Learning Futures Podcast Launch

Introducing the newly launched Learning Futures Podcast! Be sure to subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a single episode. As one of the Executive Producers of this new podcast - I am very pleased to bring such an incredible ensemble of brilliant people together to share their insights into the futures of learning.

Join us as we tackle the bigger question:

What if education systems were doing more and thinking differently about preparing learners to thrive in the future? Join Professor Ronald A. Beghetto of Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College for conversations on improving education and the future of learning. Each episode presents colleagues, researchers, education leaders and other guests who share how they're thinking about and addressing the most pressing challenges in education.

An Invited Talk: Futures Thinking & Strategic Foresight

It was a lot of fun to join the panel of invited speakers on July 14, 2020 for the first Learning Futures Leadership Studio, hosted by Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Arizona State University.

Learning Futures Leadership Studio Speakers

Learning Futures Leadership Studios
For full program details and information.

“The events of the past few months have demonstrated that we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Whether the global shutdown of schooling due to COVID-19 and the sudden move to remote learning, or the more recent protests against systemic, recurring inequities in our society, it is clear that we as educators need to do a better job.

This summer, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College hosts Learning Futures Leadership Studio, a series of four online action-oriented studio sessions that are designed to engage teams of education leaders in creating pathways for leading systems in a time of change.

You will be immersed in provocative questions and ideas through interactive studio experiences. With your colleagues and others, you will reflect on these ideas and experiences. And you will develop action steps to pursue in your own context.

This is a BYOC (Bring Your Own Challenges) experience intended to allow you, in a team, to explore new angles and perspectives on the issues that you face today and expect to face in the future.
”

— https://learningfutures.education.asu.edu/

As the first studio to kick off the event, I focused on a topic that is not only contemporary, but one that I feel is critical to the collective needs of our society, Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight.

Official tagline of my studio:

It is clear today that there will be no return to “normal” or to a pre-COVID-19 world. As a result, leaders must be prepared to forge ahead – with courage and efficacy – in a policy and bureaucratic context where there may or may not be clear guidance or feasible policy mandates. In this context, leaders cannot simply wait for guidance; rather, they must design and lead for the futures of learning.

In this session, we will introduce leaders to practical and creative tools of scenario planning and strategic foresight for leaders to explore new ways to think about strategically planning for uncertainty. Participants will learn how to forecast future trends and develop strategic plans to identify possible, plausible, and preferable futures.
(https://learningfutures.education.asu.edu)

In other words, the main objective of this studio is to demonstrate the need for organizational leaders (especially those in the educational system), to actively engage in futures thinking and strategic foresight. To create an organizational culture that allows for this type of thinking, planning, and strategy. I covered a handful of foresight methodological tools developed and open sourced (via Creative Commons) by the Future Today Institute.

The aim of this talk was to start an ember of futures thinking in educational systems leadership, with the hope that this will be the first of many subsequent explorations into the realm of strategic foresight.

A Slice of PI Podcast Appearance: IgnitED Labs Part 1

The IgnitED Labs are creative spaces where users can explore and play with new and emerging technologies that can serve a role in teaching and learning. We sat down with Dr. Sean Leahy, Director of Technology Initiatives, and Jodie Donner, Lead Technology Strategist and Head of IgnitED Labs, to talk about the design and creation of the labs here at MLFTC. This is part one of our conversation. 

Recently, Jodie and myself were asked to do an interview with the newly launched Slice of PI Podcast that is produced out of our college. It was a great conversation, and to be honest, I think we talked so much that Claire and Hannah (hosts) had to split this into two parts.

It was a lot of fun to share and discuss all of the hard work and collaboration that has gone into creating the innovative IgnitED Labs.

Have a listen, if you like what you hear, subscribe to Slice of PI wherever you get your podcasts…

Invited Lecture: Principled Use of Technology in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

On February 22, 2020 I delivered an invited presentation on the “Principled Use of Technology in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” as part of the Principled Innovation: Leadership for today, tomorrow and the future conference held at Arizona State University.

The main objective of this particular talk was to provide a general ‘provocation’ or ‘call to action’ for educational systems leadership to take note of the emerging Fourth Industrial Revolution, and to understand the implications of the potential systems-disrupting innovations and convergence of physical, digital, and biological technologies.

