Learning Futures

In this episode Sean and Punya talk about the journey and future developments of extended reality (XR) in education with Dan Beaupre and Tom Schmidt from One Giant Leap, LLC and ROAM respectively. We learn about the backstory and "origin story" from Dan and Tom and how they came together to join forces around their deep passion for education, storytelling, and emerging technologies. 

Extended Reality (XR) is a term that encompasses all immersive technologies that merge the physical and virtual worlds, including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR). It offers a new way of experiencing digital content by combining the real world with digital elements, allowing users to interact with virtual objects in a natural and intuitive way.

Guest Information: 

Dan Beaupre  -

Dan is the founder and principal of One Giant Leap, LLC which is a production and consulting company that inspires and empowers children of all ages to be planetary stewards. [They] create transformational experiences, memorable events, and new media. We also provide strategic support to organizations who seek to add, refresh, or expand educational programming. / formerly, Vice President, Experiences, in the National Geographic Society's Education division

Tom Schmidt – 

Emmy winner for TV. Emmy nominated for VR. Producer for all those mediums / the CEO and Co-Founder of ROAM - ROAM creates shared experiences for the emerging metaverse that provide understanding, empathy and awareness. And founder of Percolate Digital LLC

Episode Links

• National Geographic GeoBee
• Oculus Rift [video link]
• Dan’s giant maps project
• eCYBERMISSION educational competition
• Grasp, Dan and Tom’s immersive training company
• Powers of Ten film
• The Gailer School [Wikipedia link]
• Flatland book [Project Gutenberg link]
• Midjourney, AI image generator
• Hypercard, Mac software [Wikipedia link]
• Jane Goodall Institute
• Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Laureate
• Reeducated: Inside Xinjiang’s Secret Detention Camps (360/VR). The New Yorker.
• ASU’s BioSense Network
• Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, BBC documentary television series [IMDb link] [British Film Institute link]
• John Dewey, “father of American progressive education” [Britannica link]
• MIX Center at ASU

Guest Links

• Punya’s blog: Aesthetics and science education: Beauty at Work podcast

In this episode - Sean and Punya are joined by guest co-host Iveta Silova to talk with prominent futures scholar Keri Facer to discuss Futures education, futures literacy vs futures literacies, futures thinking, and cultivating a 'temporal imagination'. 

In our conversation we learn about Keri's own academic and professional journey, and how studying the learning space of children became synonymous with studying the future. We discuss a recent publication from Arathi Sriprakash and Keri Facer on the pedagogic imperative to 'teach the future' in modern schools and the opportunities and challenges exist, and explore the importance of the differences between futures literacy and futures literacies.

Guest Information: 

Keri Facer – Professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, Visiting Professor in Education for Sustainable Development at the University of Gothenburg and August T Larsson Guest Professor at SLU, Sweden. Her work focuses specifically on cultivating the ‘temporal imagination’ – the capacity to work critically with ideas of time, rhythm, pasts and futures to open up possibilities for individual and collective agency - in conditions of environmental and technological change.

Iveta Silova – Professor and Associate Dean of Global Engagement at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. She teaches graduate courses in comparative and international education, education policy and evaluation, research design, and post/decolonial approaches to education research. 

Links & Resources: 

• Learning Futures Collaborative: Education, sustainability, and global futures
• Futurelab, former UK educational research organization
• Futures journal [publisher link]
• Jungk and Muellert’s future workshops [actioncatologue.eu link]
• Futures Literacy [UNESCO link]
• Coldwarchildhoods.org, Iveta’s work on childhood memories
• Chen, K (2010). Asia As Method:Toward Deimperialization. Duke University Press. [publisher link]
• Teach the Future
• World Futures Study Federation
• Sardar, Z. & Sweeney, J. (2015). The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times. Futures 75 (2016) 1–13. [article link]
• Turn It Around!, socially engaged art
• Ana Dinerstein’s ‘The Art of Organizing Hope’ [video link]
• Tsing, A., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. U of Minnesota Press. [publisher link]
• The Ecoversities Network
• Facer, K & Sriprakash, A. (2021). Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification. Futures, Volume 133, October 2021. [pdf link]
• Punya and Iveta’s past work together: https://punyamishra.com/2022/11/17/speculative-fiction-and-the-future-of-learning/
• Keri Facer (2011) Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change, London: Routledge
• Facer, K (2022) The University and the Social Imagination, CGHE Working Paper
  • In this background paper for the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission,  I talk about five different ways of doing ‘futures’ in education – and the ethical choices these raise: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000375792.locale=en
• Black Mountains College - https://blackmountainscollege.uk/
• The Ecoversities Network - https://ecoversities.org/
• Book Recommendations:
  • Hospicing Modernity https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/675703/hospicing-modernity-by-vanessa-machado-de-oliveira/
  • At Work in the Ruins https://www.amazon.com/At-Work-Ruins-Pandemics-Emergencies/dp/164502184X
  • Bruce Sterling – (2002). Tomorrow Now, Envisioning the Next Fifty Years. Random House. [Google Books link]
• Keri and Arathi’s article: Provincialising Futures Literacy: A caution against codification
• How Are the Children? - Wake Up Arcade Fire Cover
• Southeast Asia collection of the Turn it Around! Youth Visions of Climate Futures

