Our panel was Nicola Dandridge whose Universities UK body can be found here; Andrew Bollington of the University of London whose partner courses with MOOC provider Coursera begin very soon; and Patrick McAndrew who has pioneered these various intiatives at the Open University.

Some attendees asked for a list of some of the services we touched on, so to that end, check out the following and educate yourself…

MOOCs: Coursera, edX, Udacity, Futurelearn
Open courseware: MIT, Yale, CarnegieMellon, Open Courseware Consortium, Academic Earth, LearnerWeb,
Other services mentioned: University of the People, Khan Academy, OpenLearn, Textbook Revolution, Stanford on YouTube, Wikiversity, Saylor, iTunes U, Quia, WizIQ, ConnectEDU, MyEJ, WaSP InterACT, P2PU, Github, Behance, Uexcel, CLEP, LearningCounts.

Finally, here’s a Storify of all the best Twitter conversation from the evening. Future Human will return on August 21 with Extended Lives – details will be announced soon.

What if students could educate themselves for free using the world’s finest institutions and professors, and build an à la carte, interdisciplinary qualification respected by the world’s leading employers – all from the comfort of a beer splattered sofa? This fantasy, exotic as it may appear to the financially crunched classes of 2013, is rapidly being turned into a reality by the protagonists of the ‘Zero Education’ movement.

The big bang moment for online education was the development of the first proper MOOC (‘Massively Online Open Course’) at Stanford University in 2011. Developed by for Google researchers Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, the ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ interactive course was supposed to attract 10,000 students. Instead 160,000 signed up.

Sensing an opportunity, Norvig and Thrun quit Stanford to form an educational startup called Udacity, which is now one of the world’s foremost digital education companies. Other entrepreneurs have been quick to follow in the footsteps of Udacity, developing similar platforms such as Coursera and edX. They offer video lessons from prestigious lecturers, many of them tenured staff at the world’s leading universities, and interactive tests on subjects ranging from equine nutrition to the early Hollywood studio system. Meanwhile, the process of assessing students is automated, accelerating the rate of student graduation.

In just two years, the Zero Education movement has admitted a global student body of millions, and is already threatening the scholastic institutions of the West. But can world class teaching standards truly be maintained by screen learning? Is a MOOC education financially sustainable or ethical, and can it simulate waking up with a traffic cone on your head? And how can smart teachers and publishers get in on the action, and reach students all over the world?

Helping us navigate the rising tides of mass digital academe are three pioneering captains of the education industry.

Nicola Dandridge is Chief Executive of Universities UK, an organisation that is at the forefront of research into the evolution of digital education, and which lobbies the government to this end. In her previous career as a celebrated lawyer, Nicola specialised in equality issues, working with the Equality Challenge Unit, the European Commission and Thompsons Solicitors.

Andrew Bollington is COO of the University of London’s international programmes, and is in charge of digital education services that serve 52,000 students in 180 countries. Earlier this year he oversaw a partnership with Coursera to provide five MOOC courses from University of London. He has a keen professional interest in the technological and practical innovations that are creating new forms of cheap, global education.

Patrick McAndrew is Professor of Open Education at the Open University, where he is responsible for developing new methods of open and free learning for Britain’s largest academic institution. Aside from designing online courses, oversees initiatives like OER Research Hub, OLnet, Bridge to Success and OpenLearn. These initiatives have informed the development of Futurelearn, the Open University’s platform which will supply MOOCs to students all over the world.

The Zero Education movement is nothing less than a revolution in global economic empowerment and knowledge acquisition, and will change the way that we, our friends and our children learn. So make sure you join us at the Book Club on May 15 to find out how a lifetime higher education bill of £27,000 plus might be meaningfully reinvested. It’s an essential event for anyone who is paid to teach, who pays to learn or who feels money should have nothing to do with the inculcation of a liberal education.

