The document discusses tools used for forecasting the future, including trend analysis, the Delphi method, and scenario planning. It then provides an overview of scenario planning and describes how to develop scenarios around a focal issue and critical uncertainties. Examples of professional forecasting products are also presented, such as the Horizon Report and Map of Future Forces, which analyze trends to predict emerging technologies.

1. The Future of Learning (Yours) Eric Grant, LDT 05 Futurist, Edupreneur email: [email_address] twitter: senatorgrant

2. Overview Lecture: A Bit of Context for Today

3. Discussion: Education in the Flat World

4. Lecture: Tools Used by the Pros

5. Activity: Scenario Development

6. Lecture: Products of the Pros

7. Discussion: What's Next?

8. Suggested Reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman Optional: Education in the Flat World Shift Happens 2.0

9. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

10. Wikinomics by Dan Tapscott

11. Disrupting Class by Clayton Christensen

12. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

13. Generations by Strauss and Howe

14. Context for Today or: Explicit Learning Goals Most likely, the Future is not that different from now Demographics change, capacities increase, but humans still learn, work, play, love, and die The Future is impossible to predict , and if you try, you will be wrong, and probably be ridiculed But the future can be forecasted through a variety of fuzzy arts and rigorous methods An unchanged Future is boring and useless But talking about the extreme possibilities is much more interesting and generates better strategies

15. Futurists, aka Futurismologists Futures Studies, Foresight, or Futurology is the science, art and practice of postulating possible, probable, and preferable futures and the worldviews and myths that underlie them.

16. Futures Studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue, what is likely to change, and what is novel.

17. The discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and trends.

18. Some Fun Foresight Shapes The future can often be depicted in terms of pendulum shifts The future sometimes looks like a long tail Source: Longtail.com Source: Wikipedia

19. Some Fun Foresight Shapes The S-Curve is popular for forecasting adoption of new technologies and products But the Hype Cycle is usually more accurate Source: Gartner via Wikipedia Source: Wikipedia

20. Some Fun Foresight Shapes The future can be depicted as a “cone of uncertainty” It becomes more uncertain the further out you try to look Trends that seem obvious now become wilder and more unpredictable

21. Tools of the Pros: Trend Analysis collecting information and attempting to spot a pattern, or trend, in the information