Featured Session: Strategy in the Times of Chaos: Imagining Futures of Education

Unknown Speaker 0:00 Investment. Everybody has a mind strategy in times of chaos, imagining futures education Unknown Speaker 0:07 to say we live in unprecedented times at this point feels a little trite. Unknown Speaker 0:12 Daily we make highest temperatures in reporting history, technology, acquiring human like communications Unknown Speaker 0:19 and the realignment of global alliances and ideologies. Alliances and ideologies in these times of rapid global upheaval, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and Unknown Speaker 0:29 discouraged, but such times are also opportunities to reinvent institutions and the very world we live in. In this conversation, our Unknown Speaker 0:38 panelists can share foresight techniques for imagining a radically different future and attempting signals of reinvention and scholarship on how communities depicted as under resourced creating practices and education of their own as examples for building more just and equitable Unknown Speaker 0:56 features. As a quick reminder, open Unknown Speaker 1:00 your topic, you or someone left your lab. Now, please join me in welcoming Lynn Jeffries, distinguished Unknown Speaker 1:12 fellow director of IoT foresight essentials at the Institute for the Future. And Dr Martin Winn, Professor and Faculty Director of the Stanford Unknown Speaker 1:21 accelerator for learning equity in Learning Initiative Unknown Speaker 1:37 set up here. All right, there we go. Yeah, all Unknown Speaker 1:44 right, there we go. So I'm so happy to be here one of the first formal crossover days here at South by Southwest edu. My name is Lynn Jeffrey, and I am from the Institute for the Future, which is a nonprofit education and research organization based in Palo Alto, California. We are almost 60 years old, and I'm going to join in a little bit by our friend, colleague and partner, Dr Manisha T win from Stanford. We're going to be laying out some of the different approaches to building strategy in times of chaos. Now, our executive director of the Institute, Marina gorbas, created the core of the presentation we give today that she was unable to be here unexpectedly, and so I've curated the work to focus on the things that I think are the most relevant for our conversation today. We will be having Q and A at the end. So if you have any questions, please get them lined up, as we just heard. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that we are living in chaotic times. We have a war in the middle of Europe. We have a new war in the middle of the Middle East. I saw in the Wall Street Journal this morning, they said that we are projected to enter the largest disruption of the global world oil markets ever, and also that we should be thinking about drone drone attacks from Iran in California, where I live. There are a lot of different ways that people deal with this kind of chaotic situation. Some people are even turning these unimaginable events into profit with the new betting markets. There was a newly created account on the poly market, betting market that earned a quarter of a million dollars by betting correctly on the exact timing of the strikes on their own, but even someone, someone wrote it on social media, we might not even be surprised if the dragons started descending at this point, it's a good time to strengthen our ability to think about the future, to get better At being futurists, to find different ways of dealing with the chaos and to do things with a sense of immediacy. We need to do things with a sense of immediacy right now. And I want to point you if you haven't taken a look at it and enjoy reading old books. One of the future is kind of favorite books is called Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. It was written in 1968 and it was the first kind of pop culture futures book in the United States. It was written at a time of great turmoil, local, social and Toffler wrote about that we need more sanctuaries for social imagination. That's what we try to do with the Institute for the Future, and that's what I invite us to do over the next hour or so, have a place where we can think about the futures that we want to build and how to avoid the ones that we don't want. And Marina and I wrote an article last year about two kind of approaches, two moments of operating simultaneously. If you run an organization, if you run a school, if you're working at an organization, you need to be both improvisational and imaginative at the same time. Improvisation is reacting to things that unimaginable, things that come up with immediacy and tariff, a new protest, and, you know, dealing with the fire somewhere in front of you, but imagination to really find the space, make the space, to pick your head up from the noise and think about what the future might look like. Now we like to use these three kind of principles. I'm going to share this with you for how to approach thinking about the future. And when we say the future at the institute, we're often thinking about 10 years ahead. So we're thinking about the year 2036, 10 years is just about the right amount of time. It's hard up ahead, but a lot of the big things that are playing out today really shifting significantly. It's not so far ahead that it feels like