Boma: Chris Clay

One of the things I am loving about the Boma Education Fellows group is that we get amazing opportunities to have workshops with interesting presenters. I love learning and love having this opportunity, even though it would be nicer face to face!!
A few weeks ago we had a workshop with Chris Clay who is a futurist - you can read about him here.
He talked about how we create the future because of how we imagine it. We imagine a future but there are a lot of possible futures out there. If we look at our December self and wondered what May would look like we would not come up with this! You can read his latest blog on this subject - Transforming education but not as we know it.

These are my notes on our session with him.
We have an opportunity to rethink, reimagine and redefine education. Read this article - Cuomo partners with Bill Gates - why do school buildings still exist? Reimagining - understand limits

"What we know limits what we can imagine" 

Cynthia Barton-Rabe from her book "The Innovation Killer"

One hundred years ago we had fiction with dragons and werewolves but now we are more streamlined, not as fantastical, only a few are now really different.

Want education to be digital, personalised, student centered - are they open to other thinking? Student centered comes out a lot and is the greatest priority.
What is the purpose of education - is being planet centered more important than student centered?
Cognitive tools - what do we take for granted?

Decolonising our imagination:
We need to help people see not only what it could be but what is restraining them
Our visions are highly colonised - not in a European way necessarily but colonised.

Wouldn't say it's wrong but NZ's future in this is only one option of future, there could be other futures and different possibilities

Technology and Entrepreneurship are needed

Learning to code may ensure our future but this only covers a narrow range of visions for the future
We need to be more adaptable. Learn to thrive in different futures. How can we use this experience of Covid19 - what else might happen that we need to adapt to?

4 future archetypes - Dator
Education in 2035 - 4 stories - all trends grow but based on continual growth
Collapse - societal or economic - new beginning
Disciplined - some kind of control, external force or power - self disciplined
Transformation - completely changed, robots do everything

This is why we look at fiction - films, books often involve scenarios of future worlds. But "what would the world be like if this is the case" could be good or bad
Scenarios of possible futures
Group to draw up different types of scenarios - may be 4 archetypes
Not trying to engage in anything predictive. Idea is to put people's imaginations in a different place to enable people to think differently.
What would school be like if we were like "Ready Player One"?
Need to give us the opportunity to decolonise. We are so switched to the 'now' that we don't get into 'what could be'.

Don't just want digital and student centered - need a broader range
Younger people's awareness is open, they are noticing and absorbing not focussing on what they need to do.
Why don't we do that now? What can we do to stop that being a problem?
Whose future is this? - Stuart Candy - TedX
In a poetic future/There is a box/Related to work/

We were then put into groups to create something that exists in the future
The year is 2040 - only 20 years so still connectable to our current situation.
He gave us an example of a Steampunk future where you have to describe the world, describe the thing you are inventing and then bring the story back to the whole group. Some related to education, some didn't and we didn't have to make it good or bad, just possible. What kind of future would you see?
There is a card deck you can get to do this - The Thing From The Future - it gets you more agile and thinking about what would be possible.
We worked together in 4 groups and looked at some different scenarios. I found it really great to just go wild with ideas and what the future could possibly look like.
Working in scenarios can enable us to amplify what is happening today. For example a flexible timetable, how it works and the impact on families.
Using horizon scanning - looking around for signals of change then using scenarios to raise ability to notice emergence and new stuff
Social media, fake news - find examples of that and track these - which response are good and bad.
All of our scenarios were great, some weird, some more realistic. When we start to think about the future don't go in with the mindset of solving the problems of the present. As you solve a problem a new one appears if we are imagining things then it turns assumptions inside out.
Rigorous imagining - Riel Miller
Need to think in new ridiculous ways, don't just solve