Every field has its standard scripts, the received ways of thinking that come, over time, to feel like the only ones available. In digital education, those scripts are written largely in the language of scale, efficiency, and personalisation, and we have been performing them so faithfully, for so long, that some of us have forgotten they were ever written at all. Yet every script has an author. The questions worth asking are who wrote them, in which rooms, and for whose benefit, and whether they are standard for everyone or only for some, remaining foreign to the rest of us, who are expected to receive them with gratitude.

This issue gathers people writing their own.

Chief among them are our five new Global Fellows for the 2026 to 2027 cycle, introduced in the pages that follow. On 5 August, at Tun Dr Ismail Hall, they delivered the lectures of our Second Annual Public Lecture Series, each taking up the theme Beyond Standard Scripts from a distinct vantage point. Prof Lim Cher Ping asked what we lose when we build teacher development for the many and call it scale. Prof Shinobu Yume Yamaguchi asked who gets left out when we build AI for everyone. Prof George Veletsianos questioned our obsession with speed, and what learning loses when everything is measured by the time it saves. Prof Felicitas Macgilchrist began, unexpectedly, with rage, and turned it towards care. Prof Bart Rienties asked whether, if we were to invent the university today, it would look anything like the one we have. This issue offers a glimpse of that day, and two of the Fellows have contributed essays that carry their arguments further.

Also featured here are the inaugural Fellows of our Southeast Asia Fellowship, and it is in their work that the theme feels most alive. These are early and mid-career scholars asking Southeast Asia’s own questions about its own digital future: gendered memory in Indonesia, platform labour in the Philippines, heritage and data in Cambodia, disability and access in Malaysia, and, in Thailand, the understanding of khwan, the life essence that scatters under the speed of digital life and must be called back collectively, set against a sociodigital future built for throughput rather than care. None of this is settled ground. It is being thought at the very edge of the field and, over the coming year, transformed into immersive works that will open at REXKL in December.

What holds these contributions together is a conviction that the future of digital education is not something that simply unfolds before us. It is authored. A public that is not part of the conversation about the education it receives does not get to shape that future. It merely inherits it.

I hope you will read on and, wherever your own work lies, take up the pen.

Best
Dr David Lim, Editor