science fiction, and I think we're also kind of used to thinking of our lives and decades. So it makes sense as I'm going to offer these three ways in thinking about teaching these new principles and hopes that these will be useful for you and your work. And then Dr Winn and I will be talking about her approach, which is slightly different and built on it. So hopefully there'll be something the first one is looking back. So looking back to look forward, examining the past, understanding how we got here, looking at historical patterns and cycles, and by paying attention to historical patterns, we really can illuminate some of the structural tensions, these big structural tensions that are shaping our world today, and we can scan and sort of start to identify what we call zombie ideas. These are ideas that have been disproven by facts, but they're still around, and they refuse to die. And we'll go into an example of a zombie idea once you've kind of understood what's happening structurally in the present, and you've identified a zombie idea, imagine the future, and we can do that by scanning for signal to change, which, if anyone is doing for certain. You know what these are? These are real surprising things happening today in the world. Could be a new behavior, a new technology, and they're things that give us a little peek into how the future might be really different. So let's look at these three principles and explore at Berkeley. Worked with Professor Marc Straub, who's a sociologist at Berkeley, and she uses a model of his to help us think about the changing role and perception of higher education in the United States, and Dr trau was doing research in the US, the UK and Europe. And I would like to say at the institute, all models are wrong, but some are useful. And we think that trails model is useful. It helps us think about the evolution of systems of higher education. And in his work, what he was looking at is the evolution from elite education, where a tiny percentage of the population is getting education, governances, tutors, private education at home, limited to the ruling class, and it's a very tiny percentage of people who are getting it to what he calls mass mass higher education, where he rates it at about 15% of the population. And in this it gets framed as a right, something that everyone has a right to. You might think about in the US, the GI Bill that sent hundreds of 1000s to to college after World War Two, making education more affordable and accessible. Or you might think about the state of Massachusetts today, which offers free community college. That's education as a right and the purpose of education, the mass model is to provide prepare people with professional and technical skills. Once more than 50% of the population is getting higher ed. That's what trout calls universal. And so this is when social expectations shift yet again, and society views this type of education, higher education as necessary, mandatory, really, almost an obligation, and really interesting. What Trump's model also looks at is what happens to the perceived value of the degree or higher education, as you shift from elite to universal, and he says that the intellectual value of the experience doesn't change, but what happens is that higher ed degrees no longer guarantee high status, and so instead, It's the absence of a degree which guarantees lower status, so that may be useful or helpful for us as a way to think about where we're at today. And this is where the US is today. We are in 1960 about 5% of people age 20 over the age of 25 had a bachelor's degree, 5% in 1960 that number is close to 40% today, and when you add in two year degrees, we're at about 50% so we're at that universal stage in trials model. Now we see also that higher education is correlated, not caused by but it's correlated with these positive social outcomes. In the United States, you have life expectancy of about seven years longer for college graduates than high school the probability of A 20 year marriage, which I guess, is an indication of stability, depending on how your marriage is, could be twice as much for college students as it is for high school grads voter turnout, which is a sign of indication of civic participation higher for college grads and probability of being incarcerated almost Five times lower. Unknown Speaker 11:41 So that's some of the historical patterns that and Trump's framework that help us think about the future of higher education and Marisa. I want to let's talk about the zombie idea now. So we've got some of our data. We frame some of the tensions and the changes in the way education is valued and what value it produces for learners. And so we want to go back to the idea of the zombie idea, an idea that shouldn't have been killed by evidence Unknown Speaker 12:10 but refuses to die. Unknown Speaker 12:13 One example might be, for example, that crime is an issue of non policing. There's a lot of data to suggest that this is not the case, and that the vast majority of the policies around policing are about more money, more funding and more police. Now, in this case, the zombie idea that we want to explore is that the higher education degree, the one that has become necessary, is a pathway to economic mobility and security. Now she wants us to examine that narrative, which is a