Warning: Postnormal Futures Ahead

Warning: Postnormal Futures Ahead

Warning: Postnormal Futures Ahead

The Relationship

of Things (RoT)

A POSTNORMAL TRANSFORMATION SCENARIO FOR 2033

The Relationship

of Things (RoT)

A POSTNORMAL TRANSFORMATION SCENARIO FOR 2033

The Relationship

of Things (RoT)

A POSTNORMAL TRANSFORMATION SCENARIO FOR 2033

A Transformation Scenario

A Transformation Scenario

Behind the Scenes

Explore the chain of custody from
which this scenarios was developed.

UNCERTAINTY

BREEDS emergent resilient systems of change

Education policymakers' historical approach of technology as an addendum to education is widely accepted as self-limiting and dangerously incorrect. Apropos to this legacy axiom, is the idea of technology as something we can shape and employ instrumentally, rather than something which shapes us. However the past impacts of social media and the increasingly virtual experiences of younger generations, have showed this to be unquestionably false. In this new state, education leaders have driven major reform to reconceptualise learning in the face of new technology futures. They have been human lighthouses amidst a sea of increasing uncertainty and complexity, reminding us of the ways in which we ourselves have always made sense of the world . . .

Corporate learning leaders bolstered by the motivation of economic output, have accepted this to be true for some time as we observed their swift bypassing of linear learning systems and tech fads. In the early 2030s we see education leaders go to war on the curriculum dichotomies of fact and skill, labelling them as polarising and incomplete foundations for possible futures ahead, and education's role is redefined as one of sense-making. Included in this reform is a redefinition of the roles of teacher vs student, to be redefined as learner and leader - both necessarily interchangeable roles dependent on context and pedagogical domain knowledge at play.

The Online Manifesto adopted by government leaders, reminds us that technology impacts the kinds of ideas we value, the quality of attention we pay, and our conceptions of self and world. Emergent learner innovations demonstrate the potential for new forms of behavior, values, and thought, even when they are not explicitly instructed to do so. It's starting to seem like we might be able to place our trust in this new educational ecosystem after all.



FUTURE SKILLS

A NECESSARY REFRAME TOWARD SENSE-MAKING

The focus of decentralised education leaders within this increasingly autopoietic system, is not how to improve classroom teaching, but rather, how to build on the process of organic learning that we know starts with young children as they begin to develop their sense of the world.


The Online Manifesto adopted by government leaders, recognises that being part of this hyperconnected world to its fullest future extent, will impact, shape and in many ways, redefine learners' concepts of self, agency, interaction and reality. Indeed it will also redefine the way we think about open access information, collective intelligence and the development, ownership and evolution of knowledge itself. Welcome to the age of the knowledge commons.


The current educational policy framework in 2033, acknowledges the more likely case, that it is us the policymakers, educational leaders and parents , who are not fluent in this new language of future. This explicit recognition of the decreasing authority of intergenerational knowledge transfer, sparks a major cultural shift as education leaders (and parents) acknowledge that the challenge to continually identify and evolve future sense-making skills is critical to preparing learners for the future. Moreover, it is a challenge that must be shared by both leaders and learners alike. The schools of the past, have no place in this future system.


And yet; it is the education leaders and learners embracing this new equilibrium, that will shape our possible futures for the years to come.

Pick any paper from the 2020s and you will see countless headlines about 21stC skills for the 'Future of Work'. In the current day (2033) education leaders commonly accept that this language functioned in many ways, to decrease agency in its suggestion that the future was somehow singular and already predetermined in some way, - we just had to prepare students for it. Both leaders and learners have reframed that space away from 'future preparedness', toward an agency-driven positioning - one of future skills in sense-making. The phrase is suggestive of a shared challenge for leaders and learners, a common goal and one that is not directed at a kind of 'future destination' for which we must be prepared, but rather, one which invites possible future adventures ahead, through shared discovery and sense-making - to wherever we end up. Just as the STEM programs of the past decade taught learners via computer programming, to speak in a language both they and computers could understand. Today learners and leaders are developing a shared understanding of both current and emergent sense-making skills, as they build their agency-powered muscles of connection and contribution in the myriad of ways that continue to emerge in these new shared futures.


