- Purpose
- Specificity
- Information quality
- Interpretation and bias
- Methods and models
- Quantitative limits
- Managing complexity
- Assumptions and paradigm paralysis
- Zeitgeist and groupthink
- Drivers and blockers.
15 mins: Discussion of Week 10: Unpacking Normative Scenarios
This week you dove deeper into the LEARN!2050 normative scenario for the future of US education in year 2050. You explored provocative questions around how might education become free for the learner in year 2050 and more recently what is the future of work that people need to train to participate within (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, etc). What insights do you have about the education that you are receiving now? In other words how prepared do you feel for the future work challenges? What skills do you feel will help you have a productive career? What skills do you think you should learn before you graduate? Any classes that you think you should take or wish were offered?
(2) in class activity
15 mins Step 1 :: Last week you explored the skills necessary in the future. One minute reports back from the teams.
15 mins Step 2 :: How do the skills you imagined compare to the following from the IFTF?
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25 mins Step 3 :: Watch the following video. How might such skills come together with free education in the video by IFTF?
What are some positive aspects of this vision for the future?
What are dark aspects of this vision for the future?
What questions do you still have about aligning measurable benchmark goals, forces of change, and futures signals?
| Response |
|---|
| What can designers help to make better free education system in 2050? I think designers can imagine the user experience and think of the services and products to support such experiences. |
What’s the barrier that might prevent us from applying the current business model to the education system to create free education?Current business models are based on a very expensive model of education. Clay Christensen – The Future of Higher Education in a Digital Age (Panel 1)  |
| How can we change the myth of education today to improve it for the future?Find new stories to live into, if the old stories aren’t working for the reality we are in. Sohail Inayatullah talks a lot about this. |
| Does aligning forces of change and futures signals just mean correctly interpreting them and establishing causality? |
| What does ADHD have to do with our education system? It looks like the video tried to draw a parallel between the rise in ADHD diagnoses and a failing education system, but I don’t buy that. How can we deconstruct our biases about our education system if we’re going to turn around and just act on another bias that appears to dismiss learning disabilities and demonize medication?I too thought that the part about ADHD in the talk was a distraction from the main point he was trying to make. I think that Sir Ken Robinson was making an argument for creativity and allowing people to embody different kinds of creativity and not thinking there is something wrong with children that don’t find school dull and lacking in dynamics. In other talks that he did he talks about creativity through dance, making, and arts. I think his critique of the education system is that it promotes one kind of intelligence at the expense of others. |
(3) OLI page 40 questions ::
| Do you think Futurist Adam Gordon’s questions about futures forecast is helpful for designers to make future scenarios? Yes, knowing evaluation criteria can help one to self-assess and guard against common pitfalls. |
| Are the ten questions in the critique ordered from surface-level question to deeper-level question?It seems like they follow that pattern. |
| I think that revealing underlying forces behind change is important. What strategies can we use to do this?We’ve been doing an exercises on this in class. We looked at STEEP as a framework, and now you are looking at futures signs and trying to link the future sign to the STEEP forces or other forces. |
| Are there any other Futures designers who had unique or contested criteria for their critiques and where do criteria come from in the first place? What’s the science behind a process that deals with a situation (a future) where science that is currently seeking to be proved is not yet proved.Yes, there are no facts in the future. It exists in our imaginations. It will require a different kind of inquiry and knowledge paradigm than scientific inquiry. Science is based on facts. I think it is more argument based. In short reflective judgement is needed to make arguments about the future. It isn’t based on undisputed facts that people can agree on. |
| Gordon gives us a few good questions to ask about other’s future scenario’s. However, by picking the questions he also biases himself. How can we create a critiquing method that is more aware of the biases in both the scenario analysed and the critiquing method?We are all biased. I think the best one can do, is to become aware of ones own biases and limitations. Ethnographers, and anthropologists, spend a lot of time discussing such biases in their observations. |
Homework :: Write comment on your classmates future of learning ideas in the inclass discussion. Vote for the ideas you like the most.
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