Always looking for inspiration and happy to take a moment’s respite from daily tasks Kindle Research decided to attend Futurelab’s Beyond Current Horizons Conference, ‘ Looking at the future of education beyond 2025’. (One couldn’t help but notice their direct alignment with the DCSF by branding the enterprise ‘technology, children, schools and family’…)
A rather conceptual but fascinating day followed as Futurelab outlined 5 potential challenges facing education in the context of social and technological change. It would be a disservice to attempt an overview of the day as the scope of themes was vast, incorporating presentations about the…
• impact of technology on identity and communities
• blurring distinctions between the public/private and work/leisure
• incalculable growth in the depth, scale and use of data on every level
• the outsourcing of intelligence, decision-making and responsibilities to machines
• and that every age will have to deal with social and generational gaps in terms of access use and comprehension of technology
Whilst each of these themes are fascinating but somewhat well-trodden of most interest was the futurist’s typical practice of challenging the audience to envisage designing educational practice for different scenarios informed by their 5 challneges above. Perhaps the most optimistic of the scenarios given was one of networked individuals, where access to the network is pervasive and provides some kind of cognitive enhancement… you could call it a communal approach. Conversely we were also asked to consider how one might attempt to help learners navigate complex learning environments in a different sort of post-industrialised model of the education environment. A context where commercial learning providers compete, and there is a real blurring of the distinctions between formal and informal learning… a more individualistic vision of the future.
In these times of educational and economic uncertainty it may seem something of a luxury to engage in utopian/dystopian fantasies but they really are worth considering if only for the fact they quickly polarise opinions and reveal something of our immediate values and anxieties. And it is this insight that informs my main criticism of the day; the failure to ask what the implications of these future scenarios are for education and the decisions we need to make about the use of technology today.
Schools and teachers are under continually increasing pressure and for many these are anxious times as they are asked to perform more varied tasks, manage more change in terms of policy and practice (let alone technology… and please, please don’t mention an imminent election) whilst enduring ever-increasing scrutiny and it felt remiss to evade an opportunity to reflect on the many crunchy issues facing us now as they make decisions which will affect the future. But … looking to the future… Futurelab are developing some materials which they plan to release later this month which we look forward to.
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