Back To The Future

This blog is probably not the best advert for my organisational skills, very often it reflects whatever happens to be on my mind and topics get picked up, then dropped, pretty much on a whim. However, I’ve decided to finish off a long-unfinished bit of business this weekend. Unfortunately, I’ve left it all so long that I thought I’d write this quick reminder of what it was all about.

Back in 2012, I started a series of blogposts on how ideas about ways in which the future would be different were used to promote progressive education and, in particular, invalidate the teaching of subject knowledge and the use of traditional teaching methods.

I began with this introduction to the issue:

The Future Part 1: Another Argument for Dumbing-Down

Then I dealt with the idea that it was increasing globalisation and competition from overseas had changed everything:

The Future Part 2: Overseas Competition

Next was the idea that the job market was changing to be less stable and predictable:

The Future Part 3: Changes in the Labour Market

Following that was the claim that technological change was constantly making established knowledge obsolete:

The Future Part 4: Technological Change as Normal and Unpredictable

Then the contradictory idea that we were in a time of unprecedented technological change:

The Future Part 5: Are We Living in a Time of Unprecedented Technological Change?

This was followed by the idea that we now don;t need to know things like we did in the past:

The Future Part 6: Does New Technology Mean We Don’t Need to Know Anything?

I also provided an example that this sort of argument wasn’t new:

A Note About The Future

I had intended to finish this with a blogpost about the idea of Digitial Natives. However, this turned out to be something which led to quite a lot more thinking and writing and I did not get round to writing it until many months later, and never really worked out when to blog it. Anyway, I now plan to cover this in my next few posts, so I thought I’d write this recap for you to put it in context. Apologies for any links and media in the above posts which are now defunct.

Update 3/12/2014: The remaining three posts in the series have now been written and can be found below:

• The Future Part 7a: What’s a Digital Native?
• The Future Part 7b: Is there such a thing as a Digital Native?
• The Future Part 7c: Whose silly idea was this Digital Natives thing anyway?

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