This talk also presented the audience with a cursory exploration of the need for organizational leadership to engage in strategic foresight and futures thinking.

To help illustrate the complexities of future uncertainty I also explored the Black Swan Theory and model used to demonstrate the potential peril or promise from new or converged technological advancements in society.

Overall it was a fun and engaging presentation with a lively group of participants that drove an enriching conversation throughout the session.

The Futures of Learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Keynote

On July 11, 2019 I had the pleasure to address the audience of the Global Learn 2019 Conference in Princeton New Jersey with a keynote focused around a growing area of my research on the preferable, plausible, and possible futures of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The keynote titled ‘The Futures of Learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ took the audience through an exploration of the challenges to the traditional educational system presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution (FIR), and presented three different vignettes of emerging technology that will drive the need for educators, technologists, and leaders to understand how to leverage these new disruptive technologies to work towards the ‘preferred’ futures of their organizations.

The technology vignettes that I discussed in this keynote were: Open Learning & Smart Materials, Augmented Reality (AR), and Artificial Intelligence in education (AIEd). Each vignette presented the audience with examples of these categories of technology disruptions and the opportunities they present the current systems of education in terms of how we think about the role and intersection of technology and learning. While these technologies give hope to a wide range of new possibilities, they are not without their concerns, and not all technologies are welcomed.

To address this issue I also discussed the role of working to identify the ‘unintended’ consequences of emerging technology through the theoretical metaphor of the Black Swan Theory. Through this theoretical methodology, leaders are encouraged to work to understand the deeper levels of impact that adopting various technologies may have on a given population. A repeated quote from the lecture derived from my published work (Leahy, Holland, & Ward (2019):

“Technologies are not neutral entities, they are values-laden, and become culturally embodied when integrated into practice, and as a result have the capacity to restrict or transform learning”

— Leahy, Holland, & Ward (2019)

The keynote concludes by addressing the use of a Futures Studies framework approach to working towards the possible, probable, and preferable futures as described by Wendell Bell (1977).

STEM Equity Workshop at Biosphere 2

At the end of February the impressive Biosphere 2 facility served as the backdrop for a small workshop of just over 60 people to convene for four days to discuss in detail the issue and pathways forward to building equity in STEM education.

With funding provided by the National Science Foundation a diverse group of people from higher education, libraries, museums, public schools, non-profit communities, and research centers were able to explore and discuss the principles for equitable design in STEM learning environments. Over the course of the four days of the workshop the participants forged new directions and created inspiring action plans.

The University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 was a truly inspiring location for this event. Steeped in the eerie mysticism and nostalgic futuristic compound that seemed frozen in time, this facility prompted myself and fellow attendees to think about the impact our actions have on the future of STEM education as well as the potential impact on Biosphere 1 (Earth). The setting was certainly a catalyst for inspiring our collective interest to forge purposeful design of STEM education and learning environments to provide a quality and equitable experience for all learners.

This workshop also served as a great community to share the work that we have been doing around the creation and design of the new IgnitED Labs. The issues discussed throughout this workshop, along with my experiences designing emerging technology spaces were highly complementary and relevant.

The first part of the workshop was focused on a series of inspiring “provocations” that pushed the participants to think about many of the issues surrounding the use or in many cases non-use of STEM and related maker spaces. The provocations ranged from thinking about the value of going slow to nurture developments, while others focused on the need for generous exclusion, to the need for designing spaces to include a sense of agency.

Following the provocations was a series of “state of the landscape” presentations that focused on many of the issues at hand today in the STEM and makerspace movement. Namely, issues of access, skillsets, mindsets, moving beyond traditional learning environments, and engaging life-long-learners.

As a final aspect of the workshop, participants shared their experience and knowledge around STEM and maker spaces through reflections and development of action plans. As a key output for this workshop, the workshop organizers will drive forward with a white paper for the NSF that is aimed to help inform future funding directions in maker and studio spaces.

This was a fantastic opportunity to be apart of such a wonderful group of people, I look forward to the continued development of the action plans and future opportunities to collaborate with colleagues from around the world on STEM equity.

