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Virtual Futures 2.0'11

As digital timers embedded within machines twitched towards the stroke of midnight 1999 the world held its breath wondering what chaos would ensue in the very first second of the new millennium. Only those technologies that were created at the time of millennial angst were bestowed with mechanisms that could deal with the transition from one epoch to another. The so-called millennium 'bug' threatened those of us that relied on older technologies and who expected the world to literally stop counting.

Of course, the future is always virtual and many things that seem imminent or inevitable, such as Y2K, never actually happen. Fortunately our ability to survive the future is not contingent on our capacity for prediction though sometimes, on those much more rare occasions, something remarkable comes of staring the future deep in the eyes and challenging everything that it seems to promise. A role which the Virtual Futures conference reaquired when it was 'rebooted' on the 18th-19th June 2011 with the support of the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), Student as Producer (Research) Grant.