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”
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).