According to Diamond’s thesis…the ancients built a very clever and advanced society but were undone by their own success. Populations grew and stretched natural resources to breaking point. Political elites failed to resolve the escalating economic problems and the system collapsed. There was no need for an external cataclysm or a plague. What did for the Maya was a slow-boiling environmental-driven crisis that its leaders failed to recognise and resolve until too late.

So the civilisation was doomed, as is ours, implies Carroll. But the world was the same size then as it is now, that is, large enough that more than one empire might be in decline or in the ascendant at any one moment. What else was going on? Where might a Mayan with the means to travel and the will to succeed have looked to settle in AD 900?

Immediately, a short trip into the centre of Mexico would bring them to the Toltecs, then a couple of hundred years into their empire and good for a couple more. A trip across the Atlantic to West Africa would reach the nascent Wagadou Empire, growing rich from the new trade routes opened up by the introduction of the camel. Travel towards the Mediterranean and the Abbasids would tempt you with the flowering of the golden age of Islamic culture. Head straight on for Europe and a quiet place to wait for Otto the Great and the Holy Roman Empire: turn right for Byzantium and the revival of fortune experienced under the Macedonian dynasty. Straight on for the Chola temples and culture of south-east India and the South China sea: carry on to the mainland for another chance to watch an empire collapse surrounded by the glories of the Tang Dynasty.

This would, of course, be a difficult trip to make starting from the jungles of the Maya, and it’s safe to say it would be hard to integrate in most of these cultures starting from there. The point is that the collapse of the Mayan civilisation didn’t take place in isolation, and that at that time the end of one way of ordering society took place at the same time as another way comes into being. The end of a civilisation wasn’t the end of Civilisation.

The question for us is to what extent globalisation has linked societies sufficiently that the diversity of ways of living that existed in AD 900 no longer exists. Is the end of civilisation really the end of everything now, connected as we are by trade and markets and advertising and mass culture? Or are there alternatives out there, ways of living that will be as untroubled by the demise of “western culture” as the Vikings were when the Mayans faded from the Mexican political scene? And if there are, how do we join them?

He makes a good case, as you might expect, but rather than examine the strengths or otherwise of his argument I thought the article was a good reminder for those of us who are trying to think clearly about future events of the importance of avoiding the temptation to imagine that today is somehow more special than yesterday. Many of the images of different futures that we’ve encountered so far have underlying them certain stories that, if left unchallenged, might lead us to entertain mistaken ideas of the world. Millennial ideas of the ‘new economy’ or the ‘knowledge society’, for example, despite being challenged or rejected by many economists and sociologists, continue to inform contemporary discussion about likely changes in society; despite warnings of resource depletion, ‘technology’ will play an ever-increasing role in bringing about these changes; despite the kind of evidence highlighted by Gray, these changes will lead to ever-more progressive nation states and a global set of values and norms enshrined in an international law that is respected across every continent.

It’s a lovely story, and one I personally find very appealing. But it’s increasingly being shown to be outdated. If we’re trying to foster what Gray calls a “capacity for realistic thinking”, perhaps it’s a good idea to look harder for the hidden narratives that shape our ideas of the world, and be ready to throw them away when they’re shown to be unhelpful. Living in the present doesn’t make us exceptional. Sometimes history is a better source of clarity than present-day claims that this time is different.

Inflection points are those changes in patterns – and as Saffo points out, although we often think change is linear, it’s much more like an ’s’ curve.  The inflection points then, are those tight curves of the s.

So how can we look for these inflection points?  First, Saffo suggests looking for things that don’t fit – juxtapositions of emerging techno/science developments and real life problems (Safo’s example of road accidents and huge developments in robotic cars).  But another suggestion is the mirror – to look back in history for the weak signals that have led to big changes. A good overview of the whole seminar can be found here where Saffo gives some examples of those weak signals in history’s mirror that can help us think about the future.  Although, as Edward de Bono reminded me in a presentation, once you’ve made a new connection, hindsight makes that achievement look easier than it was.

So, as it’s Friday – your weekend homework: Think about something that you do relatively regularly that seems like a pretty recent addition to your daily/weekly routine – recycling, blogging, using Facebook etc – and spend a bit of time trying to trace when that first came into your consciousness.  Google it, talk to your friends, look at news archives.  What were the weak signals in the past that have had an effect on your daily/weekly lives?  Where those signals social or technological etc?

It’s not an easy piece of homework but there are no marks for anything but effort!  I’ll report on my findings in a later post.

The March issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology highlighted this. In an introduction from Nick Rushby and Jan Seabrook, the authors suggest that most current efforts to support learning with technology don’t tend to show any awareness of previous efforts: in their words, “It is almost as if our field started in the late 1990s, and that nothing of importance happened before that time. Yet, the two decades from 1980–1999 encompass a great deal of UK research and development in the use of technology in education and training”. The penalty of working in this state of ignorance, of course, is that progress comes hard and energy is wasted.

So what can combat this lack of awareness? One initiative that has the potential to provide researchers into learning technologies with the kind of perspective Rushby and Seabrook are looking for is the fledgling National Archive of Educational Computing, a collection of memories, documents, artefacts and software herded together by Richard Millwood of Core UK and previously Ultralab. Launched at the Institute of Education last week (read Merlin John’s report of the event), NAEC aims to document the history of learning technologies and the experiences of those who built and used them. It’s a huge and much-needed undertaking, and if you can contribute a story or support the project in any other way you’d be doing a valuable service.

The BCH project is looking at the futures that lie ahead for education and technology, not the past, so NAEC might not seem like the most obvious topic for us to look at. But the archive offers us the promise of perspective and context, the chance to step back from what seems like a constant rush of technological excitement and learn from what’s happened already. An example: the recent reorganisation of government departments that gave birth to the DCSF, DIUS and BERR might prompt us to consider whether educational technology is something that stimulates industry and is an economic asset to the UK, or whether its economic value is more indirect, through its equipping learners with modern technological skills (or indeed, whether there is more to education than just supporting the economic health of the country). This is a current debate. But it takes access to the experience of people like Mike Aston for us to know that the Department for Trade and Industry and the Department for Education and Science were struggling to control this new approach to learning back in the late 1970s. Or that calls for “systems thinking” or “algorithmic thinking” have been made for nearly forty years. When a debate seems less novel it’s easier to assess its impact or importance than when caught up in the urgency of the present-day.

There’s a “but”, of course. The archive itself could benefit from a similar sense of perspective: at the moment, it seems to be working under the assumption that all learning technology comes in the form of disks and tapes and printed documents (listings and manuals and worksheets). But the technologies being pressed into service to support learning won’t allow themselves to be so neatly archived. How do you store the internet, or distributed programmes, or documents that change every few minutes, or activities that exist half in this world and half in another? The archive needs to be more future-focussed, if it isn’t going to end up in a museum itself. No doubt it will be, once it’s up and running.

But even if it confines itself to the last forty years of work, its presence will still help to remind us to guard against being seduced by narrow-minded presentism. And that is already a pretty useful contribution to any exploration of the future.