It’s been quiet on the BCH blog as we’re preparing for a three day event to develop the scenarios that build from the evidence collated as part of the programme so far.  Whilst that is going on, below is an overview of the responses from the Citizens Panel.

As part of the Public and Stakeholder Engagement of beyond Current Horizons a Citizens Panel was established to ask members of the public questions about the future of education. The Citizen’s Panel was sent a ten question survey that included both ordering questions and free text entry. Questions included asking about the immediate goals of education, as well as hopes, fears and expectations for future education. An additional seven questions were included to gather demographic characteristics of the respondents.  Over 500 responses were made to these questions.

The response from the Citizen’s Panel is that having the most appropriate skills for work is the most important job of the education system. This emerges from the qualitative and quantitative questions and is felt strongly across the demographic groups. People have a real worry that an education system out of step with economic reality will leave young people disillusioned and out of work and Britain lagging behind the rest of the world. It is likely that the strength of feeling about this has been influenced by the current economic climate

A number of questions ask the panel to try to look into the future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, age is the most important factor influencing the results. Younger people are more likely to look at current trends and project them into the future, whereas older people are more likely to draw inspiration from the past. The generation gap is very apparent with lots of negative views about children and young people expressed throughout the responses.

The Citizen’s Panel believe that the education system is likely to be very different in 2025, especially in terms of technological developments, but they are keen to stress that certain academic standards are timeless. There is a perception that too many people leave education without basic numeracy, literacy and communication skills and this needs to be addressed (though not, they hasten to add, with too great a reliance on bureaucratic testing.)

The Panel want the current gap in educational achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged children to be closed. There is a significant ‘Bristol effect’ here as state schools in the region are known to be struggling. The Panel do not want to see a two-tier system based on the ability to pay developing further in Bristol or elsewhere.

Finally, the panel want to see better quality teaching in the classroom. They want teachers and future teachers to have more control in the classroom, a more engaging teaching style and to rely less on boring self-directed study for pupils. They think that this could be achieved in a number of ways such as attracting a higher calibre of staff through higher pay, reducing workloads and better training and support.

Jessica Charlesworth and Michael Burton showed some work around futures and obesity during the workshop and here are some of their reflections.  They make for interesting reading, both for the comments Jessica and Michael make, but also for the articles and links they show.

Their reflections can be found here.

The Citizens Panel is made up of members of the public who have been sampled against a number of different demographic characteristics.  Their views, along with those of the Citizens Council, will be used to reflect (not represent) a public perception of the possible futures described elsewhere within BCH and to comment upon how ‘education’ should respond.  The responses have only come into the lab this week – so a first view of the overall comments through TagCrowd.  These are the words most commonly used.  Make of it what you will.  We’ll be doing detailed analysis over the next few weeks in order to inform the scenarios, but a flavour for you to mull over the weekend.

As with many tag clouds, the larger the word, the more it is used – so in this case, the larger the word, the more times the word has been used by the Citizen’s Panel.  Some of the key words are expected, relating to the question prompts – these are simply contextual words.  It is interesting to look at the words used at second/third level of frequency.  To see what terms are being used, what issues are raised regularly.   The warning, of course, is that this is not research analysis; this is not providing any context for the word use, but that by looking at the span of words and the regularity, it provokes some thought about the issues being raised.

Some interesting words to look out for with the Children’s Plan in mind: parents, health, happiness, safety, success and jobs.

Just worth a browse before we get into the detail of reflecting the Citizens Panel’s perceptions about educational futures.

However, there is a middle way between the demand for change and the need for consistency – and that is simply based upon reflecting upon the most appropriate practices for the aims of education.  If we take the aims of the Children’s Plan as these core educational goals, then a number of different practices are needed to reach the wide range of demands set out.

Some of practices are challenged by possible futures: what does ‘being healthy’ mean in an aging population where advanced pharmaceuticals and treatments challenge our current definition – and what does this mean for the way we educate young people to be healthy?  In the same way, what are the practices that support young people being active citizens in a world of complex multiple identities and diverse and dynamic communities?

Some of the challenges persist; some of them are newly defined, and some of the current practices are made even more important (whilst other new practices are needed to emerge).

There’s a new question posed on Million Futures which asks about this issue.  What are the things that we want to persist: the practices, aims, values and mechanisms that we want to take from today into future educational practices?  Not continuity for the sake of continuity, but continuity in the face of the new and continuing challenges facing education.

One such ‘Voice of Education’ is Richard Millwood, currently leading CORE and the development of the National Archive of Educational Computing, Richard was a key part in building Ultralab (and the many activities that has involved) and has an incredible ability to bring together hindsight and insight.

The bold text are questions posed to Richard, the lighter text his reponses.

