Designing Learning Futures: Navigating Toward the Next Normal

On March 17, 2021 I had the pleasure to co-present the closing keynote for the OLC Innovate K-12 Summit with my trusted colleague Ben Scragg. In this presentation we explore the challenges of creating a new “normal” as it relates to educational futures - and explore a set of strategic foresight tools and methodology that can assist leaders in creating an intentional “next normal” for their organization.

Below is the extended abstract from the event website.

Extended Abstract:

We are certainly living through a volatile, complex, uncertain, and ambiguous (VUCA) world at the present moment, and its impacts have been felt perhaps more deeply and tangibly in K12 education than anywhere else - both at global level and within our local schools and communities. Given the rapid disruption and changes brought on by COVID-19, we know that there will be no returning “back to normal.” While schools, educators, students and families have all navigated the past year in different ways and with different degrees of hardship, challenge, and even success - we still look forward to establishing a future sense of normalcy, however the new normal takes shape.

In this session, we want to explore some of the ways in which educators and leaders can begin to design and give shape to this new normal, despite all the uncertainty of now. Given all that educators and communities are facing, it’s worth exploring how we might re-imagine our teaching and learning environments - particularly online and digital learning environments - by addressing and harnessing the plausible outcomes and impacts of our collective uncertainty.

We will invite participants to learn about and experiment with emergent design and strategic foresight tools that can reveal risks and opportunities, helping us prioritize the work needed to build the next normal. The goal of this session is not to predict what will happen in the future, but to stretch the imagination (and ourselves!) to think about what we would like to have happen, using a framework and tools for how it might happen. The maxim “we cannot predict the future, but we can invent it “ is often cited as a call to design and use strategic forecasting tools and methodologies. Join us as we create a studio space to explore a set of tools and reflective prompts that we’re describing as Learning Futures.

Keynote: 2021 Winter Games Conference

Learning Futures: Designing the Horizon

I was thrilled to deliver the opening keynote address for the 2021 Winter Games conference, hosted by ASU’s ShapingEDU community and partners. Below is the publicly shared Zoom recording. Special thanks to my colleagues Dr. Punya Mishra and Jodie Donner for joining me in sharing our work.

Additionally, we also just released the second installment of our special issue in the ASU Journal Current Issues in Education, an Open Access Journal.

Vol 22 No 1 (Special Issue) Shaping the Futures of Learning in the Digital Age Part 2

The Futures of Learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Keynote

On July 11, 2019 I had the pleasure to address the audience of the Global Learn 2019 Conference in Princeton New Jersey with a keynote focused around a growing area of my research on the preferable, plausible, and possible futures of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The keynote titled ‘The Futures of Learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ took the audience through an exploration of the challenges to the traditional educational system presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR), and presented three different vignettes of emerging technology that will drive the need for educators, technologists, and leaders to understand how to leverage these new disruptive technologies to work towards the ‘preferred’ futures of their organizations.

The technology vignettes that I discussed in this keynote were: Open Learning & Smart Materials, Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence in education (AIEd). Each vignette presented the audience with examples of these categories of technology disruptions and the opportunities they present the current systems of education in terms of how we think about the role and intersection of technology and learning. While these technologies give hope to a wide range of new possibilities, they are not without their concerns, and not all technologies are welcomed.

To address this issue I also discussed the role of working to identify the ‘unintended’ consequences of emerging technology through the theoretical metaphor of the Black Swan Theory. Through this theoretical methodology, leaders are encouraged to work to understand the deeper levels of impact that adopting various technologies may have on a given population. A repeated quote from the lecture derived from my published work (Leahy, Holland, & Ward (2019):

“Technologies are not neutral entities, they are values-laden, and become culturally embodied when integrated into practice, and as a result have the capacity to restrict or transform learning”

— Leahy, Holland, & Ward (2019)

The keynote concludes by addressing the use of a Futures Studies framework approach to working towards the possible, probable, and preferable futures as described by Wendell Bell (1977).