Professional futurists continue to make outstanding contributions toward the development of understandings of the future, but is futures thought limited to this select group? Definitely not! With a do-it-yourself attitude, and leverage of the right resources, anybody can become an effective futurist. Here’s why:

Nobody knows the future – don’t trust anybody who says otherwise. [...]

Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of education from 1657-2045. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into modern education, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future history presented is intended to be edgy, [...]

Cristóbal Cobo sent me this link to the Ung Kommunikation [Young Communication] project. The project examines the convergence of new technologies, youth culture and learning. And, by looking at the influence of youth culture on digital communication, the project might be able to identify a bridge between the divide of formal and non-formal [...]

This past week…
A shockwave passed through the singularity community today with the public launch of Singularity University at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.  Singularity University aims to assemble a world class community of thought leaders, academics, and entreprenuers across the many fields of exponentially advancing technologies (nanotechnology, genetics, medicine, artificial intelligence, etc.) in [...]

Dan Sutch at Futurelab (UK) alerted me to their new project, Beyond Current Horizons:
Beyond Current Horizons looks at the future of education, beyond 2025. The aim is to help our education system prepare for and respond to the challenges it faces as society and technology rapidly evolve. What skills will children need for [...]

The World Futures Society has published a special issue of Futures Research Quarterly, focused on the Leapfrog Principle.  These papers will serve as the knowledge base for the upcoming Leapfrog conference in Anqing, China this October.  Online copies should be available through EBSCOhost in the near future (check with your library for access).  Contents for [...]

Contrary to the closed access environments University of Iowa graduate students advocate, I believe that “intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.” Therefore, before the giant hairball of a banana that is my doctoral dissertation over-ripens beyond its useful life expectancy, I am releasing the document as a free download.
More information on [...]

In response to my post on what Education 3.0 might/ought to look like, Eric Grant posted a link to a Flash-enabled map of trends in education and other potential futures.

I like the idea of mapping education futures out with a slick interface. Can we build a Web 2.0-enabled version of something like this that [...]

Here’s my presentation from this morning’s La Universidad en México en el año 2030: imaginando futuros conference at UNAM in Mexico City.

(Click here for the Spanish version.)
This paper introduces how the convergence of globalization, emergence of the knowledge society and accelerating change contribute to what might be best termed a New Paradigm of knowledge production [...]

Forbes is running a special report on “The Future.” From the opening comments:
The truth is that people simply aren’t very good at predicting the future. It was only two centuries ago that we began to think we could do it at all, and we’re still learning. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight remains largely blind.

And [...]