Smart thoughts: Designing the future

I was recently asked to share my thoughts on the future as a design space in a short essay for the launch of The Guide Project. The goal of the Guide Project is to connect the communities of practice designing the future. The Guide’s aim is to “accelerate novel, audacious, ways to improve - and then create - human futures in which we can thrive.”

The Guide Project is an inititative run out of the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. Needless to say I was honored to contribute a small piece of writing to this impressive project.

““Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” ”

— Douglas Adams (1987)

I wrote this short essay based on the prompt: The human future as a design space – what does that mean to you?

This essay appears along 29 other contributors in the section entitled “Smart Thoughts about designing the future”. I approached this this essay by considering a preferable future space designed to leverage technology in the near-ish distance of 20-35 years and what that might look like from a personal-to-physical space interactions. This future scenario also takes the assumption that we are well into the Fourth Industrial Revolution brought on by the Third Age of Computing. Putting aside all of the potential challenges and factors that might militate against this preferable future, I presented the following exercises in thought.

Online Article: Design Your Life-Long-Learning Places For an Augmented You

Written by Dr. Sean Leahy, with editorial support from Dr. Joel Garreau

Unconference: Dreamers Doers & Drivers of the Future of Learning

On April 25-27, 2018 I joined a small group of higher education change-makers for an unconference around the "Future of Learning in a Digital Age" in Scottsdale Arizona. The Conference was structured loosely around three main tracks: 1) Research to Action, 2) Mixed Reality Environments and Student Centered Learning Frontiers, and 3) Organizational Network Models.

“An unconference, also called an Open Space conference, is a participant-driven meeting. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization.”

— wikipedia.org

The unconference structure of this convening allowed for a free (open) conversational flow with loads of great ideas (big and small) and a variety of perspectives on the emerging themes. While there were many high energy "neighborhoods" of discussion, I was particularly drawn to the discussions around Mixed Reality and discussion around use, deployment, contextual relevance, and scalability within the context of one-three-five years. Additionally, on the last day of the unconference I was engaged in conversations around the growing desire and challenges of Micro Credentialing.

Throughout the event participants used the Twitter hashtag #shapingEDU to share the ideas and connections from the unconference with the intention of continuing the conversation long after the two day event was completed.

The event (including presentations and discussions and share-outs) was captured via graphic facilitator. The full unconference is available at: https://uto.asu.edu/shapingedu where you can access all of the images and files shared. 

I am very much looking forward to continuing the discussions around the future of learning in the digital age.

ASU+GSV Summit 2018 - San Diego California

The week of April 16-18th, 2018 roughly 4,000 people ascended on the beautiful city of San Diego, CA to attend the 9th ASU+GSV Summit. The event proved to be a wonderful experience to share information, listen to engaging presentations, and make new meaningful connections.

“Started in 2010 with a collaboration between Arizona State University and Global Silicon Valley (GSV), the annual ASU+GSV Summit is the industry catalyst for elevating dialogue and driving action around raising learning and career outcomes through scaled innovation.”

— asugsvsummit.com

As the Director of Technology Initiatives for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College I went to the summit with the goal of showcasing our development of the new IgnitED Labs that are designed as open, hands-on, learner-centered creative spaces where users can explore and play with new and emerging technologies that can serve a role in teaching and learning. The IgnitED Labs were designed to go beyond the scope of traditional computer labs and provide students opportunities to create knowledge, and skill sets through emerging technologies. These innovative spaces allow for users to create and tweak, tinker and play, and ultimately improve the learner experience through their discoveries.

ASU Booth at ASU+GSV Summit 2018

To help showcase the variety (sample) of equipment that will be used in the new lab spaces I packed a high powered gaming laptop and an Oculus Rift into a Pelican travel case and threw in a Shpero SPRK+ and a Raspberry Pi touchscreen as well. The IgnitED Labs project was graciously allowed to join the folks from ASU Ed Plus in their booth.  The booth was well positioned in the summit floor and had a high amount of visibility and traffic.

Overall it was great experience and opportunity for us to share the innovative work taking place in our office / college / university in a truly connected and global event.

Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Build

In an attempt to create a more engaging experience at a high profile event for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, I suggested that instead of using iPads or laptops, that we build and deploy several Raspberry Pi's to act as participant feedback/input stations.

