Link 6 – Mike McDowall’s Task 12 (Speculative Futures)

My Task 12 link.

Task 12: Speculative Futures

I enjoyed reading Mike’s speculative futures as I found them creative and intriguing to speculate about. Mike’s first speculative future found the world having tried to establish one world language: the Emoji language. However, this did not last long as, “officials didn’t realize that a language, especially one which uses symbols, is still open to interpretation depending on the different cultures.” I love the idea of having one global language. As explained by Dobson and Willinksy (2009), “digital literacy carries with it the potential for a far wider, more global access to knowledge” (p. 286), so it is a happy thought that we might one day all have equal access to knowledge. It was entertaining to think about the challenges we would face if we were to only rely on emojis to express ourselves though. Perhaps this was just a global written language, but I wonder how this would affect spoken languages. As Mike said, “language is intertwined with culture” and “culture across the globe is constantly evolving.” I wonder if the development of emojis would be able to keep up with the development of culture and expression.

Mike’s second speculative future was interesting as it followed a student going to school. By ‘going’ to school, this student walked downstairs and sat down in a chair in his own home, connecting to school via retinal detection through goggles and listening on a set of headphones. It was fun to see just how much Artificial Intelligence (AI) had taken over in the field of education, but also how there was a certain amount of freedom in his school day. David had to follow lessons, but had freedom in the order he completed them in. I felt jealous that David got to virtually visit other places. I know this is something that is greatly developing with virtual reality, but I have never experienced it myself. Some of my bigger questions about this future reality are: How are students socializing? What are students missing out on now that they don’t have a relationship with an actual teacher? Are there any humans included in David’s education?

Mike’s task was well laid out for it to visually stand out, but also to express what these speculative futures could look like. I appreciated how Mike included the task description at the top of the page as it reminded me what to expect from this task. Mike was able to bring in different modes of meaning like visual and audio meaning (Cazden et al., 1996) by including an audio version of ‘David’s Day’ at the bottom of the page and by inserting Emoji sequences at the end of each paragraph in the first speculative future.

Mike’s speculative futures seemed to show that the world was trying out new ways of doing things. In the first, it did not seem entirely successful and, in the second, it is unsure whether it would be the best way forward. When creating my speculative futures, I was worried that we would continue to rely on dated teaching methods, but Mike thought up of innovative ways that education might change, shaking up the way we teach our students in the future (Dunne & Raby, 2013).

Both Mike’s and my speculative futures included AI. I used it more as an assistant to teaching as I like to think that human interaction holds significance in a student’s learning journey, but we both saw AI as a positive development. Another similarity in our speculative futures was that we both saw negatives and positives to potential developments in education and expression. Mike’s speculative future included the desire for better communication amongst every individual, but also the realisation that this does not work in a world full of rich cultural diversity. My speculative future saw the advances of technology as a great time-saver, but that it did not encourage a consideration for good mental-health in terms of developing personal relationships with the people around us.

After seeing Mike’s speculative future, I wish that I had been more creative when it comes to showing what the world could look like in the future. I find it difficult to look to the more distant future, but there is fun and creativity that goes into thinking about what the future could look like.

Mike’s site is quite clean and easy to read. I enjoyed the emojis and pictures on this post and some others, but a few posts were a little bit bare. Although, I do not believe we have to include images to make content more interesting, but I am someone who enjoys having something to look at as a break from reading, whether it be a graph, an image, or even a change in font size or colour. That being said, I found Mike’s website to be user-friendly as it is easy to navigate and find the different posts. It is nice to have all the posts in one place.

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