dominant narrative really in the higher ed sector. It really structures and organizes all of higher education. You've got a degree, you're going to be more economically secure, make more money. So let's again, take a look at some of the data that starts to illuminate some of the tensions that cause us on the idea of the question. We do see that the number of degrees of people with higher education degrees has increased, as we just talked about. That's the purple line at the top, about 40% of people over age 25 in the US have bachelor's degrees. And as I said, 50 if you add the associates, you would expect that if degrees correlated with economic mobility, that overall more people with higher degrees would be working for higher wages. But the green line on the bottom is shows us that that is not what's happening. If you look this is a 60 year time frame here. Wages have actually been pretty stagnant during that time. So this is one data point that starts to question our narrative, and there are others that make us question it even more. This is data from the US Federal Reserve in 2019 they did a very large study. They conducted research to look at the economic return on higher education degrees. And so what they did was they studied cohorts of graduates at the same age, starting in the decade of the 1930s going up through the decade of the 1980s and these were people who got their degrees during that decade, and they compared the difference between someone with and without a college degree, and then they calculated what they call the predicted wealth premium. So how much more wealthy by percentage would you be if you had a degree versus if you did? And the two charts that we're looking at here, we see bachelor's degrees on the left and post graduate degrees on the right. Now it's important that they're tracking wealth here, because it's not income. Wealth is, you know, all of your assets, minus your debt. So that is your house, your retirement pension, your pension, if you have it, any equity that you have, wealth is what gets you to emergencies and contingencies. So we're looking at wealth. It's real economic stability. And so if you graduated, we look at the chart in the 1930s with college degree, the bachelor's degree, you would have about 250% greater wealth than someone without a degree. For postgraduate degree, that would be 400% and you can see over time this steady decline. decline in the difference between. Unknown Speaker 16:28 So this is our chart showing the non Hispanic black population. You can see that it really declines down to only 6% greater amount of wealth if you got a degree in the 1980s new black for a bachelor. Unknown Speaker 16:42 bachelor's versus 8%. For a Unknown Speaker 16:45 post grad, compared to a huge. Unknown Speaker 16:49 Now, remember, our data on the positive social aspects of higher education, there are many things that are wonderful positive about higher education, there is more health, there is longevity, there is more stability, and that doesn't even erase the aspects of growing your network and having an experience at a college. But the idea that a higher education degree guarantees economic mobility and security may be a zombie, that is time to let go of. Also, over the last 20 to 30 years. Not degree. Unknown Speaker 18:16 salary, fast food and count. Encounter workers, 30,000 annual median salary, no credential required. The next two, general operations, general law and operations, management and registered nurses. These two make between 93 100,000 and they do require bachelor's degrees, and then we're back to low paying service jobs. Now, by the way, there's no reason these jobs need to be low paying. This is a policy and market issue we could read could change the way we value these and it may leave it in a world of apeb Ai, that taking care of people in their homes actually starts to get value and compensated in the way that it probably should be. So we have this world in which higher education degrees are considered a social necessity. They're correlated with longer life and more stability, and universities and colleges are almost completely focused on degrees as paths to economic mobility and security in an environment of fewer good jobs. And so I think that we're being the point here that we step back is that the historical patterns when you look at them, help bring these structural tensions to. Unknown Speaker 20:24 going to take a look at two processes that we use in the foresight field, while we can go more deeply into entities and laisha Dr Lin will also share her approach to this. But of course, looking for signals of change on the edges of the mainstream is a great way to look. It's a great place to start. We use these signals to build visions and narratives based in the plausible realities happening today. It's really important to pay attention to all of the signals happening on the edges of the mainstream. For those of you in the education sector, you know, there is an explosion of experiments happening. You have Scandinavian style forest schools where nature is seen as the primary classroom. We have new programs like SUNY Buffalo's new Department of AI and society, which just launched seven new interdisciplinary AI degrees, like aI policy, one of our current favorite experiments, a signal of change is the Rolex College