In this episode, Sean and Punya talk with colleagues who are working toward ways educators, learners, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can address the learning and teaching of refugees/(im)migrants?

LEARN LFC Description: 

In this project, we will bring together refugees, educators, and researchers with those in global and community organizations to 1.) identify key areas of needed research on the education of refugee/(im)migrants and to 2.) develop intentional and inclusive collectives to both conduct research and to use research findings to build necessary supports for refugee/(im)migrant communities in Arizona, the United States (US), and globally. We situate refugee/(im)migrants and teachers as both learners and educators, who deserve support not only from organizations,but also from academic institutions.

Guest Information: 

Shyla Dogan
Shyla, a graduate of ASU’s Educational Leadership and Policy Ph.D. program, is an Assistant Professor of Education Studies at ASU’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (MLFTC).

Nasir Ahmad Kaihan
Nasir is a Ph.D. student at MLFTC.

Adnan Turan
Adnan is a Ph.D. student at MLFTC.

Links & More Information:

• Learning Futures Collaborative: Learning and Educating Across Refugee/(Im)migrant Networks (LEARN)
• 1951 Refugee Convention
• Punya’s blog post: Things we hold on to (in a shifting world)
• International Organization of Migration (IOM)
• Silver Linings for Learning (Feb 2023). Episode 140, Bans Don’t Work in an Open World: Afghan Women Find Educational Opportunities in Bangladesh
• President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration
• Hamid, Mohsin (2017). Exit West. Penguin Random House [publisher link]

LFC: Designing the new American High School

This LFC is aimed to bring together scholars, practitioners, and students from across the ASU community to formulate a research agenda and a new ASU initiative to imagine how high schools across America can be retooled, reimagined, and redesigned to create equitable opportunities for all U.S. students, especially those from historically marginalized communities, to be prepared for a boundless future in a rapidly changing economy.

In this episode we investigate the work from this LFC trying to answer why schools need to be reimagined, and explore what new models for high school can look like. 

About our guests: 

Chelsea Waite – Chelsea is a Principal and senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at ASU. She also co-leads the Canopy project, a collaborative effort to find and document innovative K-12 environments.

Elizabeth (Betsy) Fowler – Betsy is the Deputy Head of Schools at ASU Preparatory Academy, where she has worked since 2012. She also serves as Executive Director of Special Projects, working to build effective K-12 learning models.

Erin Whalen – Erin is the Executive Director and School Principal of Da Vinci RISE High, a part of Da Vinci Schools in Los Angeles, California.

Nate McClennen – Nate is the Vice-President of Strategy and Innovation at Getting Smart, an organization committed to supporting the future of teaching, leading, and learning. He is also the co-author of the book The Power of Place.

Links and Things to check out:

The Canopy Project - https://canopyschools.transcendeducation.org/

Center on Reinventing Public Education - https://crpe.org/

ASU Preparatory Academy - https://asuprep.asu.edu/ 

Getting Smart- https://www.gettingsmart.com/ 

Learning Future Collaborative: Designing the new American high school

Empathy interviews: Nelsestuen, K. A. R. I., & Smith, J. U. L. I. E. (2020). Empathy interviews. The Learning Professional, 41(5), 59-59. [pdf link]

Ender, Kenneth. (2019, July). We Need a 'Communiversity' Model of Public Education. Insidehighered.com

Carnegie units, from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Competency-based learning: From Formative Assessment to Tracking Student Mastery: The Road to Competency-Based Instruction, from GettingSmart.com

EssayGenius, AI essay writing tool

Jal Mehda’s work on authentic learning: Anderson, Jill (2019, May). Harvard EdCast: In Search of Deeper Learning. Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Khan World School at ASU Prep

In this episode Punya and Sean discuss some of the highlights captured in a recent interview with Senior Research Fellow from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education Dr. Chris Dede and talk about AI and education.

