My Situation Prompt:
Describe or narrate a scenario about a curriculum found a decade into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to entertainment and elicit feelings of amusement.
Setting the scene:
Ten years from now, society as we know it has collapsed.
- Arc: 10 years from now
- Terrain: Entertainment
- Object: High School Curriculum
- Mood: Amusement
Framework from the game, The Thing From the Future
Task 12 ETEC 540 Speculative Future Comic Strip by Jill Schmidt
Reflections:
I tend to try and live in the present tense, otherwise I will worry too much about the future. It would be easy for me to lean towards a dooms day view of the future, such as the speculative prompt I was given. I really appreciated the video introduction that Shannon Vallor (2018) gave to her new book The AI Mirror that comes out in the spring of 2024. I like that she brought a humanistic view to the future of AI, and called us to be good stewards of the devices and powers that we hold. I agree that AI is simply a mirror of our society. I appreciate her advice, and think that we should heed to it by washing the dirt off our own faces.
This was a challenging task in creative ways for me; both in terms of imaging a future conversation in a society that has collapsed and in terms of working on this comic strip in Canva. I used a curriculum topic that I currently teach (globalization) and tried to image what amusing things teachers in the future might say about it.
I choose to hold hope for a future where humans take action for positive change when looking in the mirror!
Reference
Santa Clara University. (2018, November 6). Lessons from the AI Mirror Shannon Vallor [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40UbpSoYN4k&t=625s
The Thing From the Future. (n.d.). Situation Lab. https://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/
Hello Jill,
I also found it really difficult to think too deeply into the future as I found it depressing and grey in the education field and curriculum. I wrote in a third person narrative, in the format of a creative story. I found it easy to set the story in a dystopian setting. What I found intriguing about your creative comic strip was the banter between the two educators, and their one-size-fits-all teacher uniform. Are we becoming more influenced by political agenda in our educational policies? Will and/or does this affect our students in a positive light? Are we truly practicing freedom of speech and representation? I felt that I leaned towards ideas inspired by 1984 by Orwell except Big Brother was not the government and instead the economic convergence superpowers of today (Disney, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Meta, etc.). Anyway, food for thought. I really enjoyed your comic strip and it was nice to know from a colleague to another, how we were able to critically engage in this task. I know I enjoyed it.
Clarisse Yeh