in Dallas. The Rolex College, as they say here, is more selective than Harvard. They have 1000s of applicants for a two year position to learn how to be a certified Rolex repair person. And you end up going to Switzerland. You learn how to repair Rolexes. You have to get certified in person. And as you make it, you have a pretty steady job because there aren't enough Rolex repair people. So some of these. Unknown Speaker 22:09 So what we do with signals is we first of all notice them, we document them, we interpret them, we ask questions about them, we cluster them into different stories and emerging themes, and then we start to use them for structured imagination of new possibilities. So the we use signals of change to build up new scenarios, new points of view and new frames of value, where they can really help us, kind of open our minds to what that might look like. So I want to end by sharing some scenarios that we presented yesterday at the edu track, and we publicly released them. I'll give you a QR code at the end of our session, but these are really, we call them What if universities. And these are looking at, what if universities organize themselves in 2036 around their relationship to AI, around who the learner wants to be, the kind of life they want to lead in the kind of AI saturated world. So very quickly, we have the AI proof University. Wherever you go, and there is no AI the whole thing is about resisting AI all real time human learning and human work and it starts to get us to think about, maybe even AI approach, economy, a set of markets and services, and ways of being and living where people have don't want to use. AI, you may. Unknown Speaker 23:57 How do you critically evaluate the outputs of AI. How do you learn to simulate with AI? The third scenario is what we call the AI adjacent University. Also very interesting. I think this university focuses on, let's get really good at all the things that AI can't do. So let's just focus and double down on skill building around how do we be together as humans? How do we build belonging? How do we take care of each other? How do we make judgments? How do we understand human dynamics, crisis response from a human point of view? And then finally, the last scenario is the AI directed University, which is a common thing to to to create scenarios about these days, you decide your track in collaboration with an AI system co authored learning between you and the AI. It's a distributed learning environments. It's also constant tracking and surveillance to do assessment of your skills. So that's what I want to leave it for the moment and happy to continue any aspects of this conversation that you want to in Q and A. What I want to do right now is invite Dr Manisha T win excellence in learning. Professor. She's the PI at the future for equity lab. at Stanford and she's the faculty. Unknown Speaker 25:39 thank you so much. It's so great to be here. Lynn, thank you so much for building that foundation on improvisation and imagination. I am going to try to build an arc toward what I'm calling historical signals that build on signals of change. So in 2019 I embarked on a futures journey at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where Berlin serves as the Director of foresight essentials. As a participant in their training, I was struck by the fact that I was the lone educator in my cohort, yet inspired by the out of the box thinking that unfolded as my colleagues from the corporate sector and I learned that futures could be both imagined and designed. When I told people I was participating in a foresight workshop to engage in future thinking and world building strategies. They were often amused as they thought about conjured images of fortune tellers science fiction fantasies and apocalyptic climate futures films. However, the future I wanted to explore at the Institute for the Future was not one depicted in science fiction literature or films. I was interested in the educational futures of children from non dominant communities, and black children in particular, like science fiction and fantasy author AK Jamison, I have long been aware of how terrifying it's been to realize that no one thinks my people have a future, and how gratifying to begin spinning futures that I want to see. Science fiction author and Afrofuturism scholar Natasha Womack notes that those making claims on the future often assert the need for some sort of incredible Apocalypse to begin anew, as the future is, according to Womack, acknowledged that some of those apocalyptic things have happened to people already, and in an interview in the Docu series A Brief History of the Future, Womack asserts that communities on the margins have long had time to think about liberating themselves, or claiming their humanity. As I consider the future of black education. I could trace a historical trajectory of strategy and times of chaos from. enslaved African. Unknown Speaker 28:57 Black parents, educators, community members continue to dream, imagine and execute educational futures for children. Their organizing and planning are maps charting the future of education. So what if the future was already here and one of some of today's most pressing or concerning issues in education have been well addressed through the co creation and efforts of everyday people