The future was not what it seemed

Imagine thinking of the future and the feelings that emerge are anxiety, apprehension and unease. The only way to deal with this was to prepare for the inevitable. To brace for that tidal wave of the future, and hope we make it out alive. That was my subconscious disposition towards the future as I walked into EFI on Monday 9th September 2024. I had until then lived under the misapprehension that the future was a fait accompli, a done deal, as immutable as the laws of physics or the inevitability of rain in Edinburgh. How wrong I was!

So instead, could the future can happen with us?

This was the first paradigm shift I experienced as the ground slowly shifted under my feet, first when reading Facer’s Introduction Education, technology and the future (2011), and which I found resonated in Ross’s 2nd Chapter How Learning Futures are Made (2023) and in Bayne & Gallagher’s article Near Future Teaching (2021). These 3 readings pierced through the prevailing myth that our agency over the future has been snatched from our grasp. Our agency has not been stolen, it was put to sleep, laid dormant, and is waiting to be awakened.

The speculative method, especially speculative narratives, ignited my curiosity. I’ll be adventuring into this further.

Within the world of education we’ve gone through various cycles of tech hype, undulated by tech being the solution to all our problems, and the downfall of our education system. Technology will revolutionise our education system making it unrecognisably [insert chosen adjective here], or so we’re told – and that’s what we’ve been told for years. The latest hype wave coming over education is AI.

So far, through this project I hope to start exploring how to integrate AI in education, primarily through LLMs, not to solve any problems or dismantle the current education system, simply to allow new possibilities to emerge as the world of education interacts with this reality. A particular curiosity is how LLMs, in my opinion, can interfere with Bloom’s Taxonomy.

I’m excited to see where this journey will take me, what futures it can bring about.

[Featured image was generated by AI, just in case the 6 fingers didn’t give it away]