukas is Postdoctoral Research Associate, Information School, University of Sheffield.

The Forum aims to:

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More Information

These forums are in line with AIT’s objective of raising public awareness of the rich and important history of technology in the UK. The 2025 Forum follows on from AIT’s inaugural Forum on the Histories of the Internet, which took place in January 2024, and is available to read here: AIT 2024 Forum on the Histories of the internet.