with far fewer resources than we have today. I realized that my futures project at iftf on black education had to reach back as much as it reached forward. One of the foundational steps in the foresight process that Lynn referenced and for signals of change. Again, signals of change are current and often surprising data points that help us imagine that another future is possible, another step that she referenced in the foresight process is looking back, to look ahead or to consider the historical trajectory of any future that we wish to explore. These two steps in the foresight process led me to conceptualize a new tool for foresight work, which I am calling historical signals. Historical signals are innovations of the past that may hold implications for future work in or beyond a particular domain. Historical signals reposition innovation as inevitably having historical roots and foundations, never entirely new or untangled. I'm an ethnographer by training and a historian by necessity. My interest in the relationship between histories and futures is best characterized by a methodological intervention that I refer to as historiography for the future. I'm keenly interested in the work of black institution builders of the 1960s and 1970s who dare to imagine and pursue self determined education for their children and for other people's children, against the backdrop of social and political turmoil, overt, interpersonal and systemic racism and severe and it is not lost on me that I am centering history and archival work in an era of AI as we consider share test ideas to affect change and to think via AI tools, we should also consider other forms of AI. Chris Chapman, founder of key makers in Oakland, California, reminds us of the importance of AI, as in ancestral intelligence. In a letter that he wrote to the key makers community, Chapman reminds stakeholders that they too are in possession of great ideas and potential for innovation. And he writes, In our quest for empowerment and reclamation, we draw upon the profound wisdom encoded within our DNA, the ancestral intelligence that pulls us through our veins, rooted in the enduring legacy of our African ancestors. This reservoir of knowledge, spirit and soul spans centuries, offering road maps for progress and resilience. True enlightenment transcends mere algorithms and computations. Artist Kara Walker offers AI as ancient intelligence in a stirring exhibition entitled Fortuna and immortality. Garden machine, a dress at San Francisco Museum, Walker assembled a haunting Unknown Speaker 32:58 collective engaging with the stages of life, death, pain. Stages Unknown Speaker 33:07 of life you may have waited for Fortuna, the fortune teller automaton to dispense a paper fortune to you. Walker has shared in interviews that she first enlisted chat GPT to create these aphorisms using prompts such as liberation struggles and Afro pessimism. However, she found the responses to lack the fire and soul she desired, and chose to write 100 plus of them herself, quote proving that her human sensibility was not yet replaceable. Historiography for the future, and my archival research on black education have taught me the importance of another form of AI, or what Elizabeth Yankel and Deborah Torres call archival intelligence, while Yankel and Torres focus on user knowledge in the physical archive, I seek to expand the scope of archival intelligence, to not only engage with the historical context for any question asked or future imagine, but for us to become citizen archivists and to document stories and struggles of resilience as we navigate these challenging times. So ancestral intelligence, ancient intelligence, archival intelligence, have been at the forefront of my work that invites histories and futures into fresh dialog. My portal has been a period in the United States known as the Black Arts Movement, typically situated between 1965 and 1975 and in this decade, poets, parents, educators, artists and creatives effectively and impactfully leveraged their technologies of their time. In that time, mostly printing and publishing, to signal to a new generation that dreaming was not enough. They had to be doers and world builders, and together, these everyday people did extraordinary things. Many were young, finishing college and starting their own families, like the ones in this picture at the Institute of positive education in Chicago, Illinois, which was started in 1969 Unknown Speaker 35:23 they created future oriented P through 12 schools, art and Unknown Speaker 35:27 performance spaces. They opened healthy food co ops, eateries and publishing houses. They bought farmland and took children out of the city and out into the farm and the countryside. They care deeply about ensuring the next generation of black children have access to the tools they needed for striving for thriving futures. In my recent book featuring Black Lives, independent black institutions and the literary imagination, I refer to those historical efforts as futuring that is intentional collective planning and future making that prioritizes, reflects and seeks to spark innovation, sustainability and opportunities for self determination across domains such as Education, wellness and economic prosperity. Futures practitioners will know that some of these elements speak to