Key aspects of the event

The event entitled Education by Design was held in the Phoenix Art Museum on February 6th, 2018. The event was focused on laying out the work the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College is engaged in around several key areas of redesigning education as we know it. The event allowed for participants to roam through several educational design "vignettes" which included:

Education Workforce Development
How should we develop and deploy 21st-century educators?
                               
Community Design Labs
How can we work with schools and communities to tackle a wide range of problems?
                                  
Contextual Models
How can we prototype successful systems in schools?  

As an interactive element, participants walked through a hallway with several Raspberry Pi's configured to be small terminals that allowed for the attendees to leave their questions related to Education.  The Raspberry Pi's were intended to serve dual roles, first to simply act as a terminal to collect participant feedback, and secondly (and perhaps most importantly) to serve as an educational technology artifact. The latter purpose seemed to engage the most number of participants. Over the night I was engaged in many conversations exploring the variety of ways in which schools and districts might think about deploying technology [such as the Raspberry Pi's] throughout their schools in a technology infusion model as opposed to a more traditional and limited technology integration model.

Event participants were able to submit their questions using a web-based form on each of the Raspberry Pi's that were placed strategically around the room. The results were projected in real-time on the wall of the hallway so attendees could see the supplied questions pop-up in a chat bubble format when submitted.

For more detailed information on the event checkout the ASU Now online article: Education by Design, re-imagining the classroom.

To build this project I turned to a rather quick "all-in-one" or kit solution rather than buying each component separately. You might pay a bit more per component in a kit, but when time is of the essence the cost of convenience is well worth the price. For this project I ordered four NeeGo Raspberry Pi Ultimate Starter Kits for $150/ea. This kit contains everything you need with the exception of a screwdriver and a few lines of code. Even though this kit uses a touchscreen and technically doesn't need a keyboard... I wanted to error on the side of caution and ensure I had a physical keyboard for each device as well in the event an end user is more comfortable with that setup. So I opted for a mini keyboard-touchpad combo with the Rii mini k12 Stainless keyboard for less than $25/ea.

Assembly

Putting the Raspberry Pi kits together was very simple and straight forward. There are no instructions that come with this kit, although you can look up everything you need online and see an almost endless tutorial stream on YouTube. I have been working with Raspberry Pi's for several years so in all honesty the longest part of this build was un-packaging all of the parts.

A few Terminal Commands to finish it off

Once the entire device was assembled and powered on there are a few more steps to get the device fully operational in the way intended. You can of course tackle these in any order, but for most the fist issue that needs to be addressed is the screen orientation. Out of the box the orientation of the screen in the screen case is upside down and needs to be flipped 180* degrees. To accomplish this, and the other adjustments we need to use the Terminal.

In the terminal we need to call up the config.txt file so we can make a couple of updates. To do this once, in the Terminal prompt type the command:

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Scroll to the end of the text file and add the following command: (The number 2 refers to the degree of rotation. 1=90*, 2=180*, 3=270*) So for this project I needed to flip the screen 180 so I used the (lcd_rotate=2) command.

lcd_rotate=1
lcd_rotate=2
lcd_rotate=3

Once you have added this line you can exit the config file by hitting "Ctrl + X" on your keyboard, then Y at the prompt, then ENTER to save the updated config.txt file. Once this step is complete with the Terminal still open, you will need to restart the device for the change to take effect. you can restart the devive in Terminal with the command:

sudo reboot

When the Raspberry Pi reboots the screen should be rotated.  (Note: if you use the display_rotate=2 command instead of lcd_rotate=2 you might run into an issue where the image is rotated but not the touch sensor grid, so your touch input is off by 180 degrees)

The final few Terminal Commands are some general housekeeping, first we will update the system to ensure that it has the most up-to-date version of the drivers etc. for the touchscreen. To complete this you will first run the "Update" command followed by the "upgrade" command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo reboot 

Once your device has rebooted with the updates the last item is to install the touch screen keyboard. To install the keyboard run the following command in Terminal:

sudo apt-get install matchbox-keyboard

sudo reboot

For more information and ideas on the multitude of ways in which you might deploy a Raspberry Pi for educational applications, or just for fun visit the official Raspberry Pi Website.