The future is not what it used to be (but maybe that’s for the best): committing to preferable futures for education and technology

Abstract

The problem with the future is that it rarely lives up to its hype. This paper explores how current discussions about emerging technologies often frame the future as inevitable, creating pressure for education to change in readiness to meet it. In this paper, I will introduce ways to reframe and resist these discussions.

First, I introduce the idea that ‘futures’ are ways of making things happen in the present. Next, I locate current discussions about the future of technology within a wider historic context, showing that contemporary discussions of educational revolution can be understood as part of a much longer history. Then, I will outline approaches to design that have been developed to generate alternative ways to approach the future, and suggest conceptual resources that we can use as provocations to open up our discussions about how to act in the present. To conclude, I suggest that if we accept this alternative framing of the future as something we can influence, we need to consider the responsibility that this places on us to make choices about whose version of the future we will work towards.