forecasting. And I would argue that the distinction here is that futuring is more relational in that it values arriving to the future as a collective with all of our intelligences intact. My research team at the futuring for equity lab at the Stanford accelerator for learning's equity and learning initiative, along with the transformative justice and education center at UC Davis, has been partnering with the Institute for the Future on our families as futurist project, families as futurists seeks to understand how families from non dominant communities can take up foresight and futures tools as they imagine and plan for their children's education futures. So imagine getting these tools into the hands of families as they're working with their children to imagine 1015, 20 years out for their families, education trajectories, we guide families, which include parents, sometimes grandparents or mentors, along with middle school and high school and even early college students through the futuring process. Many of these families enjoy looking at these historical signals together, seeing that people have done this work in this heavy lift prior to them together, these families explore the signals of change and the historical signals of people led movements for self determined education. Future is an author a future shot Alvin Toffler is often quoted as saying, The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn. Students how to learn, unlearn and relearn. A powerful new dimension can be added to education, and if we accept toddlers invitation, our work is to learn about what came before us and the ways in which people were surviving and thriving prior to the assignment. We are not the first to do difficult things in challenging times. Our work is to unlearn that non dominant communities do not have valuable contributions to future ready education. In some these communities have had to be more imaginative, dream bigger and be more innovative in the face of not having access to mainstream institutions and resources and our work is to relearn the power of collective work that is tethered to a sense of purpose as we prepare to be strategic and future ready in times of chaos, let's remember to look both ways, in front of us for what's to come And behind us, or innovations of the past have relevant implications for the future. Thank you so much. We're looking forward to having a conversation with you. We're going to talk with each other for a little bit, and then we want you to submit those questions, because we want to engage with audience questions. Thank you for your Unknown Speaker 39:51 Okay, well, thank you so much. I'm thinking right now about AI and memories and the role of memories and education, and how AI has memories, but it doesn't have lived memories. So that's kind of a whole interesting direction that your talk just brought me in. I want to talk a little bit about the book is fantastic, and one of the things that you write about in the book was this independent black institutions during the Black Arts Movement period. I'm wondering if you can say a little bit more about some of the strategies of improvisation and imagination that they actually use, that we might learn from as we're in this time of volatility. I Yeah, Unknown Speaker 40:43 so future in black lives is historical ethnography. So I put these archival materials in conversation with the people who were there, creating them, enacting them. And we're really fortunate because many of these institution builders, they're in their early 80s, they're still doing the work. It's amazing to see them still working on behalf of the next generation of children. They're still fighting, they're still organizing, they're still struggling. And by the way, when I say struggle, they think of the word struggle as a badge of honor. That's actually one of the values. When we Unknown Speaker 41:18 say struggle, we say something different in this era, of course, self Unknown Speaker 41:22 care and rest, but I think it's really interesting how they lifted up the notion of struggle as a privilege, especially when the struggle was on behalf of the next generation. And so that's been something that I've been trying to reframe in my mind. So distilling some of their lessons, I think one of the biggest ones is they were very keen on reimagining and not Unknown Speaker 41:46 reacting, which feels hard right now, right and Unknown Speaker 41:51 so this idea that we're going to build and create and curate, despite a lot of noise that's happening, is one of the values that was within intentional about everything, detail oriented, meticulous with also documenting their work, because if they hadn't documented their stories in the work that they were doing, they couldn't really pass on strategy for the next generation. And I think that's something that you know we're all busy doing, but we also need to be busy documenting what we're doing, because how are people going to know what we're doing? And then another value that I think is really important is being realistic about scale. One of the Black Arts Movement poets, Kalama ya salaam out of New Orleans, Louisiana, that one of the co founders of the Indiana Work Study Center, which was an early childhood school in the early 70s, he talks about a what he calls an lnl model, local, national, local, starting