professor keri facer, education and social research institute, manchester metropolitan university
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Taking the 21 st Century Seriously: potential socio-technical developments over the coming two decades. Professor Keri Facer, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University [email protected]. The Beyond Current Horizons Programme. - PowerPoint PPT PresentationTRANSCRIPT
Taking the 21st Century Seriously: potential socio-technical developments
over the coming two decades
Professor Keri Facer, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University
The Beyond Current Horizons Programme
• 2 year programme, funded by UK Government
• Remit to ‘produce a set of challenging long-term scenarios for the future of education in the context of socio-technical change 2025 and beyond’
• Engagement of over 150 academics, industry, policy partners, public engagement programme involving over 700 people
• 60+ reviews of existing evidence
Thinking systematically about ‘the future’ in education
• Purpose is to challenge assumptions, not make predictions
• Technological development does not determine social development
• Education has multiple purposes
• Future visions always involve values – make methods clear
KEY SOCIO-TECHNICAL TRENDS OVER THE COMING TWO DECADES
1. Ageing Populations
Over 50% of the population of Western Europe aged over 50 by 2030 with a further 40 year life expectancy. Over 25 % aged over 65. Population ageing a global phenomena, not just restricted to Europe/US
Late life learning increasingly important. Late life inequalities will emerge.
Intergenerational learning & intergenerational teams – wisdom + responsiveness
Lifelong learning in the context of radical longevity?
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2. Working and living alongside machines becomes increasingly normal
Devolving responsibility to machines: simple manual tasks or outsourcing the management of complex systems
Cosmetic Pharmacology & Intelligent Prostheses (Brain-computer interfaces)
Different generations with different degrees of comfort in delegating power and responsibility to machines.
Growing computers – ethics? 6
Image from Andrew Harrison, DEGW
Patterned (Flickr): Creative Commons License
3. We will have the capacity to ‘know more stuff about more stuff’
Social trends toward accountability and security,
The decreasing cost and increasing availability of digital storage capacity,
The development of new forms of bio- and genetic information,
The ability to digitally tag almost any physical object, space or person,
The ability to represent information in more diverse media;
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Image by Noah Sussman Tumbollage (Creative Commons License applies)
4. The personal ‘cloud’
The capacity to connect to a network, and be constantly connected to knowledge, resources, people and tools
Expectations of ‘perpetual contact’ with diverse networks and communities, both physical and virtual.
Mobile/distributed families creating new notions of ‘absent presence’
My filter systems/friends – shaping what information I get
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Image by Noah Sussman – Creative Commons License Applies
5. Distance matters less, geography still counts
Access information, people and resources anywhere
Familiarity & social etiquette of working at a distance
Increased international migration & decreased ease of frequent travel
Place plays a role as identity marker & shapes regulatory/legal issues
Place shapes cultures of innovation, economies and exchange
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Lars Plougmann: creative commons license applies
6. Weakening institutional boundaries
Cultural shifts: younger age groups merging working and leisure practices
Demographic shifts: adults needing to balance caring, working, learning, relationships
The linear temporal structure of education -> work -> retirement is eroded
The spatial structure of education/work/family is eroded
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Brande Jackson: Creative Commons License applies
SJ Photography: Creative Commons License applies
Cindy47452 (flickr): Creative Commons License applies
7. Challenges to the ‘knowledge economy’ narrative
Polarisation of workforces: •Rise of elites in major organisations •Capacity to offshore work to low cost environments•Automation
•What cannot be automated/offshored? – Caring? - Currently undervalued/underpaid
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Troy Holden: CC license applies
Jessica Mulley: CC license applies
Fiona L Cooper: CC license applies
2025 ?
• Networked, ‘augmented’ people, in an increasingly ageing population, working later in life and in intergenerational teams, working and living in collaboration with diverse machines that take on roles we see as human today, operating across multiple locations, in the context of increasingly sharp and extreme socio-economic divides
• New divides emerge around access to information, augmentation, participation in specific social networks?
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Three major challenges
• Education for the networked individual – the network not the individual becomes the basis for educational design
• Supporting the individual to navigate a diverse learning landscape – learning is no longer seen as the preserve of schooling
• Reviewing educational goals in the light of potential polarisation – the lisbon agenda, the Leitch agenda, the ‘knowledge economy’ agenda all need to be rethought.
Thank you for listening
Acknowledgements & Links• This socio-technical trends described here are derived from the work of the Beyond
Current Horizons project which I led while Research Director at Futurelab. The research team at Futurelab included Richard Sandford, Dan Sutch, Steve Sayers and Mary Ulicsak. The implications for education presented here should be understood to be the views of the author and not the BCH programme, its participants or its funders. All members of the advisory group, challenge leads and review authors along with the full text of the final report from the programme can be found at:
– www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/outcomes/reports/final-report-2009/
• Images/photographs are attributed to their author where possible. They are used under Creative Commons license which means that they can be displayed elsewhere, but only with attribution, and they should not be modified in any way or used for commercial purposes. They were (almost) all sourced from Flickr.
• The futures tools can be found as follows: – www.millionfutures.org.uk; www.visionmapper.org.uk; www.powerleague.org.uk;
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