If you could talk with the Oracle at Delphi (or ask questions of the data we’re collecting and generating), what would you want to find out to inform educational policy and practice?

I’m not too fond of static data-of-the-moment – rather I would ask for live data relating to learner satisfaction with learning activity – something which could feed-back into learning environments to inform both learner and teacher.

On a slightly longer time-scale – feedback to the system on learners’ next steps in learning or career.

In scanning the horizon, we often look for ‘weak signals’ – new developments and ideas that may play out in the future in many different ways.  What current developments (policy, practice, tech etc) have you noted that you think have possibilities for making a big difference to education in the future?

Collaborative documents, both synchronous and asynchronous as found in SubEthaEdit and GoogleDocs. The capacity to identify individual contributions to collaborative outcomes may be a clue to helping us to recognise learning achieved in group work.

Forecasters talk of ‘inflection points’ as a way of identifying big changes to come – they are often highlighted by ‘things that don’t fit’ (for example the mis-match between car crashes and developments in sensing technology).  Can you highlight any real world problems within education, with possible developments/solutions outside of it?

The problem of ‘authority’ in knowledge as observed in the debate between supporters and opponents of Wikipedia. Solutions will come from a re-alignment based on real-world utility – people will ‘vote with their feet’ by their use of collectively authored sources.

The problem of marking summative assessment products, as we move towards personalised learning and digital creativity in expression. Sustaining fairness, cost-effectiveness and validity may mean adopting more widely the radical technology-supported methods such as those proposed by Alistair Pollitt and employed in the eScape project.

What do you not want to see in any education in 2025?

A continuation of an overemphasis on selection, elitism and individualism at the cost of collaborative learning & attainment.

What are your hopes for education in 2025?

A democratic and fair system for accessing learning at all ages that fulfils citizens needs and interests, as they identify them.

Comment
There’s plenty in this short Q&A that is of interest, for examples notions of voice and empowerment, but one element specifically is assessment.  Assessment is often seen as a force that controls practice – sometimes to its detriment (perceptions here of ‘teaching to the test’) and sometimes to its benefit (the wide range of practices undertaken by sprinters and their coaches, as they absolutely know the specific details of their measured performance).  Richard points to collaborative authoring environments, not solely from a standard point of view referring to how they can support collective and collaborative endeavour, but of how they can be used to help identify individual activity, as well as the benefits of working with others.  As one of the challenges to collaboration is the individual nature of assessment, investigating how collaborative technologies can support the identification of both individual and collaborative acts is an important step in reducing the resistances of change in developing collaborative practice.  The marvellous eScape project that Richard refers to also highlights how the processes of learning can be made explicit through appropriate use of digital technologies, allowing more formative assessments.

If digital technologies can be used to make explicit these developments and they are linked to the live-student data, Richard refers to, a truly dynamic learning environment can be created that builds around the learners’ interests, satisfaction and of the moment needs.  Personalisation indeed.

Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand.  Curious to find out more about their worldview, I decided to set up an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, to learn what it might be like to live in the dark future they were foretelling. This article gives a brief outline of that experiment.

The utopia experiment, as I called it, started when I put an announcement on my website in January 2006 calling for volunteers to come and help me set up a temporary community in the Scottish Highlands. We would live as if modern civilisation had collapsed, growing our own food, generating our own power, and salvaging what technology we could from the wreckage.  Within a few months, I had received hundreds of applications to join the experimental community. And they weren’t all hippies in their twenties either, as one of my friends had predicted. With ages ranging from 18 to 67, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds; an ex royal marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit.

It started in Mexico, while I was touring the Yucatan Peninsula.  I had long dreamed of visiting this part of the world, famous for the ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the first millennium, before collapsing rather suddenly around the tenth century.  And when I visited these lost cities, they did not disappoint.

I can still remember vividly the impact that the ruins of Uxmal had on me. As I surveyed the majestic temples and stone colonnades from the top of a steep pyramid, a feeling of melancholy overcame me. I pictured the bustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares, over a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all that could be seen now was the green canopy of the jungle, which stretched in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peeks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.

Nobody who visits these ruined cities can fail to wonder what happened to their original inhabitants, or why they were abandoned. Fortunately, archaeologists have pieced together the answer. The Maya collapse, it turns out, was not triggered by invasion, or any outside force; it was entirely self-caused. It seems the Maya depleted one of their principal resources – trees – and this led to a series of other problems, including soil erosion, decrease of usable farmland, and drought. The growing population that drove this overexploitation was then faced with a diminishing amount of food, which led to increasing migration and, eventually, bloody civil war.

