Annette Markham and I gave the opening keynote for NORDMEDIA 2025 together and had a lot of fun! I’ll try to write more about our talk later, but I wanted to share this list of ideas from the audience right away. The tagline of the conference is “Imagining Livable Futures”, and we decided the main goal of our keynote would be how we as media scholars can actually work to achieve livable futures and not just critique what’s going wrong. The buzz of 400 people in the auditorium discussing this with their neighbours was amazing! I forgot to photograph them, tragically. We asked them to share ideas on Mentimeter and 70 of them took the time to write out their ideas. Here they are – maybe you’ll be inspired? If you have more ideas, please share them in the comments!

• Have coffee
• Discuss with students and colleagues. Awareness
• I will stop burying my head in the ground and confront AI
• Confront/discuss with media industries:
• Or tea
• Focus on critical literacy
• We need to organize together with the civil society. There is real power there!
• Make AI depressed by telling it we hate it over and over.
• Literacy! Advocacy!
• Desperately convince my CS students to work on projects that matter.
• Inform our students and colleagues of the pitfalls (inherent biases) of AI.
• Prepare for the next “inevitable” tech when AI has passed
• Educate ourselves
• Rethink our relationship with mother nature
• Train independent journalists
• Help students learn criticality so they can become critical media producers
• Make more time for engagement with people
• raise conscientious, empathetic, empowered kids (& students!) who don’t feel like doom is inevitable
• Write a manifest
• Teaching
• I don’t know
• We need national/nordic standards for how to handle AI in education.
• Resist until the AI hype dies
• Make visible the material consequences
• Make really specific assignments. More specific interpersonal interaction.
• Give better incentives to students/users than what the companies can offer. That’s always what encourages humans.”
• Discuss with students and colleagues to form awareness
• Engage in uni level policy making on AI use
• We need to talk more with students, discuss with them and make them discuss. Make them defend their ideas, use pop culture examples
• Teach our students critical AI literacy
• Pause to rethink, the race is exhausting ?
• Reach the public, steer the conversation
• Cyberbully Sam Altman
• Have different methods of exams to avoid use of AI
• Return to pen and paper in teaching
• volunteer
• Teach AI developers to understand humans and society
• Use it as a playmate – but know that as many playmates it might be silly or wrong – even when it is fun
• Change tech dependency at our university
• Confront media industries
• Embrace healthy snacks
• To listen, see and meet each other better than Ai can do.
• Learn from the Terminator movies?
• Have a critical approach towards AI.
• Use and challenge AI in the classroom and in assignments
• Engage university managements, and have them understand the problems.
• Resist it.
• Oral exams and conversations
• Make games
• Read more books.
• First of all, take care of mental health of scholars
• Engage in public debates on AI and use of AI
• STOP using Twitter/X, Facebook, etc and start using Mastodon!
• Read more of your work and adopt creative methods
• Fix the system before fixing students
• Let the students understand that the I in AI has nothing to do with intelligence.
• Make students complete practical projects, where it’s okay to use ai but it needs to be productive and meaningful.
• start grading students papers with AI. Once they see the feedback, they will go back
• experiment explore try out – human and machine interaction
• Confront media industries
• Support democratic literacy among young people
• Demand conceptual clarity: GenAI is not all AI and many people, including university admin & guidelines, are having hard time figuring it out.
• Keep telling people why using GenAI is problematic, even though it makes them uncomfortable.
• Fight my own university and most of my colleagues who LOVE AI / LLM
• I keep my AI-assistant accountable. I teach my colleagues to approach AI critically
• Make stories with nuanced perspectives on sustainability and diversity.
• More human interaction
• Experiment more with AI tools and look critically on how to humanize it and make it more truly useful for regular people.
• Find out and get across what humans can do that AI cannot
• Experimenting and then comparing AI outcomes with human outcomes.
• think/teach outside the witness or NordMedia
• Prioritize talk/ conversation over writing.
• Publish opinion pieces in local and national press, together with our students, to get conversations going
• Initiate European/internationale collaboration and Exchange
• Force students to only use AI for an assignment, present it, and force them to justify whatever is written there
• Understanding AI and the environmental crises in conjunction
• Have a dialogue with teachers and students with less to no screens
• Ask ourselves if we have been too optimistic about new media so that we can go forward in a more critical way
• Think with different disciplines about how to use AI for good – including reflections about risks
• Raise public and peer awareness of AI literacies, promote AI governance and engage in critical debates on the educational, societal and political implications of AI
• Be more reflectively playful.
• build transnational scholarly solidarities. Stop being so siloed/isolated!
• Discuss with students what genAI does for learning
• To challenge your own being in the comfort-zone and test jumping out of it!
• Interact with students and industry
• Search for and teach alternative methods(and perhaps better?) which do what we use AI for
• “To start with: work with students. They have alredy created a lot of strategies teachers & universities are not aware of.
• What is the role AI & role of libraries. Have some interesting data on this.”
• The world needs to learn how to rely less on AI. Every bubble is bound to burst. Sadly, if we want collective action and a strong response, we need a crisis 🙂
• Build strong European sovereignty. Alternatives to commercial and state-controlled AI
• Continue studying crutical AIED and defending epistemically sustainable HE.
• HE – espe ually managers and boards -should consider and argument why we need universities.
• Resist corporate AI!