Taking the 21st Century Seriously: potential socio-technical developments

over the coming two decades

Professor Keri Facer, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University

k.facer@mmu.ac.uk

The Beyond Current Horizons Programme

• 2 year programme, funded by UK Government

• Remit to ‘produce a set of challenging long-term scenarios for the future of education in the context of socio-technical change 2025 and beyond’

• Engagement of over 150 academics, industry, policy partners, public engagement programme involving over 700 people

• 60+ reviews of existing evidence

Thinking systematically about ‘the future’ in education

• Purpose is to challenge assumptions, not make predictions

• Technological development does not determine social development

• Education has multiple purposes

• Future visions always involve values – make methods clear

KEY SOCIO-TECHNICAL TRENDS OVER THE COMING TWO DECADES

1. Ageing Populations

Over 50% of the population of Western Europe aged over 50 by 2030 with a further 40 year life expectancy. Over 25 % aged over 65. Population ageing a global phenomena, not just restricted to Europe/US

Late life learning increasingly important. Late life inequalities will emerge.

Intergenerational learning & intergenerational teams – wisdom + responsiveness

Lifelong learning in the context of radical longevity?

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2. Working and living alongside machines becomes increasingly normal

Devolving responsibility to machines: simple manual tasks or outsourcing the management of complex systems

Cosmetic Pharmacology & Intelligent Prostheses (Brain-computer interfaces)

Different generations with different degrees of comfort in delegating power and responsibility to machines.

Growing computers – ethics? 6

Image from Andrew Harrison, DEGW

Patterned (Flickr): Creative Commons License

3. We will have the capacity to ‘know more stuff about more stuff’

Social trends toward accountability and security,

The decreasing cost and increasing availability of digital storage capacity,

The development of new forms of bio- and genetic information,

The ability to digitally tag almost any physical object, space or person,

The ability to represent information in more diverse media;

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Image by Noah Sussman Tumbollage (Creative Commons License applies)

4. The personal ‘cloud’

The capacity to connect to a network, and be constantly connected to knowledge, resources, people and tools

Expectations of ‘perpetual contact’ with diverse networks and communities, both physical and virtual.

Mobile/distributed families creating new notions of ‘absent presence’

My filter systems/friends – shaping what information I get

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Image by Noah Sussman – Creative Commons License Applies

5. Distance matters less, geography still counts

Access information, people and resources anywhere

Familiarity & social etiquette of working at a distance

Increased international migration & decreased ease of frequent travel

Place plays a role as identity marker & shapes regulatory/legal issues

Place shapes cultures of innovation, economies and exchange

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Lars Plougmann: creative commons license applies

6. Weakening institutional boundaries

Cultural shifts: younger age groups merging working and leisure practices

Demographic shifts: adults needing to balance caring, working, learning, relationships

The linear temporal structure of education -> work -> retirement is eroded

The spatial structure of education/work/family is eroded

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Brande Jackson: Creative Commons License applies

SJ Photography: Creative Commons License applies

Cindy47452 (flickr): Creative Commons License applies

7. Challenges to the ‘knowledge economy’ narrative

Polarisation of workforces: •Rise of elites in major organisations •Capacity to offshore work to low cost environments•Automation

•What cannot be automated/offshored? – Caring? - Currently undervalued/underpaid

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Troy Holden: CC license applies

Jessica Mulley: CC license applies

Fiona L Cooper: CC license applies

2025 ?

• Networked, ‘augmented’ people, in an increasingly ageing population, working later in life and in intergenerational teams, working and living in collaboration with diverse machines that take on roles we see as human today, operating across multiple locations, in the context of increasingly sharp and extreme socio-economic divides

• New divides emerge around access to information, augmentation, participation in specific social networks?

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Three major challenges

• Education for the networked individual – the network not the individual becomes the basis for educational design

• Supporting the individual to navigate a diverse learning landscape – learning is no longer seen as the preserve of schooling

• Reviewing educational goals in the light of potential polarisation – the lisbon agenda, the Leitch agenda, the ‘knowledge economy’ agenda all need to be rethought.

Thank you for listening

k.facer@mmu.ac.ukwww.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk

Acknowledgements & Links• This socio-technical trends described here are derived from the work of the Beyond

Current Horizons project which I led while Research Director at Futurelab. The research team at Futurelab included Richard Sandford, Dan Sutch, Steve Sayers and Mary Ulicsak. The implications for education presented here should be understood to be the views of the author and not the BCH programme, its participants or its funders. All members of the advisory group, challenge leads and review authors along with the full text of the final report from the programme can be found at:

– www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/outcomes/reports/final-report-2009/

• Images/photographs are attributed to their author where possible. They are used under Creative Commons license which means that they can be displayed elsewhere, but only with attribution, and they should not be modified in any way or used for commercial purposes. They were (almost) all sourced from Flickr.

• The futures tools can be found as follows: – www.millionfutures.org.uk; www.visionmapper.org.uk; www.powerleague.org.uk;

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