Uncertainty principles

It's extremely difficult to predict the future accurately, because as futurologist Ray Kurzweil once said, change isn't linear, it's exponential. I often consult The Horizon Report, which is published every year and attempts to predict what will be the widespread adoptions of technologies in education and training. The annual report is published after extensive consultation with an international panel of technology and pedagogy experts. Yet even this is problematic, because the farther you move away from the present, the more opportunity there will be for unforeseen and unpredictable events to occur. And experts are not infallible. You really have to turn to science fiction and read something like Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy to appreciate some of the complexity associated with this kind of uncertainty. What does the future hold? We can't be certain, because right now it's imaginary. The Horizon Report is usually quite accurate in the 1 year cycle. When we examine the predictions in the 2-3 year cycle, it becomes a little hit and miss, and by the time we attempt to predict what will be widely available on the 5 year horizon, it becomes even more tricky to maintain accuracy. The farther out we move in projected time from the familiarity of 'here and now' the less accurate we are in our predictions.

I was invited to speak at the Learning and Performance Institute's annual conference - Learning Live - at St Paul's in London recently, on the subject of Learning Futures, and afterwards talked to Martin Couzins, who recorded the brief video interview below (yes, I know it says 'learning tends'... but perhaps that's a fortuitous error):



Uncertainty principles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.