Page 15 - Campus Technology, November/December 2017

EDUCATION TRENDS
ning for emerging trends and developments. At a very basic level we all do this through being aware of our immediate environment, keeping up with the news and participating in professional development. Environmental scanning goes beyond this, starting with scale. Scan- ners check dozens or hundreds of sources, including blogs, videos, news feeds and even print materials. They take care to set up a diverse source set, varied by view- point, demographics, geography and other influential perspectival factors.
Environmental scanning has advantages akin to those of trend analysis. Scans are grounded in present-day reality, rather than speculation. Conducted well, they broaden participants’ and consumers’ worldview. Gath- ered over time, scans point out trends, which can then be tracked. Two good examples of this method come from the library world: a 2015 scan conducted by the Association of Research Libraries and a 2010 report from the OCLC Online Computer Library Center.
Scenarios
A third forecasting approach differs from trends and environmental scanning in being more qualitative and theatrical: We can create scenarios that depict potential futures, each one driven by the impact of one or two trends. Scenarios are not predictions but stories of what
The genre of science fiction has been offering visions of what might be for centuries. Not only has this offered obvious aesthetic and cognitive benefits to large audiences, but science fiction has also influenced technology.
might occur. They are also heuristic tools, as they let us think through how our institutions and our own profes- sional lives might change if certain developments come to pass. For example, a scenario could posit that schol- arly publication and textbooks “flip” to an open model; how might that change a campus library, classes, stu- dent financial aid, faculty publishing and research, ten- ure and promotion?
Scenarios offer all of the human benefits of storytelling, encouraging us to engage personally with a vision. They can elicit greater participation than trend data, depending on the audience, due to their narrative structure and creativity. They help flesh out strategic planning. Their largest downside is that they can be time-consuming to interact with, espe- cially when a group works with multiple scenarios.
Science Fiction
While scenarios are stories we create about the future, there is another realm of professional storytelling along
these lines: science fiction. The genre of science fiction has, after all, been offering visions of what might be for centuries. Not only has this offered obvious aesthetic and cognitive benefits to large audiences, but science fiction has also influenced technology. Consider the flip phone, for example, which draws on the Star Trek com- municator. During a court battle over the iPad’s inven- tion, Samsung fought Apple to a standstill by demon- strating that tablet computing appeared before a massive audience in the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey — a generation before the iPad’s first release. John Brun- ner’s Shockwave Rider (1975) portrayed a world reshaped by networked computers, where hackers released worms to wreak havoc on other people’s code, and virtual gambling and education were established realities.
More recently we have seen even more examples of sci- ence fiction envisioning and perhaps shaping the future. Computer interface designers were inspired by devices in
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | November/December 2017