Sam Jordison gave an excellent primer on the crowdfunding phenomenon – he runs the new publishing imprint Galley Beggar whose blend of new fiction and forgotten classics is well worth checking out. Our panel guests were Bobbie Johnson, whose project MATTER has just been bought by Medium, a company from Twitter founder Ev Williams; Gregory Vincent, founder of soon-to-be-multilingual platform Sponsume; and Martin Rich, director at Social Finance whose Social Impact Bonds are some of the most innovative and socially beneficial investment instruments available.

Below is a selection of the best tweets from the evening – thanks to all the tweeters for their thoughtful comments. And make sure to come along to our May salon, Zero Education, with details going live on Monday April 29.

Following Moore’s Law, the power of computer chips has doubled every 18 months or so for the past 30 years, and this pattern has seen computing devices grow ever more personal: the PC, the laptop, the smartphone and now super personal smart devices that we wear on our bodies. Consequently, the line between our physical and virtual existence is blurring like never before, as a new wave of devices invite us to treat our bodies and minds like manipulable software.

But does wearable tech seek data for data’s sake? Does ‘quantifying our self’ harness untapped human potential that can make us smarter and better, or merely make our lives increasingly public and incoherent? And can an algorithm ever trump human intuition?

Future Human’s founder Jack Gwilym Roberts hosts a conversation with three special guests: Marcus Codrington-Fernandez, a leading player in the British wearable health tech company Fitbug, and Ryan Genz and Francesca Rosella of the technology-augmented fashion house CuteCircuit. We’re also joined by Future Human’s very own Ben Beaumont-Thomas.

Together, they discuss how wearable devices can enhance our mood and help us be more creative and decisive, question how we will adapt and incorporate the emerging influx of data streams that analyse our physical and mental activities, and project scenarios for a new culture of anti-private, public lifestyles.

You can download the Smart Self podcast at Soundcloud or iTunes, where you can also catch up on some of our previous episodes.

If you want to find out more about our guests and their work, then head to Technology Will Save Us to pick up the brilliant tech kits made by Daniel Hirschmann and Bethany Koby, go to CuteCircuit to be wowed by the fabulous future fashion of Francesca Rosella, and to Fitbug to explore how Marcus Codrington Fernandez is tailoring fitness with tech.

Below is a Storify featuring all the best Twitter conversation from the evening – it was perhaps the best we’ve ever had, so have a look through to get photos, Vine vids and tons of fascinating thoughts and links. We’ll hopefully see you next month at Kickstarter Economy, where we’ll explore how crowdfunding websites are mutating creative finance – tickets are available from our store.

If you haven’t attended Future Human before, you’re missing out: we attract London’s best, brightest and most intoxicated for an ideas firework display that has been lauded by the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, Time Out, Grazia and many other media grandees.

In January, the feature documentary Blood Brother took the Grand Jury prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. That its US $9000 budget was entirely raised using the crowdfunding website Kickstarter was a remarkable yet minor detail in a bigger story: over 10% of all the films nominated at Sundance were funded by the same New York Web company. And it’s not just in film where these tremors are being felt: Publisher’s Weekly calculated that Kickstarter was #2 in publisher revenues for graphic novels in 2012, ahead of DC Comics and behind Marvel. In the same period, Kickstarter generated £7 million for the e-ink watch startup Pebble, distributed over £50 million to indie video game developers and funded the development of city bus stops and civilian space suits.

However, the three-year-old Kickstarter platform is merely the most visible tip of a much larger crowdfunding iceberg. Platforms such as RocketHub, IndieGoGo, Sponsume and Mobscaster similarly realise niche ideas as viable products and connect creative entrepreneurs with a plugged-in subculture of fans and investors. Elsewhere, crowdfunding websites encourage investment in startup equity (Fundable), civic projects (Neighbor.ly) and charitable or non-profit ventures (FundRazr). Despite their varied niches, all of these platforms reframe financial self-interest as activism. In the process, they are funding idealistic cult startup projects that would have been blocked by the traditional investment system, and making investment in human creativity a mass sport.