with your local space, finding out what people Need in the local context, expanding that to a national space and even international, and then coming back and curating what you need for the local context again. So a lot of these institution builders are really focused on that local, national, global model. And then I think something that I can't say enough about is the intergenerational international spaces, as evidenced by that picture of the Institute of positive education, where you have all the teachers and founders. And by the way, I love telling people that the children were not on the laps of their parents, they were on other people's laps. And they were trying to signal that the children are everybody's responsibility, not just their parents, but we are a community, and they're all responsible for all of these things. Unknown Speaker 43:46 Thank you again. You got me with the word struggle. I was just talking to someone in the hallway about the importance of struggle and effort and learning now that we have aI that's making things so easy and I was recalling a list of you, the, the applicant gold figure gold medal winner from Oakland, California, who talks about how much she likes to work hard and took and she struggles and but that's, that's a really, it's a nice also kind of thing to. Unknown Speaker 44:41 How are you helping them as a teacher with kind of improvisation and imagination and future? Unknown Speaker 44:50 It's a great question. Unknown Speaker 44:53 So just the day before, I flew out to Austin, Unknown Speaker 44:58 students who Unknown Speaker 44:59 are in my lab, I have a lab called featuring for equity lab in the Stanford accelerator for learning, and we had a day at the special collections in the Green Library Stanford. And one of my grad students is Stephanie. She organized a spelling because she and I have been working on looking at the Huey P foundation papers, which are housed in special elections at at Stanford, Huey, who was one of the members of the Black Panther Party, and so we had two tables Lynn that had all of the information about the Oakland Community School, which was established in the early 70s by the Black Panther Party. I mean, there were these. There's one entire box that has notes written from Erica Huggins to EP Newton about the activities of their schools. You see that they introduce mindfulness and meditation they were doing, you know, reenactments of the play The Wiz. And then there was also just regular school business, Unknown Speaker 46:09 like, kids are sick, you know, the class is gone, you know. So, you know, everything from basic to Unknown Speaker 46:14 some really innovative ideas. And then what the Lord did for us is she had these other pieces Unknown Speaker 46:22 that were Unknown Speaker 46:25 focused on FBI activity and some of these fictitious letters that were drafted in the names that were sent out to people to cause and to destroy relationships. And she said, I really want Jesus see that. Unknown Speaker 46:45 All this has happened. Unknown Speaker 46:52 They were focusing children, the next generation. They course material science for us to touch and hold Unknown Speaker 47:07 through and to see my students sort of have this aha moment of, okay, yes, all these things were happening, and they were aware of all of them around imagining what the future would look like. Unknown Speaker 47:25 Out around what the future would look like for these children. It's very, very powerful moment. And yeah, it links to your point about citizen archive as the primary practice of learning, but also between children now, documentation, yes, because they documented, yeah, and it is one of those I want to turn to questions now. And there's an interesting kind of questions that the one of the things that AI possibly might be good for is we need to make our documentation easier. Now it's over documenting, and that's another problem. But there are ways that we can use these new tools that are evolving for these practices that are so important. So I want to take this question. I'll pass it to you in my class as well. If AI is transforming how knowledge is created in access, what should be the primary purpose of education in the next generation? Unknown Speaker 48:37 I love that question. So if I go back to Lessons that I'm learning from these institution builders, they really saw education as having three pillars. Those pillars were identity, purpose and direction. Identity, purpose and direction. Planet, identity, purpose and direction. And I sort of think about those as identity tasks of who we are, historicizing yourself. Purpose. What are you doing now? Why are you doing it? And direction is really about the future. Where do you want to take this? Where do you want to take this word. And I think those pillars, to me, feel more relevant now, I shouldn't say they feel more relevant. I'm sure they feel very relevant to the folks who created these tools in the late 60s and early 70s. But it feels to me like we could, does those also purpose? Those right now identity, purpose and direction. So that's what a university or Unknown Speaker 49:44 college or home school imagine a curriculum designed around identity, purpose and direction? Unknown Speaker 49:50 Yeah, I think it transcends the lifespan in terms of learners. Unknown Speaker 