DISCONNECTION

FROM HISTORIES PAST

Education policymakers' historical approach of technology as an addendum to education is widely accepted as self-limiting and dangerously incorrect. Apropos to this legacy axiom, is the idea of technology as something we can shape and employ instrumentally, rather than something which shapes us. However the past impacts of social media and the development of sophisticated metaverse experiences within younger generations, showed this to be untrue.


Marshall McLuhan's theory that 'technologies are not simply inventions that people employ, but are the means by which people are reinvented' has shown itself to be a theory of change more relevant than ever in this future state. Just as the advent of the publishing industry did not just increase communication, but also created the 'author' and necessarily a 'public'; so too, did social media create the role of 'social influencer'. Unlike historical persons of influence or charismatic charlatans, the modern social media influencer's primary value was the ability to connect and interpret the world, through a shared system of meaning, redefining notions of expertise amid a noisy landscape of information, through new modes of connection and distributed networks of increasing influence.

FROM PRE-DIGITAL IDEAS

In a transformative state, education leaders and policymakers' reform signals the end of this disconnection between our historical denial of technology's power to shape us and our experience of technology in the real world. The disconnect here, is from our own history; as we come to terms with the limits of our attempts to sustain pre-digital ideas about learning and indeed, life.

FROM HORSELESS CARRIAGES

The historical Myth of Progress that is legacy edtech, would have us believe technology-inclusive pedagogy is surplus to the efficiencies of new learning systems. We now know this presumption to be incorrect at the deepest level. As an adult competent in math, you may not be able to easily solve a Year 9 equation; but the foundations of math learning, enable you to be fluent in a more expansive mind framework of logic, puzzles, problem-solving and paradoxes. Learning leaders have reconceptualised foundational domains of knowledge and their dynamic pedagogical models to encompass this new technology-driven operating context. Technology takes its rightful place as both a lens with which to make sense of the world, and a tool to shape our possible futures within it.

MYTH OF PROGRESS

legacy edtech has left the stable

The horseless carriage of steady state has bolted. The conservative bias of edtech systems responsible for the homogenising myth of the 2020s; that the delivery of historical, linear methods of learning via new technologies would satisfy changing needs, has been dismantled. The WHAT and the HOW may have been easier to dispense and measure, but the sum of these parts in no way added up to the whole that new futures required. The continual decline in Australia's OECD academic measures demonstrated the fragility of the dominant narratives of the 2020s; but many education leaders now view that period in retrospect, as the necessary invitation to shape a new future.


By the time we reach 2033, the historical edtech market has long been recognised as inherently problematic in pedagogical approach (or lack thereof), not to mention transparency, privacy, portability and interoperability. The establishment of the Critical Digital Futures Foundation (CDFF) encompasses both education and business leaders, creating a space for collaboration and consideration of second and third order implications, of any new technology applying to receive a 'responsible tech' classification.


Student and teacher concern over privacy and ownership of personal data has been recognised as paramount to the production of agency, and integrated into educational law. Google classroom and other major platforms have been disestablished, as has the siloing of educational technology versus real-world technology.



AGENCY

PARTICIPATORY POWER

The notion of digital presence for many students in the decade prior, consisted of regrettable social media postings with intermittent scatterings of digital literacy and e-safety thrown in for good measure. But the arrival of authentic digital connection and learner sovereignty was no panacea.

Genuine learner agency and participatory power were achieved in large part, due to the tireless efforts of innovative policymakers who systematically deconstructed the hierarchies and binaries that defined the historical model. To their credit, they foresaw the pedagogical value of open dynamic educational approaches, designed to feed this autopoietic system. Inputs which embraced systemic uncertainty, and continued to evolve and re-form in response to the world around them over time. In 2032 led by these same policymakers, the Australian government passed 'The Education Agency Act' (EAA) which legislated this open dynamic systems model already underway in many independent schools, and rolled it out across the nation.

