World Learning Summit 2024 is our 14th annual event, starting out in 2010 with a first conference on the theme of education´s digital future. Education and technology is still an important theme for us, but we invite discussions, panels and papers and workshops that contextualize challenges in higher education more broadly. Our mission is to explore and cultivate a sense of cross-disciplinary thinking on education challenges in the context of technology and globalization. 

These are big themes. And it explains why we try to keep the annual summit small enough for conversations and networking to matter. The summits began at the University of Agder in Southern Norway, through the research center Future Learning Lab. It has by now gained an international community — with a number or returning attendees over the years. So far with visitors from 40+ countries. And in 2024, Future Learning Lab is joined by another center at the Unicversity of Agder: CreaTeME – a Center of Excdellence in Music Education.

This year WLS is also proud to be collaborating with the University of Dubrovnik on hosting the event.

One of several dimensions of this collaboration is the many ways in which a game-inspired education design pedagogy emerges from the convergence of technologies leaving older models of education less viable. Game-based learning and gamified learning introduces a narrative mode in which the learner is in charge, exploring different avenues of developing and advancement through engaging with a story, a plot, solutions and ways to get there.

These are deep-seated challenges and educators need to talk more about them, about how to structure learning designs around approaches that are less dependent on texts so easily searched, copied and pasted these days. What alternatives do we have and how do we make shifts? One thing we can do, is to get together in the city where many parts of Game of Thrones were filmed — a TV series based on games based on books.