ET4Online Keynote Address

Bryan Alexander
Senior Fellow
National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education

Imagining the Future of Education:

Scenarios for Learning After Technology

Monday, July 11, 2011
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Imperial Ballroom

"What will become of the educational environment over the next decade, as technology-fueled challenges and transformations make their mark? How will we mobilize our resources to anticipate, think through, and strategize the medium-term future?

First, we will survey various methods currently available, including environmental scanning, prediction market games, and the Delphi method. Next, we will delve into one of these methods to generate and reflect on possible educational futures. Several scenarios – imaginative narratives of what could be, based on current trends – will take the audience ahead. Two of these narratives will imagine an education environment reshaped by open content, one by closed content.

Together, we will explore a gamified schooling sector, contrasted by a scenario based on a persistent, deeper recession, then another whereby augmented reality redesigns our very spaces.

The audience is encouraged to participate throughout, ultimately voting for the scenario they deem most likely - and the scenario they would prefer to live and learn through."

Bryan Alexander researches, writes, and speaks about emerging trends in the integration of inquiry, pedagogy, and technology and their potential application to liberal arts contexts. His current research interests include emerging pedagogical forms enabled by mobile technologies, learning processes and outcomes associated with immersive environments (as in gaming, augmented reality, and virtual worlds), the digital humanities, and futurist methodologies. Other interests include digital writing, information literacy, social media, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

In exploring the potential of computer-mediated pedagogies, Bryan focuses on the relationship between these, the interdisciplinary liberal arts, and the broader development of our technology-inflected culture. In addition to his writing and research, Bryan maintains the NITLE Prediction Markets, which leverages the collective intelligence of traders in a game environment in order to predict developments relevant to the future of liberal education.

Bryan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and taught English and information technology studies as faculty at Centenary College of Louisiana. Bryan lives up in the Green Mountains of Vermont with his beloved family, many animals, and a great many trees. There he bakes, lifts weights, carries wood, and thinks about movies.

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