49:55 Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, I think it's, it is. It's a really important question whether we're talking we're talking about adult learners or people learning inside organizations, professional training, or people in K, 12, or college. Unknown Speaker 50:15 What is the primary versus purpose of education and. Unknown Speaker 50:57 And this is a different kind of technology, there's a sort of way it was created. Has some ethical problems, it has environmental problems, but the enthusiasm that we're seeing in China around figuring out how to use this for education so hundreds of 1000s of parents working with AI at home with their kids, you have a completely different context, where you have many people only have one child in the family. You only got one child. All of the resources will be going to that child. But there's a kind of openness to experimentation and making the tools valuable and useful for your child, which I think is I'm not sure whether the the conversation in the US is becoming, I think, unfortunately, so polarized, and it the technology is landing at such a polarized moment in the United States, but I'm not sure actually how it's going To play out in education in the next generation. I think it should play a role, and AI should be part of education in the next generation, but I think it's going to look very different in different places. Unknown Speaker 52:11 I also think we need to be listening to youth voices on the piece around AI. I think a lot of adults are talking and strategizing without youth in the space at the Stanford accelerator for learning, we just hosted an AI and education convening, and the day before the convening, I hosted something called Youth powered AI. We brought students and teachers from all over the country, middle school and high school teachers with their students to have a day of learning around AI, and we did focus. Unknown Speaker 53:41 Really talking about that? Unknown Speaker 53:43 They were talking Unknown Speaker 53:45 how, which Unknown Speaker 53:47 is very interesting, early days. So there is a, I think a really important question, not talking about future education, but talking about foresight as a practice, which is, can you expand on how we translate future building theory into action to reimagine and impact systemic change. And I'm wondering what you think about that and then I can. Unknown Speaker 55:04 see certain pathways and possibilities that they're able to go and pursue and in the families as future, as project. What I love is that we hear back from families who take the scenarios that we've created, and they take some element of it and they implement it and create it, either at their children's school or for the purpose of their own homeschooling journey, or whatever, you know, educational trajectory their child is on. And that, to me, is the power of the future's work in the foresight work is when people can just even take a little piece of it and build something from that. Yeah, I love that. Unknown Speaker 55:50 I think there are so many ways that foresighted futures work is applied and used in so many different contexts. It can be very local. Can be at the family level. There are many national level, projects, where people are trying to develop participatory national visions Unknown Speaker 56:09 of different kinds of scenarios Unknown Speaker 56:10 where they're thinking, precisely about the interplay of different elements of a system and trying to play. What's going to happen when we have the shortage of water. Unknown Speaker 57:03 And so I think that's it's a way of thinking about new ways of acting. Another project, or sort of topic that we've been interested in quite a bit is the future of climate action. So we've been looking at what are the changing dynamics of multilateral systems of financial instruments, and how might new technologies, new values, new political situations, open up new kinds of action. So that would be an example of using future thinking to think about emerging spaces for action. And I guess my last thought, and I'm going to ask you, Maya, if you want to choose the next question, I think we have maybe time for one more. Any vision that has mobilized systemic change is a futures vision. I mean, revolutions are formed. Unknown Speaker 58:38 Yeah. I mean, I would say starting with the pandemic that was the first. I think these two were 25 years. This year it's really crazy. And I think starting with the Pandem. Unknown Speaker 1:01:59 Okay, we're at time. Can we have our last slide, please? Two quick announcements. Is, one is that if you are interested in learning more about the scenarios that I talked about, we have a QR code, which should be up at some point, and there's a bot, and Unknown Speaker 1:02:19 you can go and explore the scenarios with the bot. There's a video. And secondly, you are about to do a book signing of your fabulous book. Tell us about where that's going to happen and when I Unknown Speaker 1:02:30 think it's happening right now, after this at the book section, which I don't know where I am, maybe that way. Unknown Speaker 1:02:36 Okay, really, just fascinating history and so inspiring and important to thinking about the future. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Stay in view and. Transcribed by https://otter.ai