This past year has been an incredible journey into the “futures”. It all started with a seminar class where I, along with my cohort, were introduced to Dr. Jim Dator’s futures class. I was fascinated by the presentation given by 2 futures doctoral students who showed us how futures theories and methods are practices for forecasting and then planning for preferred futures.
It occured to me — why don’t we educational technologist ever engage in futures practices? Why do we always seem to be playing “catch the technology” and then figure out how to use it? Why aren’t we more proactive about considering technologies on the distant horizon and why don’t we plan for their implications instead of waiting to deal with them when they arrive (and usually they arrive in the hands of our students before making way into our classrooms)?
I decided I needed to learn more about this futures stuff and so I took Dator’s Futures in Education course in the fall of ‘08. It was one of the most intellectually challenging and stimulating courses I have ever taken. It included doc students from political science and the school of architecture. The course was team taught by Dator and Ray Yeh, accomplished campus architect and former dean of the school of arch. It was truly an interdisciplinary course, which was centered around a problem-based learning project. Our task was to engage in a deep understanding of the historical perspectives surrounding higher education and then to apply futures theories and methodologies and architectural design methods to construct four alternative campus scenarios for UH Manoa in the year 2050.
I am presenting the outcomes of this project at the 2009 EdMedia conference this June.
We are in fact continuing on with this project to refine our scenarios and to present them to an international panel of futurists this fall 2009. Our research group is called the Alternative Campus of the Futures Research Group and we are based here at the School of Architecture.
Stay tuned for more!
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