In a transformative future state; the primacy of enabling intellectual structures to be built by the learner, not taught by the teacher, becomes the driving force in all education policy. The role of technology in the development of personal agency, provides a community of practice, helping learners understand how to be in this space. Australia adopts the Domain of One's Own initiative some 15 years after its inception, creating space for learners and leaders to explore, discover and document their learning adventures. The nationwide initiative enables learners and leaders to exercise control over their work, personal data and digital identity.


Learners are recognised as scholars, and leaders as forces of change in their own right.


It's beginning to feel a little like revolution.





DECENTRALISATION

the mechanistic solutions to address inequity, are equally distributed

The educational challenges our society faced throughout the period of 2024 - 2029 demonstrated unequivocally, that politically driven models to address inequality were not sufficient to meet potential futures, nor to address the self-sustaining mechanisms producing such widespread inequity .


Contrary to our historical tendency to stretch curriculum and resources out to the margins; the transformative period post-2030 saw innovative learning policymakers re-position marginalising mechanisms at the centre of education reimagining. Drivers of marginalisation became the starting point for revolutionary reforms. The innovative solutions to address techno-poverty, structural inequity, regional and rural divides and neurodivergence paradigms, provide a starting place for this dynamic educational system.



UNCERTAINTY

UNCERTAINTY

Sees the emergence of a GLOBAL autopoietic system

Education as an autopoietic system, ‘produces and reproduces its own elements as well as its own structures’. It is the tension between the education system and the real world lived experience, which enables the sense-making for both learner and educator.The autopoietic system enables ongoing reconceptualisation of both - worldviews of learning, and the process by which those worldviews potentially transform over time.
(Luhmann, N. (2012). Theory of Society, Volume 1. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. Stanford: Stanford University Press.)

Increasing uncertainty occurs as a result of the absence of a common prescribed curriculum, which in turn increases system complexity moving forward. Knowledge networks and feedback loops continue to emerge and reform, as learners unite through engagement with inter-disciplinary problem-focused subsystems. Here learning emerges through ‘knowledge in use’ , surfaced in the flow of autonomous learning explorations, stewarded by educators. Education centres are hybrid and set up to scaffold; selected by education consumers based on access, pathway and facilitator approaches.


FUTURE SKILLS

FUTURE SKILLS

I AM the future employer you’ve been preparing me for.

Proof-of-work becomes Proof-of-Self,

And by the way . . proof of ‘work’, is whatever learners say it is.

In the later years of the period formerly known as ‘schooling’, learners are required to critique, maintain and generously contribute to the Knowledge Commons. This is about as close to a historical textbook as they’ll get.

The widespread popularity of creator, hacker and startup culture has subsided as individual solo careers either independently or as part of a smaller collective subsystem within a larger system, are commonplace.

DISCONNECTION

DISCONNECTION

I connect. Therefore I am.

Knowledge is defined, developed, shaped, circulated, exchanged and discovered within an ever-changing network model. Learning comes from energy flows within this network. Learning and knowledge operates like a current - open, participatory and peer-driven. It moves through nodes and networks. The goal is to channel it, not covet, hoard or restrain it.

School is not somewhere you go, learning is something you do and it looks markedly different for everyone.

Students utilise different learning mode spaces at various stages of their problem-project pathways; super labs offer powerful physical technology, scientific equipment, creative production and manufacturing facilities, whilst immersive arenas and virtual cells invite exploration at every scale, time period and subject matter imaginable.

Community technology infrastructure becomes the main focus of Govt. spending as region now requires high speed broadband (cable), regularly updated hardware and technical support.


MYTH OF PROGRESS

Legacy NPCs*
won’t survive the update.

There is widespread acceptance of hybrid reality. Virtual reality is not a technological experience, it is an experience. Period.

New models emerge to progress the entity relationship model of Artificial, Natural and Human Intelligence. A new balance emerges.

Technology shapes the kinds of ideas we value, the quality of attention we pay, and our conceptions (and relationships) with our self and world. Technology creates new forms of behaviour, modes of expression, value models and forms of creativity and intelligence. Regardless of whether it is explicitly developed (or taught) to do so.

Systems thinking forms the backbone of the meta-learning streams for both learners and educators.