Guest Information: 

Dr. Chris Dede

Chris Dede is a Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) who has worked with AI since the 1970s. A former Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Learning Technologies at Harvard GSE, Dede is a Co-Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded National Artificial Intelligence Institute in Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE).

• More information on Dr. Chris Dede - visit his Wikipedia page.
• National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education - https://aialoe.org
• LinkedIn
• Twitter @chrs_dede
• Silver Lining for Learning - https://silverliningforlearning.org

Dr. Melissa Warr

Melissa Warr, a graduate of ASU’s Learning, Literacies, and Technologies PhD program, is an Assistant Professor of Learning Technology and Education Design at New Mexico State University.

Links from the conversation: 

• Learning Futures Collaborative: Future of AI in Education & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Chiang, Ted. (2023, February). ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. The New Yorker. 
• Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books. [openlibrary.org link]
• Weizenbaum, Joseph. (1966). ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine. Communications of the ACM, 9(1), 36-45. [pdf link]
• Dreyfus, Hubert (1972). What Computers Can’t Do. New York: MIT Press. [archive.org link]
• Chinese room argument: Searle, John (1980). Minds, Brains, and Programs. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy link]
• Quandary Game
• Cicero, Facebook’s A.I. “Diplomacy” game
• DALL-E 2, AI art platform
• Dieterle, E., Dede, C. & Walker, M. The cyclical ethical effects of using artificial intelligence in education. AI & Soc (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01497-w
• Ashok Goel’s AI “Jill Watson”, Georgia Tech University [TEDx Talk link]
• Mursion, workforce immersive learning
• Ethan Mollick’s substack, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

The Learning Futures Podcast is jointly produced by Enterprise Technology and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

Sean and Punya talk with Steven Zuiker and Ed Finn about the importance of imagination and futures thinking in K12 learning environment. We explore the core research question of their Learning Futures Collaborative: How can we prepare youth to think critically about and take agency for their futures?

In this episode we explore the ongoing work through the Imagination and Futures Thinking for K12 Learning Futures Collaborative, where Ed and Steve discuss the core issues of why does every school teach history but hardly any have courses on the future? They discuss their aims in this project to establish a working group around futures thinking and foresight in K-12 education with an aim of building community and developing an interdisciplinary program of research.

Guest Information

Dr. Ed Finn

Ed Finn is the founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, where he is an associate professor with a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Arts, Media and Engineering. He also serves as the academic director of Future Tense, a partnership between ASU, New America and Slate Magazine and a co-director of Emerge, an annual festival of art, ideas and the future.

Dr. Steven Zuiker 

Steve Zuiker is an associate professor of the learning sciences in the division of educational innovation and leadership. His research is broadly based on the notion that ideas are only as important as what we can do with them.

Additional Links

• Center for Science and the Imagination (ASU) https://csi.asu.edu/
• Imagination and Futures Thinking for K12 Learning Futures Collaborative (ASU)

The Learning Futures Podcast is jointly produced by Enterprise Technology and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

Sean and Rachna talk about the "Cambrian explosion" of generative AI with Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO & Founder of Autonomize Inc. and the potential challenges and opportunities from this rapidly evolving technological change.

As we frame our conversation - we talk about the contemporary implications of some of the latest advancements in generative AI using Neil Postman's 1998  talk titled: “Five things we need to know about technological change” In a long and windy way, our conversation hot on the following 5 topics... 

• Trade offs (good or bad) are presented by technological change 
• Distribution is uneven
• Empowering the "adjacent possible" 
• Ecological change of new technology disruptions and innovations 
• The dangers to a society or system when new and emergent technologies become mythic 

About our Guests

Ganesh Padmanabhan

Ganesh is the CEO & founder of Autonomize, Inc, a software company focussed on applying AI to power healthcare outcomes. He is an accomplished business executive, entrepreneur and investor, with deep expertise in data and artificial intelligence (AI) related businesses.

