Education Futurists: Our Time has Come!

I have been waiting for this moment all my life.  As a professional consulting education futurist, I've set out visions and reasons for change, but we all know humans only change when there is a crisis.  So we have a crisis and I have ideas.

Others have said this, so I will just repeat:  We need to change everything;  what we teach, how we teach, who teaches, where and when we teach.  Everything, and that is because the world we were perpetuating with our formal education system has ceased to exist. The industrial age education system wasn't really bad, it's just that we don't need it anymore.  We need to rapidly and constructively contribute to the "new normal" we want to create - because if we don't, the new normal will be even worse than what we are struggling with now. This is urgent. eLearning alone is NOT the answer. 

We need a total rethink and redesign of where learning fits into the lives and communities of all people, families, citizens, refugees, societies, the world.  We need to ask: why did we segregate learning institutions off from the community?  Why did we build separate libraries and sports facilities?  Why do we think only certified teachers can be allowed in the classroom? Why don't we teach household and personal finance management?  Why do we test everyone at the same time against the same vague standards?  Why do we allow anyone to fail?  Why do we expect lockstep progression?  Why don't graduates get jobs? I have a whole dissertation that asked those questions and looked for answers in the literature of futurists.

Why futurists?  Because educators have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo - those for whom the system works cannot be expected to change it. I read countless futurist books - politics, socio-economics, demographics, environmental science, social science - and every one had a chapter on how learning systems impacted that field and how they needed to change. I captured it all and produced A Forecast of Change in Canada's Education System in 1994 full of ideas and imperatives for change in learning systems. I designed the FuturEd Transformation Model - a system for bringing about change but I never achieved a position of authority to implement it.  It has been lonely as a futurist and somewhat disconcerting when some bright light announces something I conceptualized almost 30 years ago.

I said I have ideas, and I'll just say my best and favorite is the ePortfolio - a tool that can be used to plan and document learning, promote lifelong learning, monitor faculty development, authentically assess student learning, foster reflective thinking and creativity skills, manage standards-based learning objectives and marking rubrics, document learning and change, generate evidence of competencies for multiple uses, contribute to digital identity and so much more.  An ePortfolio is a digital record of what I know and can do, infinitely more meaningful than a letter grade or transcript.  My website www.FuturEd.com is my professional portfolio, and I have a lot of papers and presentations about ePortfolio - what I called "the future of eLearning" 25 years ago.  It still is, and its time has come.