AGENCY

Agency emerges through self-generated intentional action

Agency continues to develop through self-generated intentional action. The development of personal and collective agency through passion, curiosity and connected experiences locates learning in the flow of agency building, alongside social connection, relationship, community and shared experience.

Learners connect with networked publics both individually and through self-forming collaborative pods, engaging in passionate discovery and serendipitous scholarship. This collaborative discovery and network engagement leads to shared learning experiences and deeper community building.

Learners of any age, become scholars . . with young learners in secondary / high school commonly referred to as ‘earlywork scholars’, enjoying peer attribution and recognition on-chain, enabling them full autonomy and ownership over their work.


Credentials are stacked, and there is no longer a clear distinction between learning, creating, connecting and working.


DECENTRALISATION

You can lead from any chair.
Or laptop.

A transformative shift from the primacy of binary relationships and individual players, asset, nodes or parts - to the primacy of entity relationships, interactions, processes and networks.

Learning pathways (including content, modes of interaction and proof-of-work projects) are co-created by passionate learners, domain masters and learning coaches.

Students learn in their own time, asynchronously or in-person, online or off or both. Every learner’s experience is different.

Early models of peer-to-peer learning and knowledge transfer such as wikipedia, have given way to Peeragogy: collaborative peer-to peer teaching and learning. Like the production of agency, learning is recognised as a socially constructive act. The co-creation of knowledge amongst individuals, groups and participant networks within the system.

Transformation Scenario ✨

Transformation Scenario ✨

We begin at the beginning…

I did it . . I finally published my first longform essay to mirror.xyz.


Sure it's about web3 provenance protocols and NFT derivatives but hey, that's what I'm into. Who are you to judge? You might not think it's a big deal, some kid doing some blog post to a stupid website but I'm not an academic person. Three years ago, after failing English, I would have told you I wasn't even a smart person. Atleast, that's how I felt. Now I know that was total cap.


My parents insisted I attend the deathtrap formerly known as school until I was 15; which you'd think was torture, but was really just a frustratingly intense waste of my time. I used to sit in class, feigning interest, trying to fly under the radar so the NPC Chalkie up the front speaking yapanese wouldn't catch me responding to my clients on discord. Hell sometimes I'd even crack open my web development projects and get into that instead. I mean, I wasn't lazy or anything.


My attitude towards school might have had something to do with the fact that nobody my age has the appetite for some old dead dude who wrote a bunch of plays years ago, but it's more than that. You see, I have ADHD. Which makes concentration difficult . . and sitting still . . and concentrating on subjects of which I have next to no interest. Which was most of them.


I used to be pretty good at math and got into crypto super early. A lot of my good mates on Twitter were into it and it gave me a rush to see what I could do with a little research. I taught myself most of it using online simulations; I knew I couldn't beat the big whales who did it for a living but I found a different strategy. I built myself a nocode web scanner and set up alerts every time an influential dropped the name of a new coin or a freshly minted token project in a positive post. I had automatic buys scheduled that executed within minutes, I'd hold for 24 hours and then get rid of that baby before the bottom dropped out. It worked for a while, until it didn't. Crypto led to NFTs, where I learned my first lesson the hard way. I found this NFT project called Wonkey Donkey and was instantly hooked. I didn't have the money to mint but I volunteered as a discourse community mod which got me on the white list. Then my parents gave me the money for my birthday, it was $500 and felt like all the money in the world. I minted . . but it turned out to be a rug pull. I was devastated. My parents agreed to reinburse my birthday money if I could identify the red flags I missed and a plan to interrogate any future project to stop it happening again.


I joined a web3 micro-course on open source intelligence tools (OSINT) recommended to me by the guys in my design slack channel . . I have ADHD remember, nothing happens by halves here,😂 and I worked out how to track the digital meta-data and provenance records of both users and assets online. If I'd done that in the first place, I would have seen that the dudes who started the project had no prior proof-of-work, that their domains were registered temporarily and diverted through multiple global server networks and I found a guy listed online as a co-founder, who left the project prior to minting. He deleted his profile but I found a lag file which listed him as the third partner. Must have freaked about being doxxed.


