Prospective

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Five Principles for Thinking Like a Futurist
Marina Gorbis, EDUCAUSE Review, 2019/04/11
Half of my work involves thinking like a futurist. But my approach to being a futurist is, I think, quite different from what's described in the article. For example, the first recommendation is to "forget about predictions." Why? "Nobody can predict large socio-technical transformations and what exactly these are going to look like." By analogy, "One way to think about this is to look at the difference between waves and tides. Waves are what we see on the surface... Underneath the waves is the tide, causing all kinds of disturbances of which waves are just one sign." But if you can't predict the tides, you're not much of a futurist. Being a futurist is predicting the future. Otherwise, you're an economist.
The article discusses some other facets of being a futurist. One focuses on readiness, another on finding patterns, another on signals, and another on community. All of these have to do not so much with being a futurist but rather with speaking to a particular audience. That is a core skill, but has nothing to do with futurism. Take any proposition P - some people will care about P, others won't. I can make all kinds of predictions about tomorrow, but the odds are you will not care about them. Patterns, signals, readiness, community - all these depend on salience and relevance. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Edu-Decade That Was: Unfounded Optimism?
Geoff Cain, Brainstorm in Progress, 2020/01/21
I swear, I had flagged this for inclusion in the newsletter before reading all the way to the end of the post. What caught my eye was that it offered a look at the positive developments in the last decade of online learning, a welcome counterpoint to the doom and gloom we've heard from many pundits. What positive developments? Well we have cMOOCS and Connectivism, which if I may so humbly say, represented a big leap forward. We have web annotations (ok, they don't thrill me, but so what?). We have the renewed and welcome emphasis on equity and Inclusion in learning. We have data literacy (and I would add, increasing media literacy generally). We have open resources, domain of one's own, and microcredentials. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Predictions for Journalism 2020
NiemanLab, 2020/01/03
This is a long list of short contributions to a Nieman Labs special study on the future of journalism. Amid the dire predictions are suggestions about the business model, focus on content, focus on specific issues, format changes, and maybe even the rise of blogcasting. From my own perspective, I think I've found a good formula for doing journalism in this newsletter, but I don't know how I would make it pay if I had to leave my day job. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Top 12 Technologies Innovations by 2025
Most of these technologies are reasonable projections - some of them, like carbon management, are absolute necessities. I will say, though, I'm less sanguine about nanotechnology - not because I'm afraid of being infested by billions of tiny robots (that doesn't bother me a bit) but because I think quantuum phenomena may make nanotechnology a bit further out of reach than we think. More...