Facer, K. L., & Sandford, R. (2010). The next 25 years? future
scenarios and future directions for education and technology.
Journal
of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL)
,
26
(1), 74 - 93.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00337.x
Peer reviewed version
Link to published version (if available):
10.1111/j.1365-2729.2009.00337.x
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1
The next 25 years? : future scenarios and future directions for
education and technology
Keri Facer* and Richard Sandford
ESRI, Manchester Metropolitan University and Futurelab
Cite as: Facer, K and Sandford R (2010- in press) The Next 25 years? Future scenarios and
future directions for education and technology, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning
Paper accepted by JCAL October 2009
*Address for correspondence:
Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University
799 Wilmslow Road
Didsbury
Manchester
M20 2RR
K.Facer@mmu.ac.uk
2
The next 25 years? : future scenarios and future directions for
education and technology
Abstract:
The educational technology research field has been at the heart of debates about the future
of education for the last quarter century. This paper explores the socio-technical
developments that the next twenty five years might bring and the implications of such
developments for educators and for educational technology research.
The paper begins by outlining the diverse approaches to educational futures that are
currently visible in the field, and suggests four principles to underpin futures thinking in
educational technology. It then describes the methods used to inquire into long-term socio-
technical futures in the two year Beyond Current Horizons Programme
1
. These included a
foresight and scenario development process bringing together evidence reviews and insights
from over 100 researchers from disciplines as diverse as computer science, demography and
sociology of childhood, as well as consultation with over 130 organisations and individuals
from industry, practice and educational beneficiary groups.
The outcomes of this programme are then presented, including a set of future scenarios for
education in the context of long-term socio-technical change, and a set of socio-technical
developments that might underpin such scenarios. The scenarios emerge from three future
worlds (‘Trust Yourself’, ‘Loyalty Points’ and ‘Only Connect’) and from projections including:
changing demography, new human-machine relations and a weakening of institutional
boundaries.
Building on these projections and scenarios, the paper argues that the next twenty five years
will challenge our current organisation of education around the unit of the individual child,
the school, and the discourses of the knowledge economy; and require the development of
new approaches to curriculum, cross-institutional relationships, workforce development and
decision-making in education.
Finally, the paper argues that educational technology research will need to move beyond
pedagogy to curriculum; beyond the school to the community, home and workplace; and
beyond social sciences to collaborations with medical and bio-ethics fields. In so doing, it will
continue to play an important role in building alternative and socially just futures for
education in the context of socio-technical change.
Keywords
Futures, Socio-technical change, Methods, Ethics, Policy
1
While this paper is based on the Beyond Current Horizons programme and its research, the implications
for education technology research presented in the discussion should not be taken to reflect the views of all
the programme participants or the programme’s commissioners (DCSF). Some arguments have also been
abbreviated to fit the confines of a journal paper. For the official final report and recommendations from the
programme, see www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/outcomes
3
1. Introduction
Education is a future-facing activity. Assumptions about and aspirations for the future
underpin all levels of educational activity: from learners deciding what to study in the light
of their aspirations for their future lives, to national debates over the curriculum and
teaching methods that will best equip societies for future social, economic and cultural
worlds. From discussions of national strategy, to day-to-day interactions between educators
and learners, ideas about possible futures are instrumental in rationalising and generating
educational change. In the UK alone, for example, the government is investing £45bn in its
‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme
i
, intended to re-imagine and redesign the
schools estate for the next century; in the US the call for ‘21
st
century skills’ is becoming
more vocal as schools and advocates argue for new curriculum aims
ii
. Around the world
there are foundations, public-private partnerships, government initiatives and commercial
entities leading calls for a redesign of ‘21
st
century education’
iii
. The educational technology
research field plays diverse roles in these discourses of educational and social futures.
