What do paper planes say about the future?
Mary Ulicsak
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.
Although the deadline is not until some time in 2009 I have been having a look at responses and thinking about how they can be meaningfully analysed. So is it worth relating to the research challenges and cross-challenge activities – as an aside there’s already a strong focus on the environment? However, this does not work with those questions relating to education so does it make sense to use the educational implementations (goals, personnel, institutions, methods, tools, outcomes and beliefs) instead? My hope is that we’ll be able to see what concerns you as stakeholders most about the future and education systems in particular.
I haven’t got very far but thought I would share a couple of first impressions – neither having anything to do with content. Of the 1149 responses by the 11th November 470 related to the first question: “What are your hopes for the future?”. This could be a) because it is the most interesting of the 6 questions presented, b) because you had to press another button to see all six questions. I am tending towards the order of presentation being vital. My reasoning being when the first (and only) question initially seen was switched at the end of September to: “What would you not want to see in any future education system?” nobody answered the question about hopes and there were 171 responses (of the 173 in total) around the future education system. It’s changed again, so am looking to see the number of responses for the new question “What of today’s education do you want to see in 2025?” – see ‘Continuity for the sake of continuity’ for the reasoning behind this question. Lessons learnt: if you ever design something similar constantly rotate the first question seen in order to get a similar number of responses to each question.
The second thought is that there has been a slow down in responses. In October 453 planes were added, which means that there ought to have been a 150 in the first third of November if the rate held – or more if it followed the trend from August and increased by around 150 each month. Except so far there has been 42. My own pet theory is that people are more worried about Christmas now so haven’t been making planes, but more seriously there are issues about how frequently people return to the site or stumble across it. Possibly all those interested have already visited and added all their ideas, perhaps it isn’t easy to find unless you already know about Beyond Current Horizons…
And to finish on, I really like the person who wants their community to be: “safe, clean, caring and ideally with a small local post office and school” – so do I.