I also bought myself a cold crypto wallet that could handle all the major coins, and set up an eth address for trading and one for holding. There was no way I was going to be that guy again. I had to present my findings to my parents, it was like a project but with no grades. My school friends thought it was hilarious, and probably also a little stupid. But it changed the way I think about data provenance and trust in a major way.


Anyway the NFT collecting led to web3 discourse community modding and token art. I minted my own collection of NFTs which I had designed by a guy I knew. In reality the art was average and the traits were limited, and I had no profile . . so unsurprisingly it flopped. But the designer and I are good mates now, so I wouldn't call it a complete waste of time. One of the NFT creators from the @radi6 project saw some of the PFPs I'd been doing and asked me to do some art. One thing led to another and soon I was building out sites for his test projects. Like all newbies, I started in nocode and worked across all the big platforms. Pretty soon I was modding my own code and creating web components for others to buy. That was pretty cool. I created proof-of-work profiles on all the major art hubs and NFT drop channels; and pretty soon I was developing proper websites for major NFT projects and developing a following on Twitter. Which is kind of hard to maintain because my crowd is so US-centric, hence why I needed to make myself available in class while the Chalkie NPC was yapping.


Some banking dude who follows me suggested a few books I should read; my mum nearly fell off her chair when the amazon box arrived with books that not only had I ordered, but paid for too. I mean . . you gotta stay current. I set up a community for alphas like myself, and made some of my best mates there. Before you freak out I had physical friends too . . it's just that they weren't into what I was into. And whatever I'm into . .is always in a major way. Bet.



The founder of the @Yaa8 project which I'd been doing some design for, saw a post I made about saving up for a @Yaa8 NFT. They're about $5,000 so you can see that I was playing a long game. He DM'd me and offered me a deal. If I wrote some posts for his work discord about data provenance and the challenges of ownership verification off-chain, he'd loan me one of his NFTs for my PFP. He'd seen my posts about immutable content and web3 provenance protocols, and wanted to upskill his digital agency team.


Loaning NFTs is not something you do in the web3 space. Especially with so much algorithmic junk and authenticity issues, anyone who uses an NFT that isn't trackable on-chain is considered a hack or worse still, a thief. But this guy just gave me one of his NFTs indefinitely, can you believe it? Transferred it to me on-chain, just like that. Of course he made me explain my holding set up to make sure I didn't lose it but after the Wonkey Donkey rug pull, I was all over that like a rash.


So I started writing for the @Yaa8s founder - @bloktrad. At first just short posts outlining critical provenance issues and authenticity feedback loops. My failures came full circle when I started writing about digital intelligence tools and methodologies; his people couldn't believe I'd learned all this from open source but you can find pretty much anything on the web if you look hard enough.

Then he asked me to write a longform piece about web3 provenance protocols; so I wrote about collectable embeds and how splits are changing the game for social attribution network graphs, and the structures creators use for attribution and economic compensation.

I sent it to him a couple of times and he gave me some feedback, but mostly I think he was happy. I finally finished it and when I sent it him the final cut . . I got this DM back 👆 I'm telling you this guy is the GOAT

It's been 10 years since I first started trading in crypto and 8 years since I parted company with what is now called OpenCampus - (the system formerly known as high school), which is almost completely unrecognisable. In 2027 a wave of privatisation swept across the educational landscape and more than 35% of private schools broke ranks with legacy church structures and pivoted to for-profit models led mostly by, you guessed it . . Big Tech . By the end of 2029, these for-profit schools formed the Education Commons Collective and in 2031 expanded the Collective worldwide.


OpenCampus reformed as a series of local and international networks. Learning is now available through a series of decentralised transparent blockchain-based platforms maintained by community white hats. Peeragogy is the dominant educational approach now which doesn't surprise any of us. Content is open source and co-created by domain masters and students alike; while learners connect with personal learning coaches regularly to structure pathways that align with problem-based meta maps. These meta maps eventually form pathways towards early work opportunities (what we used to call careers), but unlike the school I went to, there's no age limit and people tend to get into it early nowadays.