What are the deeper dynamics of crowdfunding and how can they be exploited? Is the excitement for this new investment culture just a consequence of hype and our collective naivety? And will the ‘consumerisation’ of investment lead to a more complex, unstable market for the creative industries? Joining us to consider these questions are three entrepreneurial stars from the UK’s own crowdfunding and social innovation firmament.

Bobbie Johnson is the founder of MATTER, a journalistic venture that raised US $140,000 on Kickstarter from over 2,500 backers. MATTER offers individual long-form features on subjects across science, technology and the environment, and sells them via digital download at 99 cents each. Members who sign up for premium services receive extras such as author Q&As and audiobook editions. Before founding MATTER, Bobbie was a technology reporter for The Guardian newspaper and the web publisher GigaOM.

Gregory Vincent is the founder of Sponsume, one of the UK’s leading crowdfunding platforms. Their website has helped over 1000 projects access funding over the last three years, connecting project creators with donors from the wider public online. Sponsume aims to fund ‘creative and innovative’ projects across the arts, media, sport, environment, education and technology. Previously, he was a financial analyst for the fund management firm M&G.

Martin Rich is a director at Social Finance, a company that creates financial assets whose performance is tied to ‘socially useful’ outcomes, such as a reduction in child vulnerability or prisoner reoffending rates. They bridge the fields of philanthropy, charity and investment in an attempt improve society, and contribute to what has become known as the emerging ‘fourth sector’ of the economy – the ‘for benefit’ corporation, whose desire for profit is weighed against social ideals. Martin has previously worked across the banking sector for the likes of HSBC, JP Morgan and UBS.

So come and join us as we decode the the secret sauce that adds bite to the most successful crowdfunding projects, and find out why the old guard of angel investors and bank perps are worried about their lunch being eaten by the masses. Kickstarter Economy takes place 7-9.30pm at The Book Club, 100 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4RH on Wednesday April 17, and you can expect a molasses rich blend of disruptive ideas, raucous debates and powerful midweek cocktails. It’s an essential event for creative professionals and hobbyists alike, so don’t miss it!

The humble TV set is evolving into a rich computer interface: peripherals such as Sky+, Xbox, and Apple TV offer television shows on-demand, apps like BBC iPlayer serve up timeshifted broadcasting, and modern TV programmes offer ample opportunity to interact on mobile devices, often across multiple screens simultaneously.

In the process, a radically progressive vision of the television as a universal appliance is beginning to be realised: a mutable screen that combines as a media player and games console, a global communications device, a university and professional training resource, a shopping mall, and so much more besides.

But who will truly profit from a profoundly changing broadcasting environment where ‘apps are channels’ and a public service broadcaster like Channel 4 goes head to head with Angry Birds? Will Internet savvy production companies cut the networks out and go straight to the consumer? And will we see a new form of public broadcasting emerge as museums, theatres and charities enter the fray?

Seeking A’s to Q’s, we travelled to the HQ of Zeebox, a social television service and British startup that has been taking control of the TV experience in a fiendishly intelligent manner. The company’s CTO Anthony Rose, previously the BBC iPlayer boss who took the service to the masses, joined us to identify and connect the moving dots of that make up the networked television universe. We were also accompanied by Nick Brown, chairman of TBC Digital, an app developer for smart TVs, and heard from Simon Brickle, MD of the second screen entertainment company Monterosa, and Bill Thompson, the BBC’s resident digital iconoclast.

Listen below via Soundcloud, or download in iTunes, where you can also catch up on our previous episodes.

For the as yet unenlightened, consider Future Human a high voltage ideas clinic – a place to soothe your motion sickness and ease you into an age of radical change. We beckon London’s best, brightest and most intoxicated for an evening of ecstatic discovery that has been lauded by the Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, Time Out and many other giants of media prehistory.

