Speculative Futures
Life is interesting. Trying to speculative about the future is even more interesting.
The following are two very different speculative narratives about our potential relationship with education and text and technology in the next 30 years. Like the movie, Sliding Doors, the narratives have the same starting point and different end points.
A. Speculative narrative – Sunny Days (in some people’s opinion)
2020 – Our relationship with education, text and technology has changed quickly. Out of necessity, education moved on-line, fast. Education has to catch up quickly to deliver useful on-line education, on short notice. Teachers, parents and students must adapt to text in a digital form, almost exclusively. Further, technology will need to be developed, to not simply deliver a digital version of prior traditional in-class programs, but to deliver higher level, ie constructivist, flipped classroom or UDL learning programs in schools and Universities. On-line, Zoom classrooms are the norm (but they have to get better).
2030 – Technology continues to change. Reading is out and audio everything is in. Children will no longer be assigned texts to read but will instead use their phones to play podcasts and audio of lessons. Zoom has been replaced with the Virtual Classroom. Gone are the one dimensional computer classes. Instead, each student will be in a virtual classroom as avatars. They will interact on a 3 d basis with the other students and the teachers. (This is helping with Covid 19 version 8 – social distancing is no longer an issue). And, unlike Zoom, where one needed to dress nicely at least from the waist up, the Virtual Classroom lets participants dress in virtual outfits – pick anything. But the administrators have decided not to let the students change their actual appearance – they believe that would not be a productive social engineering tool.
2040 – Google glasses are in, monitors, blackboards, white boards and sort of board are out. (See a video on google glasses below). Anything the student needs to see visually will be shown on their google glasses. During class the teacher can control what the students are seeing. The glasses also allow for collaborative work – ie two students can work together and both see the same visuals. Teachers are combatting student’s who have algorithms select which passages of readings are necessary for the class (Johnson, 2019). Understandably the teacher’s want the students to read the i.e. whole book. In some ways, this is an old fight – the current version of the 20th century battle against the use of Coles notes (a common student guide to literature that some students would read in lieu of a book).
2050. Student’s don’t have actual phones anymore. All information is simply transmitted without hardware save and except the google glasses -which are multi-functional. They replace the old cell phone, can act much like an old school tv, as a computer and correct vision. The challenged in this era is to override the student’s simply using one another’s writings as their own. Group work is encouraged and glass transfer should be off outside of the group. All teaching is virtual. Students are now attending classes anywhere they chose globally. Language is not an issue as instant translation is the norm. The world is getting smaller as cultures are more intertwined.
B. Speculative narrative – Different, darker days ahead
Music credit: Howard, J.N. (2015), There Are Worse Games to Plan/Deep In The Meadow/The Hungar Games Suite, The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.
B. Some Interesting Videos
Control the underwater internet cables, control the world
OMG – Millennials have little or no experience with: a map, the Yellow pages and a rotary phone
Google glasses: an early generation of what will become essentially a wearable virtual monitor
References
Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Retrieved August 30, 2019, from Project MUSE database.
Hariri, Y. N. (2017). Reboot for the AI revolution. Nature International Weekly Journal of Science, 550(7676), 324-327.
Johnson, S. (Producer), (2019, May 19), The Future of Digital Literacies .
Marshall, T. (2015). Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics, New York, Elliot & Thompson.
Zeihan, P. (2014). The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, New York, Hachette.