Slides on "Let's Predict the Future: Gathering and Prioritising Your Predictions" for a workshop session on "Predicting the Future" held on 3 June 2014 at the SAOIM 2014 conference in Pretoria, South Africa and facilitated by Brian Kelly, Cetis. See https://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/events/saoim-2014-lets-predict-the-future-workshop/

1. C: Approaches
Let’s Predict the Future!
A half-day workshop
at the SAOIM 2014
conference held on
Tuesday 3 June
2014 facilitated by
Brian Kelly, Cetis
Slides available
under a Creative
Commons licence
(CC-BY)
1
C2: Let’s Predict the Future:
Gathering and
Prioritising Your
Predictions

2. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
What technologies / technology-related areas
do you feel will be important in your area of
work?:
• In the short-term (in the current year)?
• In the medium term (two – three years)?
• In the longer term (four – five years)?
2

3. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Group exercise:
• Agree on four (only four!) areas which you
feel will be important in the short-term
• Agree on four (only four!) areas which you
feel will be important in the medium-term
Spend ten minutes on this and be prepared to give
a brief summary of the areas
3

4. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Collating The Responses
Important in the short-term:
4
Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5

5. What Do You Think Will Be
Important?
Collating The Responses
Important in the medium term:
5
Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5

6. Reaching Consensus
Voting on the topics
Now vote on the other groups proposed areas.
Give each proposed area scores of:
3: Felt very likely to be of significant
importance to the organisation
2: Likely to have some importance to the
organisation
1: May have some importance for the
organisation
0: Felt to have little or no importance
6

7. Reviewing the Consensus
Analysis of the Votes
We now have some broad consensus on:
• Technological developments which are felt to
be importance to the organisation
• Some ranking of their level of importance
We can now:
• Explore some areas of technological
developments
• Explore ways in which we can see if they may
be the new Web or the new Second Life
7

8. About The Process
This Delphi process:
• Is an established and structured communication
technique for interactive forecasting reliant on a
selected panel of experts.
• Has been adopted by the US-based New Media
Consortium (NMC) for the NMC Horizon project
centrepiece activity charting the international
landscape of emerging technologies initiative as they
relate to "teaching, learning , research creative
inquiry and information management".
• Has been used at events organised by CETIS to
predict the potential impact of technology on learning
and teaching in the short, medium and long term.
8

9. 9
Use of the Delphi Process
The group was presented with a number of key trend statements, as identified by the NMC horizon scan
activities 2013, an example of which was "Openness; concepts like open content, open date and open
resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information, is becoming a value"
and significant challenges such as "Faculty training still does not acknowledge the fact that digital media
literacy continues to rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession".
Participants were split into smaller groups and posed a series of response questions; Question 1 being "Given
the technology trends and challenges just discussed which technologies do you think will have greatest impact
on Higher Education (Teaching and Learning from the CETIS 13 expert group) over the next twelve months
(near term)?
The expert groups were given ten minutes to discuss the question, collectively agree and provide three
technologies identified. The technologies identified by the expert groups were listed and presented to the whole
group. Each of the smaller working group were given a further five minutes to discuss the other groups
suggestions asked to vote for the suggestions, excluding their own. The scores were collated and the three
technologies emerging with the highest overall group scores were put forward as the three technologies with
potentially greatest impact on teaching and learning in the near term.
The process was then repeated for the medium (2-3 years) and long term (3-5 years) questions. In an hour the
expert group were able to produce a list of technologies that they considered would have impact on higher
Education in the short, medium and long term the results of which were then compared with the NMC Horizon
scan findings and other group findings for further discussion and debate. The value of such a process is two-
fold; firstly the finding and outputs and secondly as a process by which to instigate discussion and debate
around technologies amongst experts.
From “Reflecting on Yesterday, Understanding Today, Planning for Tomorrow”, Kelly & Hollins, Umbrella 2013

10. Questions
Any questions?
10