Scenarios for the future of education (post-election edition)

Our assignment this week is to look carefully at Facer and Sandford's 2010 article on the next 25 years in education.

Facer, K., & Sandford, R. (2010). The next 25 years?: Future scenarios and future directions for education and technology. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 74–93.

The authors present "three complex future worlds and, within each world, two alternative educational futures" (p. 82) and Kristin has asked us to choose one of the six scenarios that is "viable" and to create a couple of our own. I've done some of this scenarios work before and was excited for the chance to dive into our task. But I got dark pretty quickly.

I chose the following as my viable world:

World 3: only connectA world organized around a collective understanding of interdependence between people, between individuals and machines, between individuals and ecosystems, in which the concepts of ‘identity’, benefit and action are understood as profoundly social. (p. 83)

I didn't chose this world because it seems most likely. By far that goes to "World 1: trust yourself," in which "there is no support for collective responses to social problems" and which certainly seems like the safest bet from extrapolation of current conditions. No, I think World 3 it's the only one "viable" in the sense of "supportive of continued human flourishing." Within that world, I chose Scenario 1:

‘Integrated experience’ – an education system embedded indistinguishably in society, economy and community, in which learners learn through ongoing participation

This seems in many ways like the oldest form of learning: lifelong, lifewide, informal, as needed. And to the extent that school-based learning is reforming for the better, I believe it is taking on the shape of integrated learning through ongoing participation. This is certainly true in my own field of theological education, where experiments like the Ministry Resident Program and Wisdom Year are attempting to address some of the deficiencies of the schooling model.

As for my own scenarios, I thought I'd lay them out in a fourth world, basically a more drastic version of "World 2: loyalty points." I have altered the World 2 scenarios accordingly

World 4: what remains
The threat of environmental ruin and the consequences of a dismantled social safety net diminish the importance of the nation state and send most people scrambling for their material sustenance to the few institutions left standing, mostly wealthy multinational corporations and family foundations.

Scenario 1: 'Neo-meritocracy' – The early childhood education system is a series of trials determined to identify those who represent the best "bets" for the precious investment of continuing education, i.e., access to excess food, increased shelter and security, electricity, digital tutoring and eventually apprenticeship in the professions that keep what remains of society afloat. Everyone else learns on the job the skills they need for manual labor in the institutions' agricultural operations in exchange for a meager subsistence.

Scenario 2: 'Neo-feudalism' – Those born to the wealthy elite are the de facto recipients of the education efforts, with consequently diminished success.

OK, so maybe this is a more realistic scenario for 50 years out. ;) What can I say, it's a cautionary tale. Ask me again in four years and on a day when I haven't been reading both "The machine stops" (also assigned for the course) and Ready Player One.

"New" literacies: A glossary

I'm using my class project to get acquainted with a family of literatures within which my advisor, Lalitha Vasudevan, and one of the labs I participate in, MASCLab, live and work. To put (too) fine a point on it, my goal for this project is to understand how I've been misusing the critical terminology of my advisor's fields. To put it another way ...

Research question: How can a (new) literacies perspective reframe or clarify the emerging scholarly conversation about digital media instruction for students engaged in professional ministerial training?

To keep myself organized as I begin to dip my toes into these waters, I'm starting a glossary of terms. I'll edit and clarify as my thinking changes and improves. For now, this is all coming from Vasudevan, L. (2010). Education remix: New media, literacies, and the emerging digital geographies. Digital Culture & Education, 2:1, 62-82.

literacies: See literacy practices. More coming, I'm sure, but even this equivalency is really important. I think this is significantly related to what James Gee in 1999 called the "social turn" that took place in literacy studies in the '80s. Point being (again, if I'm following): all of us engage in literacy practices and they are inherently socio-cultural.

New Literacy Studies: The body of literature that emerged from the social turn. Among the happenings are Brian Street's 1995 observation that literacies are multiple and that schools typically choose to privilege some over others. But multiple literacies are not to be confused with

multiliteracies: These "signal[] the multiple resources and communicative forms that inform the design of texts." Yes, quotation marks because I don't really get it yet. But I get that some of these resources and forms are digital. Thus...

new literacy studies: Note lack of capital letters. This is a generic label that has been applied to the work of folks studying how technology, as a set of such resources, changes that process of designing and enacting texts.

Digital literacies: See new literacy studies, I think, but sounds like we can say it in a more concrete and specialized way: the study of literacy practices using digital tools and/or within digital spaces. You'll notice what this isn't, which is of course how everyone, including me, tends to defines it ...

Digital literacy: The instrumentalist (mis)use of precise terminology that simultaneously reduces and expands the use of "digital literacies" above to basically mean "have a baseline competency using technology." This is roughly equivalent to the way people use terms like "technology literacy" (I heard this a lot in engineering school, usually in the context of lament about how people don't really understand science [yeah...]) and "financial literacy" (balancing a checkbook, being able to explain the cause of the Financial Crisis, etc.—basically what you achieve when you read How to Speak Money, which you should do because, of course, whether or not "financial literacy" is a stupid term, it is terrifyingly important and rare).

For what it's worth, I think I'm a little closer to describing the ways in which the work I've been doing has been supporting the development of digital literacies among faith leaders (as Lalitha and her colleagues conceive them). In fact, that's been the vast majority of it. That people (including me) sometimes narrow that to "digital literacy" in the instrumentalist sense is due to the fact that

How do we construct (religious) texts that convey (religious) meaning in digital geographies (error: undefined). This question matters a lot both to how we teach church leaders to use technology and, I believe, how we teach them everything else.

P. S. Digital geographies: Basically, the hybrid spaces we all move in and out of all the time. See, for example, Keith Anderson's Digital Cathedral.