As I sat atop that pyramid in Uxmal, a question began to form in my mind.  If a great civilisation like that of the Mayas can implode, I wondered, might not the same happen to us? There are, of course, some big differences between the civilisation we live in today and that of the Mayas. For one thing, our civilisation is global. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, it can appeal to the rest of the world for help. The Mayas did not have this luxury, because they were in effect isolated from the rest of the world. But on the negative side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, the trouble could quickly be exported and cascade throughout the tightly-integrated international system. If modern civilisation collapses, it will do so everywhere. Everyone now stands or falls together.

If the idea of our great global industrial civilisation crashing seems outlandish, no doubt the idea of their own civilisation collapsing would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. To the crowds who once thronged the now deserted streets of Tikal and Chichen-Itza, the idea that within a few years these streets would be deserted would have been hard to entertain. So perhaps those who refuse to contemplate the possibility of global collapse are simply suffering from a failure of imagination.

That’s when the idea for the utopia experiment came to me.  I would appeal for volunteers to live as if civilisation had recently collapsed.  It would be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  By acting it out in real life, I hoped our thoughts about such an existence would be more realistic than if we just sat around and made it up.

I returned to England from Mexico full of enthusiasm for my new project. The first task was to find a suitable location. My scenario called for somewhere rural, so the volunteers could grow their own food. Climate would be important too – and if climate change was one of the major contributors to the collapse of the old civilisation, the places favoured by the old climate might be too hot or too dry for new settlements. I began to peruse the scientific models forecasting the climate of different parts of the UK, and one area seemed to stand out as more favourable than most – the Highlands of Scotland. While the south of England would become increasingly dry with global warming, all the models predicted that rainfall would still be plentiful in the Highlands, while the rising temperatures would mean that average snowfalls there would reduce by up to ninety per cent.

Having secured a suitable location, the next step was to recruit volunteers for the experiment.  In January 2006, I put up a new page on my website, with the following announcement:

“Volunteers needed for a visionary experiment – from March 2007

From March 2007, I’ll be inviting volunteers to join me in an experiment in utopia in the Scottish highlands.  We will live together in a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:

1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.

2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.

3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED.  This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community.  Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.“

To make it clear that this was not just another commune, I made it clear that the aim of the experiment would be to simulate life after the collapse of modern civilisation:

“The main objective of this experiment,” I wrote, “is to simulate life in the aftermath of a collapse of global civilisation and to prepare for such an eventuality.”  The announcement finished by asking potential volunteers to email me a short (200 word) description of themselves and what they could offer the community.

At first I made no attempt to promote the project or tell anyone the announcement was there. I didn’t know if anyone would see the website, or respond. But, the wonders of the internet being what they are, somehow people found their way to this page, and within a few days I received the first application.   It was from a 51 year old man who called himself Agric. 

When I eventually met him in person, he turned out to be a softly spoken man with shocks of white hair and irrepressible energy (a “hobbit on speed”, as another volunteer once remarked), . He lived in Slough and worked in computers – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad. It didn’t take me long to realise that Agric was a committed “doomer” – a believer in the coming apocalypse. For him, the scenario we were playing out at the utopia experiment was not just a collaborative fiction. It was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the stock exchange, the global economy and, of course, peak oil.

One of the main lessons from my experiment was how easy it was for people to make the same ideological transition that Agric had already made – from imagining what it might be like if civilisation really did collapse, to firmly believing that it would collapse.  The experiment was originally meant to be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn it into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  The problem, as it turned out, was that our thoughts became too realistic.  With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  A similar thing, after all, happened in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, when the undergraduates who he selected to live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building started taking their roles far too seriously.  Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment early, and in the end I also decided to curtail the experiment after a year.

For me, one of the final straws came when some of the volunteers started talking about justice.  Without any police force, surely we would have to enact our own – inevitably rough – kind of justice?  That sort of thing is ok to write about in fiction, but it could get very dangerous if you begin to start acting it out in reality.

Besides the transition from taking the scenario as an interesting fiction and an accurate prediction, I also witnessed another strange mutation; the volunteers began to think of the future collapse as something good.  It’s the opposite to sour grapes – Jon Elster has called it “sweet lemons”. This strain of thought has many names.  Luddism.  Anti-technologism.  Anti-transhumanism.  Primitivism.  Bioconservatism.  But they all amount to the same thing.

Part of the appeal of this current of thought is that it provides an easy explanation for a sense of anomie.  Boredom, frustration, anxiety, depression?  According to the Luddites, we can blame them all on industrial civilisation.  If we were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands consisting mostly of family members, in contact with nature, directly satisfying our own biological needs each day, then we’d be happy, right?  Well, maybe.  But that was the past, and we can’t go back there now.  Or maybe we can – if society collapses…. That’s one reason why Luddism is so dangerous: it encourages people to imagine social collapse as something desirable.

