Seminar 3: speaker abstracts

11 June 2010, by Richard

The next seminar is in a few weeks’ time and will focus on methods and approaches to futures work that might have particular relevance from an educational perspective. Below are outlines of the three presentations supporting the day’s discussions.

Integral Futures for Education
Dr. Richard A. Slaughter

This presentation briefly considers the development of the futures field, especially through the development of an evolving knowledge base. It then reviews several aspects of futures in education. It introduces aspects of integral theory and shows how they’ve been applied to issues such as global warming, the ‘state of play’ in the futures field and the outlook for humankind. Emerging strategies of relevance to education are outlined along with an integral view human and social development. It is suggested that the latter can help us to conceptualise viable futures beyond the current ‘overshoot and collapse’ trajectory.

Designing Educational Futures with the Future Technology Workshop method
Dr. Giasemi Vavoula

Future educational scenarios invariably contain references to some form of advanced, desirable and, often, as yet nonexistent technology. This seminar will present the Future Technology Workshop (FTW), a structured, collaborative method for envisioning future technology-enabled experiences that are relevant, innovative and practicable. The FTW has developed over a series of research projects, design exercises and teaching sessions, serving a variety of purposes and objectives. Through a series of seven sessions, participants are guided from ‘blue sky’ thinking to specifying requirements for new technology-enhanced learning experiences. The session will include a presentation of the method and examples of its application. Further development of the method will be discussed, with input from the audience.

A survey of methods for educational futures research
Richard Sandford

For those encountering the domain of futures work for the first time, the range and variety of methods, approaches, tools and techniques can seem overwhelming, and the processes in which these various methods are employed opaque. This session will begin with an overview of those techniques and approaches commonly employed in futures work, and of the sorts of organisations who most often engage in this work: a basic framework for grouping and understanding these approaches will be proposed in order to support their critique and analysis from the perspective of education research, and finally an exploration offered of some possible criteria for assessing the relevance of particular approaches in supporting the construction of educational futures. Participants will be invited to consider other domains which might usefully contribute methods and perspectives to such exercises.

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