by Richard Sandford filed under scenario building, the future | 12:11 21 November 2008
In Kevin Kelly’s piece The Missing Near Future I was struck by this passage:
As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that someday, somehow they’ll have massive floating cities, or highways in the sky, instant food, and all the rest. We feel certain about this despite the fact that we can’t fund fast trains between our cities today, or permit genetically modified insect-resistant corn, or take any unified step toward large-scale 21-century developments. Even returning to the moon next decade seems far-fetched.
The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond — is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible.
There are, in fact, many visions of the period Kelly describes that are both desirable and plausible to some people, but what really intrigued me was this idea of an “alien present”. One of the things I’ve been saying to audiences over the last year or so has been “the difficult present is not the likely future”, meaning that it’s often easier to pick something confusing or challenging about the present to think about than it is to consider things that are genuinely sited in the future.
If the “future” is far enough away in time, it becomes an alternative or parallel world, chronologically separate from our own. “2186″ becomes, not a date, but as much of a location as “Fairyland” or “Toontown”. What Kelly calls the “near future” is somewhere that’s far enough distant from the present to appear different, without being so far away in time that it becomes easy for us to treat it as an alternative world rather than this world. The challenge is to articulate a future in a way that makes the causal and temporal connections to our own clear, and forces us to imagine reality, not fantasy.
by Mary Ulicsak filed under BCH general, engagement | 12:11 17 November 2008
Am sure you’ve all seen Million Futures – you remember, virtual paper planes, your wishes for the future… Very pretty, if you haven’t seen it take a look. Anyway, in addition to being inspirational and fun there is a purpose. As it says, the responses on the planes contribute to the report we’re compiling of views of education in the future. This report is one part of the data presented to the Government to help inform their long term scenario planning for education.
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by Dan Sutch filed under BCH general | 12:11 13 November 2008
‘Change for the sake of change’ is something often denied by progressive educationalists, innovators and enthusiasts for educational development. However, continuing practices without challenging their benefits, aims or value within new demands of education, not only hampers the development of new practices, but can actively hinder reaching the goals of education.
However, there is a middle way between the demand for change and the need for consistency - and that is simply based upon reflecting upon the most appropriate practices for the aims of education. If we take the aims of the Children’s Plan as these core educational goals, then a number of different practices are needed to reach the wide range of demands set out.
Some of practices are challenged by possible futures: what does ‘being healthy’ mean in an aging population where advanced pharmaceuticals and treatments challenge our current definition - and what does this mean for the way we educate young people to be healthy? In the same way, what are the practices that support young people being active citizens in a world of complex multiple identities and diverse and dynamic communities?
Some of the challenges persist; some of them are newly defined, and some of the current practices are made even more important (whilst other new practices are needed to emerge).
There’s a new question posed on Million Futures which asks about this issue. What are the things that we want to persist: the practices, aims, values and mechanisms that we want to take from today into future educational practices? Not continuity for the sake of continuity, but continuity in the face of the new and continuing challenges facing education.