Thinking about the future can be done in a sensible way, but only when one is aware of the many pitfalls that we tend to fall into when trying to do futurology.  The utopia experiment taught me about many of these pitfalls.  Besides the tendency to take fiction as truth, and the sweet-lemons phenomenon, I also witnessed what the security expert Bruce Schneier refers as the tendency to focus on “movie plot threats”.  People worry about dramatic threats of the sort that make good movies – and convince themselves that these are probable just because they are dramatic.  As Schneier says:

“We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared”

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Evolution has endowed us with good imaginations.  But these imaginations are often seduced by dramatic images and pay little attention to good probabilistic reasoning.

When I did eventually call an end to the experiment, most of the volunteers returned happily to their former lives, but some of them wanted to carry on.  Indeed, they were shocked that I did not want to carry on with them.  When I explained that the experiment had always been just that – an experiment, a kind of collaborative fiction – they didn’t believe me, even though I had clearly stated that at the outset.  A few of them are, I believe, still thinking about trying to buy some land of their own in a remote part of Scotland so they can live there permanently and prepare for the coming apocalypse for real.   And they are convinced that someday, I’ll see the light, and come and join them.”

At a glance, the article is quite alarmist: learners have a right to use smart drugs; teachers guilty of discrimination if they don’t ensure equal access to cognition enhancers; children holding all their digital profiles on memory sticks!  But that’s just at a first glance.

What is so interesting about the paper upon which this is based is that its content causes an emotional response from the reader – and the TES article does just the same.  This is because the possibilities offered by technological change can challenge the beliefs and values we hold about education.

The data and trends that this article builds from are about the possiblities of using smart drugs, of psyco-pharmaceuticals to enhance memory and performance etc.  But it isn’t the possibility of these trends developing that causes such a reaction in the reader, after all, we already have Ritalin, Modafinil as well as a whole host of banned drugs for performance atheletes.  The reaction comes from how these changes challenge or are challenged-by our views and beliefs about education.

The greatest strength of this article is that is sparks conversations and thought about possible futures – and it takes questions about the future of education into the wider educational community.  In a previous post I presented some benefits for thinking about the future and the TES article is a great example of point 3: bringing about preferable futures.  The paper highlights techno trends that are part of a possible, even a probable future – but the way in which we consider these technological possiblities and the ways in which we act now, go towards creating the preferable future that we want.  So – if the TES article caused a gut reaction or the socio-tech paper caused a moment of reflection – consider the paper some more, share your thoughts on millionfutures or by commenting here.

For me the sentence “['smart' drugs] are expected to be common in schools within 20 years” is the one that concerns me – because it takes away the agency that I/we have to influence the way in these drugs are used in education – indeed the agency we have over any of these possible futures (positively and negatively).

There were a number of really interesting conversations at the FAN club event about cosmetic psycho-pharmacology and I’ll leave you with a question that was raised and left open.  Where is the acceptable line between early morning coffee to help with concentration; vitamins to feel healthy; fish oils for learning, ritalin for specific learner groups, and the use of provigil and other ’smart drugs’?

The RSA is currently looking at two important sorts of futures in particular: cognition, and the role of the government. There are some great videos on their website featuring lectures and provocations about how developments may play out in the future in these areas. Yet for a provocative glimpse at the pace of continuity, the RSA’s Journal (Summer ‘08) has a great timeline created – as stimulus rather than prediction – by Richard Watson. Many thanks to the RSA for allowing me to reproduce it here:

RSA Journal Timeline

Spelling and free roads both disappear around 2020, whilst work-free weekends and free public services have gone by 2030. The disappearance of childhood, the family room and free public spaces all have stark consequences for the way we think about the world operating (and of course interesting discussions about definitions of all of them), yet blindness and deafness, physical pain and household chores may all die to thankful applause. ‘Death’ disappears by 2050 but evidentally Cher and Cliff Richard just before.

The timeline is presented ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’ – but an interesting pair of questions are in the preamble – ‘do you disagree with something becoming extinct or merely with the date of the extinction? Do you have any serious evidence for why this might be incorrect or is it just a gut feeling?’

It’s not solely about the quality of the evidence and information that possible futures are based upon (which is a shame considering the incredible challenge leads developing the evidence within BCH!) but about making explicit the values (and artefacts and practices etc) that we want to hold on to. BCH is doing this in many ways – Million Futures is beautiful start to questions of hopes and aspirations. Often preferable futures are based upon the continuation of the values and emotional connections that we currently have, so it is important to consider those things that we wish to hold on to – artefacts, beliefs and relationships – and more than considering them, it is important to make them explicit and actively ensure that they can play a role in the preferable future we’re working towards. If you’d like to share the things you’re hoping will remain – get in touch.

Richard’s book ‘Future Files: The 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years‘ is being launched at an RSA event on Tuesday 23 September. (Views on the timeline are welcomed by the RSA and of course as comments here too). If you can’t wait for that, the first chapter is available for download.

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