At Smart Self we will discover how wearable technology is enhancing the human form and psyche in a number of intriguing ways. In the late 20th Century, baby boomers began to worship at the altar of, well, themselves. Unburdened by the religious and moral expectations of their parents, the post Second World War generation devoted unprecedented energy towards understanding their psyche, their emotional complexion and their physical wellbeing. And understanding themselves meant improving themselves: the self-help lifestyle boom emerged as a byproduct of the Me generation’s pursuit of ‘wholeness’, along with numerous social Bibles, from Chicken Soup For The Soul to Jane Fonda workout videos.

However, just as the bookshop and video rental store are struggling in the digital era, so the £7 billion a year global self-help industry is being threatened by a new breed of personal technologies that ask us to put the computer chip at the heart of a modern lifestyle. Out go the common sense homilies and spiritual guidance of the ‘Me’ era, and in comes data monitoring, wearable gadgetry, and ‘quantifiable outcomes’. Yet it does not end there: brain-scanning headsets, ‘fitbits’ and removable tattoos that measure heart rate are also contributing towards a movement that encourages us to manipulate our lifestyle like a smartphone screen.

The ‘Smart Self’ movement encompasses a growing industry in personal health and fitness technologies, digitally augmented clothing the wearer can ‘code’ or which interprets their emotions, and also personal relationship analysis, including the application of behavioural economics to marriage counselling. But can a human relationship truly be enhanced by crunching the numbers? How does wearable technology parse raw data into meaningful information without sacrificing our privacy? And will greater measurement ever truly produce a happy psyche?

We have a tremendous panel of innovators joining us to discuss how the human body is in fact a grand canvas for wearable science.

Daniel Hirschmann is the co-founder of Technology Will Save Us, ‘a haberdashery for technology and education.’ Their products include attention grabbing LED sunglasses that teach you how to code, and musical instruments that can hone your soldering skills. Daniel also runs an agency called Hirsch & Mann, which creates responsive artworks for clients including Beats By Dre, the Whitney Museum of Art and Siemens.

Francesca Rosella is the co-founder of Cute Circuit, a London based fashion house that designs technologically enhanced clothing. Using LEDs, Internet connections, accelerometers, and smart materials that track the wearer’s movement, Cute Circuit clothes can display tweets or programmable graphics and respond to their environment. Their creations have been worn on stage by the likes of Katy Perry, U2 and Nicole Scherzinger.

Finally, Marcus Codrington Fernandez is ‘head of Imagineering’ at Fitbug, a consumer health and technology company founded in 2005. Fitbug products are wearable devices that track user movements, linking to smartphone apps that can create tailored exercise programs and provide dietary guidance. Recently Fitbug partnered with the NHS and other private healthcare providers to help patients learn how to improve their fitness, and they also work with employers to create wellness programs for staff. Marcus was formerly Global Creative Director at ad agency Ogilvy, and has helped to develop some of the world’s biggest brands, including Mercedes-Benz, Orange, and British Airways.

On March 13, you can expect information overload, an impromptu invitation to craft your own wearable tech, big-screen Twitter mania and the finest cocktails this side of Havana. We hope you will join us on a voyage of self-discovery and personal enhancement, as we find out how wearable technologists can help you tap into your Smart Self. It should be a magnificent evening of future thinking!

However, many women argue such an explicitly gendered vision of business can be as restricting as it is empowering. Are they right? And can the aspiring female businesswoman really succeed by playing a game in which men set the rules, or in boardrooms that are not heterogenous?

To find out, we headed to the offices of Delta Economics to meet its founder Dr. Rebecca Harding, an expert on female-led social enterprise who has successfully nurtured a startup in the traditionally male dominated world of financial services. We’re also joined by Servane Mouazan, founder of the female entrepreneur network Ogunte, who appeared on a panel debate at our XX Vision salon.

