Lizbeth Goodman is Chair of Creative Technology Innovation and Professor of Inclusive Design for Education at University College Dublin, and an Executive Board member of the Innovation Academy (TCD, UCD, QUB), for which she runs the Social Entrepreneurship module and part of the core introductory interdisciplinary session on creative identities in innovation. She is Chair of the Social Sciences Committee of the Royal Irish Academy. When she joined UCD in 2010 she brought the SMARTlab with her to Ireland, building on the twenty year successful history of socially responsible creative technology development which had been developed in the UK in the past 20 years.
SMARTlab developed the world renowned practice-based PhD Programme through the institute, along with the associated MAGIC Multimedia and Games Innovation Centre and Gamelab.Lizbeth and her teams specialise in developing ground-up technology solutions for people of all levels of cognitive and physical ability, from mainstream learners of all ages to ‘special’ and ‘gifted’ learners and lifelong learners in the developed and developing worlds. In all her work, she applies a universal design method to practice-based innovation to transform lives through providing unlimited access to education and tools for creative expression. Prior to joining UCD, Lizbeth was Director of Research for Futurelab Education, working with David Puttnam’s team to establish innovative platforms for the future of education in a context of global change. In 2008 she was awarded top prizes as Best Woman in Academia and the Public Sphere, and Best Woman in Technology, by Blackberry Rim and an international panel of judges.
Presentation Title: “Max Headroom - unlocking creative communications to enable inclusive learning for all”
Summary: If we are to succeed as a global society in the large effort to make learning accessible to all, we need first as a group to address the very basic issues which still exclude some learners from the ‘knowledge society’. This talk shares some brief examples of work which gives voice and expressive movement to people previously denied those voices, and argues that all of our minds will be expanded by the knowledge we will share only once we level the playing fields of all our learning spaces.
