Planning a Speculative Future About Ed Tech in 2030

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

While preparing to write my final paper for LRNT523, I re-acquainted myself with scenarios and how to write them, something I learned a long time ago starting with The Art of the Long View (Schwartz, 1996). Scenarios are a powerful storytelling tool that allow us to project social, cultural, environmental, economic, political, and other factors toward the horizon, to envision speculative futures that are plausible, believable works of fiction with a ring of truth to them, because they are based on research that has a foundation in our current reality. Scenarios aren’t meant to predict the future, but to suggest a possible future outcome based on the inputs of the present.

“Rather than explaining, these are stories that could appear to simply confuse and mystify,suggest rather than tell, imply rather than instruct.”  

Selwyn et al. (2020)

Although the assignment asks for a speculative futures essay, I feel like I may write this as a scenario and weave into the narrative the required academic references and resources to support the story I will be telling. It feels more natural to write a speculative future in more of a narrative form than in essay format. It is, after all, a work of “social science fiction” (Selwyn et al., 2020).

The main area within ed tech that I am interested in examining deeper is learning experience design (LXD). This is a relatively new discipline that bridges instructional design with user experience design, and seeks to apply principles of user-centred design to the learning environment, in order to create accessible, inclusive, and equitable learning experiences for all. I’m also very interested in multi-modal learning theory and the processes of perception, cognition, memory and recall, seeking evidence within the realm of cognitive psychology to support the design of learning that accommodates the different learning strategies used by user/students. However, these areas on their own may yield a bit of a “So what?” from those reading it, so the scenario also includes an applied component to the narrative, showing how LXD principles may be used to address in the near future an underlying issue facing ed tech today.

I thought the third scenario proposed by Macgilchrist et al. (2020) had some very interesting content around raising the digital literacy of learners, with them being more engaged in more active and participatory roles in their own learning. However, our shorter time horizon of 2030 (ten years shorter than Macgilchrist’s piece) makes this a lot more challenging.

Thus, the lens through which I will be viewing LXD and multimodal learning is that of are equity, diversity, and inclusion, and that may also touch on decolonization and indigenization in the learning space. At its core, learning experience design seeks to make learning more accessible and inclusive, supporting learning objectives through evidence-based design principles shown to improve the learning experience for all users.

I’m fascinated by the concept of Ukraine’s “hacker army” (Burgess, 2022) and their ingenuity in collecting and distributing battlefield intelligence (a form of tactical e-learning) swiftly using donated Starlink terminals, and how that same ingenuity used to survive network infrastructure being bombed could be deployed in remote communities to bring digital learning to disenfranchised learners in areas where no network previously existed, preventing them from accessing learning at all.

How can designing learning environments to be more accessible, inclusive, and based on sound user experience design principles have an impact on learning in the near future?