We also hear from Theresa Burton, founder of Buzzbnk, and serial entrepreneur Cindy Gallop, as well as Jean Hannah Edelstein, who lays out a blueprint for XX Vision for us. Disagreeing with some of the ideas outlined by Jean and Cindy, the pod guests consider the challenges thrown at women who are aggressively ambitious, why successful female entrepreneurs gravitate towards certain business fields, and the broader social expectations that restrict female aspiration.

This was the central question that played out between our guests on the panel debate – Bill Thompson, head of partnerships at the BBC; Simon Brickle, co-founder and MD of Monterosa; and Nick Brown, chairman of TBC Digital. You’ll be able to listen back to highlights from their nacho-filled discussion on The Future Human Podcast in a couple of months’ time. Thanks to them for a spirited and far-reaching discussion, and to our special guest Gabby Best for appearing on our new interactive TV format Boozenight Review – Gabby is next appearing at this (free!) stand-up night on November 21.

Thanks also to everyone who tweeted in during the evening – here’s a selection of the best via our Storify. Future Human salons will return in 2013…

The falling cost of genome sequencing, where our DNA is digitally profiled, suggests the existing ‘one size fits all’ approach to medical diagnosis and treatment could soon be consigned to the past. From pocket-sized kits that sample human DNA, microchip implants that keep tabs on our internal organs or assess our moods, and 3D printers that produce tailored hip replacements, the medical innovations of the ‘body hacking’ movement are beginning to filter into mainstream use.

Yet should we be concerned that individuals and private companies will increasingly be able to access our detailed genetic data? Might this information be used against us? And can the global biohacking movement really unsettle the dominance of the world’s corporate pharmaceutical giants?

Searching for answers we travelled to the City of London headquarters of IPGroup, a venture capital firm who fund some of the UK’s most exciting medical startups. We meet Mark Warne, their Head of Life Sciences, and discuss how the innovations of the Body Hacking movement are being seen on the high street and in the treatment rooms of your local GP. We also meet Miguel Toribio-Mateas, the  founder of the personalised nutrition company Naturopatica, who explains how personalised medicine is complicated by epigenetics and nutrigenomics and also why the heightened awareness of our health risks a mass outbreak of hypochondria.

Just two years ago, a work of messageboard ‘fanfic’ re-imagining the Twilight Saga as a saucy S&M romp was self-published as an ebook. Today, its creator E.L. James is the bestselling author of all time on Amazon.co.uk and the Fifty Shades trilogy is a blockbusting global sensation. Yet the unprecedented success of a self-published ‘mummy porn’ ebook is merely an early symptom of a tremendous metamorphosis that is taking place within the book publishing industry.

A panoply of digital tools and community publishing platforms such as Wattpad and CreateSpace have reduced the cost of marketing and distributing a book dramatically, propelling unknown authors towards professionalism. This process is disrupting and augmenting the traditional book publishing career path that connects writers to literary agents to commissioning editors to printers.

Meanwhile, established authors like Seth Godin and Rich Burlew are taking advantage of a fluid ebooks market to assert more control over their work and claw back a greater chunk of the returns. Online author collectives like The League of Extraordinary Authors are thriving, and emerging ‘digital first’ publishing imprints are ditching paper altogether.

So are we witnessing the mass idolatry of the digital amateur or the birth of a better, more networked literary culture? How will mass market publishers ride out the next decade? And how are DIY digital authors innovating to bypass the existing hierarchies?

Joining Future Human’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas and Jack Gwilym Roberts to discuss these questions are Sam Jordison, founder of Galley Beggar, a newly launched small press, and Henry Volans, head of digital publishing at Faber. They explain how authors are finding new ways to market books and ‘work their brand’ online, weigh the merits of a traditional publishing deal’s prestige against the eroding stigma of self-publishing, and examine contemporary innovations in fiction distribution. Listen below via Soundcloud, or download via iTunes.