In many policy fields, for example, the ‘imaginary’
iv
upon which future-oriented projects are
premised often takes for granted the contemporary existence of and continued progress
toward a universal, technologically-rich, global ‘knowledge economy’, the so-called ‘flat
world’ of neo-liberal rhetoric (Friedman, 2005). It is toward this imminent world that
governments and educators are exhorted to propel students and citizens
v
; and it is this
imminent flat world that is used to mobilise support for funding allocations, to justify
investment in new technologies or to rationalise curriculum decisions. In these discourses,
the possibility of alternative futures frequently remains unarticulated, or is presented simply
as a rationale for further support to ensure that specific individuals or countries are enabled
to keep up. Within these discourses, technology enhanced learning is often presented, by
researchers and policy makers, as an essential modernising tool for education (see, for
example, Negroponte 1996; Lego, quoted in Jenson, 2006; Prensky, 2005; Heppell, 2009).
Such universalist discourses of inevitable ‘flat worlds’ or ‘knowledge economies’ are,
however, subject to critique; both from the sociology of the future (Bell, 1997; Adam and
Groves, 2007), from critical studies in education (Gough, 2000; Robertson et al, 2007), and
from economists (Stiglitz, 2006). These criticisms are often concerned to resist the
chronological imperialism of accounts of inevitable and universal futures; to testify to the
availability of diverse alternative trajectories for the coming century; to restate the
openness of the future; and to remind us of our responsibility for the consequences of our
actions in the future. In this tradition too, we find researchers contributing to the
educational technology field and arguing for more nuanced accounts of possible futures (for
example, Gee, Hull and Lankshear, 1996; Apple, 1993).
The idea of ‘the future’ as a singular, inevitable trajectory in the face of which educators and
citizens have no agency, is also subject to critique by the growing field of critical futures
studies with its links with peace studies, sustainability and global citizenship agendas (Beare
and Slaugher, 2001; Inayatullah, 2008). This field is committed to empowering learners,
students, researchers and communities to envisage and take action to build alternative and
desirable futures. In some ways, many researchers from the educational technology field
could be considered to be in sympathy with such action-oriented approaches, including
those such as Alan Kay who argue, paraphrasing Lincoln, that ‘the best way to predict the
future is to invent it’. The ethical dimensions of such an approach are also exemplified in the
4
design research field and in projects such as the MIT fablab that aim to place the means to
build new educational futures in the hands of communities, learners and educators
vi
.
We are also currently seeing the emergence of a range of foresight initiatives, operating
across global academic, commercial, governmental and charitable institutions and
networks
vii
. Such endeavours have historically often been oriented toward economic or
defence disciplines (Sandford and Facer, 2007). Recently, however, education has been seen
as a site for such inquiry with the commissioning of a number of major educationally
oriented foresight projects. In the UK alone, for example, the last five years have seen 4
major educational futures projects
viii
, while the OECD’s strategic future scenarios have, since
the early 2000s played an influential role in shaping international thinking about educational
policy. Many of these studies have engaged with educational technology researchers as a
central part of their work (Williams, 2005).
The educational technology research community, therefore, can be seen to play many
different roles in the development of discourses of the future of education. Some of its
members are actively committed to promoting visions of a technology-rich future
knowledge economy, others to critiquing and challenging this vision by presenting
alternative and oppositional accounts; some are involved in building new models of
institutions and pedagogies as templates for future development; others are concerned to
examine the empirical data on current practices to provide insight into how such models
might ‘play out’ over the longer term. Our participation in such futures-oriented work,
however, is usually directed towards exploring the implications of potential future
developments for educators, learners, schools and university education.
On the occasion of the 25
th
anniversary issue of JCAL, then, it seems appropriate to direct
our futures inquiry towards the educational technology field itself, and to ask: what might
be the implications of future socio-technical change for education, and what does this mean
for research in this field over the coming 25 years?
As a basis for the discussion, the paper outlines the work of the Beyond Current Horizons
programme, a two year project tasked with interrogating potential socio-technical futures
for education which brought together over 100 academics from disciplines as diverse as
computer science, demography, psychology, and sociology of childhood, and involved
contributions from over 130 organisations and individuals from industry, practice, policy and
research.
The paper explores:
1. a discussion of principles and methods that underpinned the Beyond Current
Horizons Programme
2. a set of future scenarios for education in the context of long term socio-technical
change and a set of projections of socio-technical developments over the coming
quarter century
3. a discussion of the challenges that these scenarios and projections imply for the
design of education
4. a discussion of the challenges and opportunities that this programme presents for
the educational technology research field