Tag: COVID-19

UNESCO Prospects Journal: Scenarios and the future of education

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The question for teachers, learners, and the various organizations and communities in which they participate becomes “How will we adapt, evolve, and thrive even if uncertainties play out in ways for which we had not initially prepared?”

In the UNESCO International Bureau of Education’s journal Prospects, the University of Oslo’s Steffen Krüger, the University of Agder’s Niamh Ní Bhroin, and I discuss the “Schools and/or screens” scenario project for the digitalisation of education in Norway.

UNESCO Headquarters sign. (C) Matt Finch, 2023

We show how challenging issues raised in the context of distant imagined futures proved to be immediately pertinent in the developing Covid-19 pandemic, and, as a wide range of actors explore the possibility of a new social contract for education, we reflect on how future scenarios can provide fresh perspectives on issues that are difficult or even impossible to resolve within current frames of reference, including questions of equity and justice that may be construed differently in times to come.

Read “Unlearning, relearning, staying with the trouble: Scenarios and the future of education” at Prospects online.

New book: Building the Post-Pandemic University

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Next month sees the release of the edited volume Building the Post-Pandemic University: Imagining, Contesting, and Materializing Higher Education Futures.

Together with UCL’s Richard Sandford, I contributed a chapter on “Scenarios as a device for forming common futures: plurality and the post-pandemic university”

You can find out more, and pre-order the book, at the Edward Elgar website.

Strategizing across organizations

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“Capitalizing on big opportunities and solving systemic problems will require organizations to come together to develop strategies as a group.”

Together with Rafael Ramírez, Trudi Lang, Gail Carson, and Dale Fisher, I have a new piece in MIT Sloan Management Review exploring scenario-based strategy for networks of organizations addressing large-scale challenges, drawing on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic with the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN).

Tree bridge created from entwined roots – from Wikimedia Commons user Arshiya Urveeja Bose – CC-BY 2.0

You can find “Strategizing across organizations” at the MIT Sloan Management Review website.

You can also find the accepted version of the paper at Oxford University’s online ORA resource.

More than a Game: Scenario Planning, Imagination, and the Public Library’s Future

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For Public Libraries Quarterly, Bronwen Gamble and Melissa Adams of the Reading Public Library co-wrote an article with me on our scenario planning journey through a leadership transition in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“More than a Game: Scenario Planning, Imagination, and the Public Library’s Future” explores the use of frugal, online scenario planning methods during the pandemic and the benefits of a scenarios process in times of leadership transition.

It builds on Dale Leorke and Danielle Wyatt’s notion, expressed in their book The Library as Playground, of the library as “a space and institutional order innately imbued with playful qualities” to consider how libraries may be the perfect hosts for scenario processes which “play with expectations, hopes, fears, and desires, in a strategically consequential game of ‘What if?'”

Find out more about “frugal” scenario planning on the Oxford model from Rafael Ramirez and Trudi Lang at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford here.

X365: The Graphic Novel, by Neill Cameron

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In early 2020, acclaimed comic creator Neill Cameron began to write and draw the one-panel-a-day comic X365: “No plan going in, no preparation. I’d just make a story up and see where it took me.”

When the pandemic hit, it reshaped the tale Neill was telling, of parallel worlds entwined.

The full story is now being produced in a collected edition on Kickstarter, including an interview I conducted with Neill about the project as it reached its conclusion.

See more at the Kickstarter project page for X365: The Graphic Novel.

IMAJINE: Futures of Infectious Disease

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COVID-19 has brought infectious disease, and the ways we fight or prevent it, to the forefront of discussion about the very biggest decisions our societies face. On issues ranging from economics, wellbeing, and sustainability to authoritarianism, democratic accountability, digital inclusion, privacy, and surveillance, the pandemic has become something we cannot ignore.

What might the future hold in terms of both infectious disease and the acts we take to counter it? For the IMAJINE project’s four scenarios for the future of Europe in 2048, Gail Carson of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Medicine explores this question.

You can read her response to the scenarios at the IMAJINE website.

Library Journal: COVID-era scenarios for Reading, Pennsylvania

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“It was clear we should not wait out COVID-19. We needed a vision for where our services were headed, even if we couldn’t fully see what lay in store.”

In Library Journal, Bronwen Gamble of the Reading Public Library in Pennyslvania writes with me about our experience developing COVID-era scenarios to inform strategy for one of the United States’ oldest public libraries.

You can read our piece “Change the Scene” at the Library Journal website.

The Child Who Had To Grow Up: Using Scenario Planning to Prepare for Uncertain Future Contexts in Digital Education

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My paper “The Child Who Had To Grow Up: Using Scenario Planning to Prepare for Uncertain Future Contexts in Digital Education“, which appears in the proceedings of the Architecture Media Politics Society conference Teaching in a Time of Change, can be read here (PDF download).

The paper discusses the University of Oslo “Schools and/or screens” scenario project exploring the digitalisation of education in Norwegian schools.

You can read more about “Schools and/or screens” at the CO:RE Education blog and the University of Oslo’s “Times of COVID-19” blog, as well as watching a discussion of education and the future of work at the 2021 SHAPE conference.

New Librarianship Symposium: Scenarios for the COVID-affected world?

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On November 18th, I’ll be joining the fourth of the New Librarianship Symposia convened by leading information professionals to explore key issues and new agendas for the COVID-affected world.

The symposia mark ten years since the publication of R. David Lankes’ Atlas of New Librarianship, and offer an opportunity to reinvigorate institutions’ approach to the ever-changing information environment.

In the panel on “Re-imagining the future”, I’ll be presenting a paper on “Mapping the future: scenario planning for the post-pandemic library” (PDF download), drawing on a case study of public library planning in the context of the coronavirus pandemic and America’s widening political rifts.

The paper explores both the use of scenarios, and the benefits of attending to value co-creation, in devising library strategy.

My contribution will be in dialogue with thought provoking papers from Seattle Pacific University’s Michael Paulus and a team at the OCLC library cooperative. We’ll consider what might await for information institutions and the communities they serve; how best to move forward in times characterised by turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity; and what it means to practice strategy at different levels, from the global to the deeply local.

Do join us for the fourth of the New Librarianship Symposia on November 18th, 2021.

Circulating Ideas: Scenario Planning With Reading Public Library

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Bronwen Gamble, Executive Director of Pennsylvania’s Reading Public Library, appeared with me on the American library podcast Circulating Ideas to share our experiences of scenario planning during a pandemic.

Reading Public Library, PA – Image Courtesy of Berks County Public Libraries

You can listen to the show, or check out a transcript, over at the Circulating Ideas website.