• https://www.storiesinai.com
• https://autonomize.ai

Rachna Mathur

Rachna is an Artist, an Engineer, a Teacher, a Tinkerer, a Researcher, a Dreamer... a Lifelong Learner. She loves discussing STEM and demonstrating Kathak dance to kids, adults, and other teachers! Rachna is the CEO/ Founder of STEMology Club and currently pursuing a doctorate in education with a focus on K-6 STEM.

• https://www.stemology.club/

Additional Links

• Neil Postman (1998) 5 Things to Know about Technological Change
• Terminator Paradox, Teaching parents to raise kids for the AI future | Jair Ribeiro | Stories in AI

The Learning Futures Podcast is jointly produced by Enterprise Technology and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

Sean and Punya welcome special guests Dr. Scotty Craig (ASU) and Dr. Ryan Baker (Penn) to discuss rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and what implications it may have for education

Guest Information

Dr. Scotty Craig
Is an associate professor of human systems engineering within The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Dr. Craig is a learning engineer and has investigated research areas of emotion and learning, multimedia learning, and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS)in both laboratory and applied classroom settings. Scotty is also a fellow member of our own AI in Education Learning Futures Collaborative here at ASU.

Dr. Ryan Baker
Is a professor of education and computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, and also directs the Penn Center for Learning Analytics.

Dr. Baker researches how students use and learn from educational games, intelligent tutors, and other kinds of educational software. Drawing on the fields of educational data mining, learning analytics, and human–computer interaction, he develops methods for mining the data that come out of the interactions between students and educational software. He then uses this information to improve our understanding of how students respond to educational software, and how these responses influence their learning.

Topics discussed:

• UNESCO publications on Artificial Intelligence in education
• Maturity of AI in Education from both a technical perspective and practical / pedagogical perspective
• Parsing student behaviors in moocs and other environments, including one that caught our eye, what Dr. Baker called “wtf” behaviors
• Calls for future developments of AI to be grounded in a human-centered approach
• Algorithmic bias, challenges, pitfalls and opportunities
• How does a system like ChatGPT from Open AI impact the possible future of online learning and behavior?
• Big picture idea, What are we gaining and losing in seeing ourselves as essentially streams of data?

Resources and Links:
-Chiou, E. K., & Lee, J. D. (2021). Trusting automation: Designing for responsivity and resilience. Human factors, 0018720821100999

-Penn Center for Learning Analytics

-Algorithmic Bias in Education

-U Penn Learning Analytics (Online) Master of Science in Education Degree Program

MS in Human Systems Engineering with a Concentration in Intelligent Systems at ASU

The Intelligent Systems Concentration provides students with a Master of Science in Human Systems Engineering that prepares them with the skills needed to improve our world by creating innovative technology-based systems that integrate into human environments. Our faculty provide a guided experience with training in theory, development, and evaluation. For more information, check out our website or email  Dr. Craig

Link: https://poly.engineering.asu.edu/hse/ms/

The Learning Futures Podcast is jointly produced by Enterprise Technology and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

We're back! Season 5 kicks off with a short introduction from co-hosts Sean Leahy and Punya Mishra on what Season 5 has in store. Punya and Sean discuss the newly formed Learning Futures Collaborative, and why they are so important to the futures of learning, and how they frame the arch of Season 5 – as a catalyst for getting involved with futures in your own contexts.

Hosts & Guests:
– Dr. Sean M. Leahy ASU Bio @seanthenerd
– Dr. Punya Mishra ASU Bio @punyamishra

Links and Resources:
– Learning Futures Website: https://learningfutures.education.asu.edu/
– Learning Futures Collaboratives

The Learning Futures Podcast is jointly produced by Enterprise Technology and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.

In this bonus episode Dr. Sean Leahy talks about the importance of educating for sustainable futures, discussing the opportunities and challenges. Dr. Leahy explores the urgency created by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the need to prepare for the uncertainty by engaging in futures thinking and other futures methodologies. 

In this episode Dr. Leahy discusses:

• Elements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and what set it apart from the previous three.
• Disruptions and global mega trends
• Three pressing Challenges of FIR - building upon the work of Klaus Shwab (Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution)
• Preparing for Uncertainty
• Futures Studies
• Futures Thinking
• Working towards UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals

The Learning Futures Podcast is jointly produced by Enterprise Technology and the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University.