Besides, work doesn't mean what it used to. The idea of focusing your final school years training for a job with somebody else feels kind of ridiculous now. Like the education version of an old school "prepper" 😂. I mean . . obviously peoples still work for others, but even bigger businesses tend to operate micro-system models, so you still feel like you're working for a startup. No doubt there's some guru organisational theory about why this approach has increased staff retention and productivity, but mostly I think people just got tired of imbalance and boredom.


At OpenCampus kids create their own interdisciplinary work projects based around personal passions, for some kids . . even just finding the passion can be a big step. I think one of the mandates is the selection of one wicked collaborative challenge project each year . . you know, like tackling the water crisis or climate refugees. But apart from that kids are free to pick almost anything, their learning coaches will help them shape it into something robust and purposeful. They mint these projects as Scholar NFTs, so they have them on-chain as proof-of-work which they can stack for subsequent connections. And by the way . . proof of ‘work’, is whatever learners say it is.


Following your weird interest to the depths of its complexity is always going to be a more engaging and transformative experience than memorising sonnets. Bet. It's weird that schools used to grade us and force us to memorise and regurgitate a load of bollocks that nobody ever remembered. Funny thing is . . . I still remember the security protocols I learned when I lost my first NFT buy to a rug pull. Just goes to show you doesn't it . . . Each student belongs to a series of learning communities-of-practice, much like the unofficial ones I cultivated for myself in the old days of discord and slack. From what I can see, despite early misgivings from the boomers, these OpenCampus hubs have been transformative. They offer a network of different learning mode spaces which learners can access at various stages of their problem-project pathways; super labs offer powerful physical technology, scientific equipment, creative production and manufacturing facilities, whilst immersive arenas and virtual cells invite exploration at every scale, time period and subject matter imaginable.


The government's role has been reduced to community tech infrastructure and device supply. Who would have thought? The good news is that every region in the country has stable high speed internet and the latest fully subsidised laptops which get replaced every three years. It's hard to believe . . had I been just a few years younger, that I could have literally developed my own path with support from inside the system. Still, I'm not feeling hard done by, there were plenty of people in my community who stepped up and reached sideways to scaffold me. Just as I've done for others along the way.

As for me? . . . I'm a professional writer, can you believe that?! The guy that only went by ApCtrl_web3 because he was too freaked to put out his real name. Yep that guy who pretty much failed English. That's me . . Simon Renstad and now I get paid to write for a living. Not a salary mind you, it's all attribution splits and networked commerce but it's more than enough. And it's not just about the money. When you work across these web3 platforms like I do, it's the acknowledgement from people who have read your work or better still, who have built on it and included you in their creative attribution protocols (with on-chain acknowledgement), that makes you get up in the morning. Want to guess who my first paid subscriber was? . . @bloktrad. Facts.


I'm also a domain master for OpenCampus; I work across three areas - mostly Crpto, NFT design and lately, a new area I'm calling the Common Arts Collective. I co-create domain knowledge and problem-based meta maps with the hardcore students who are really into it; I hold regular digital spaces and physical meetups with students and learning coaches all over the world. All paid for by OpenCampus which is pretty rad. There's a couple of guys in my crypto class who are out of this world . . they're teaching me stuff that would blow your mind. One of them is like sixteen I think and the other is only twelve. It's brilliant. That's the kind of stuff that makes you smile.


It's funny you know, when I was younger . . I was the one my parents worried about. How would I cope if I didn't do well at school? Why couldn't I just be more engaged with the Chalkies? And now, it seems like the system has finally caught me with me. Seems like I was never actually that far off the track I was meant to be on. I used to tell my mum I was a pioneer, and unbeknownst to me, I might actually have been right.


Behind the Scenes

Create your own Education Futures. These visual maps will get you started.

Behind the Scenes

Create your own Education Futures. These visual maps will get you started.

education-policy-milestones

Key Education Milestones

February 2023

Key Drivers

February 2023

Imagine Your Own Education Futures

Imagine Your Own Education Futures

Imagine Your Own Education Futures

Use the Visuals