Assignment Description
Project 3A:
Future Learning: Visions, Possibilities and Nightmares

Philip Molebash, molebash@mail.sdsu.edu

Assignment

In a team:

  • Develop a 10-16 year timeline of recent and future events that reflect the interaction of information and communications technologies with educational and social trends.
  • Write a 5-7 minute one-act play that culminates or epitomizes trends in your timeline.
  • Perform the play
  • Lead discussion of the issues represented in the play.

Due April 13: Timeline of future trends and initial draft of a manuscript for one-act play with audience discussion questions.

Due April 20: As a team, perform the play before a live audience of EDTEC 296 students and faculty and lead a discussion on the issues.

Deliverables

1.  Timeline of Recent and Future Events: 2000-2020 (5%): Using complete sentences and/or sentence fragments, and starting with recent years, identify key technological and social events that characterize a future trend or trends in technology-based education and/or training. In general, these trends should reflect and extend what you have learned in Dr. Eger's ICT honors course, EDTEC 296, and other sources of information. The events represented on the timeline should clearly identify some ways that information and communications technology might interact with education and learning, which are fundamentally social enterprises. You can use this PowerPoint document to create your timeline.

Previous EDTEC 296 Assignments: This assignment might remind you of Tool #6 in The Thinker's Toolkit ('Sorting, Chronologies, and Timelines'). However, you'll need to give some thought to reframing Tool #6 so that you can apply it to a future chronology. Dr. Molebash's article might help you to identify some basic educational trends for your timeline. Also relevant is advice from 101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: 2/2, 53/27, 63/37, 64/38.

2.  Manuscript for One-Act Play (10%): Write a dialog with (optional) callouts of PowerPoint graphics, text, and/or artwork (which can be developed later as part of Deliverable 3). Your dialog must include at least three characters with speaking parts and might take the form of a newscast, advertisement, 'edutainment' program, infomercial, political event, technical or political demonstration, or just a casual conversation on a street corner. The play should not require extensive acting, body movement, or special effects. Typical length: 5-7 minutes.

      The play should vividly represent, using thought-provoking satire, commentary, and/or discussion, events that epitomize or culminate the trend(s) represented in your timeline. Your play should represent a vision, possibility, or nightmare that is clearly related to what, how, and, why people will learn. It should also represent some of the ways that technological trends can influence educational and social trends (and visa versa). In general, it should minimize fantastical or magical events and emphasize features of a possible, although not necessarily probable future. Some tongue-in-cheek or 'cornball' humor may be appropriate, but not if it seriously detracts from presentation of the important issues.

        The manuscript should include, as an addendum, at least three well-conceived questions that will stimulate audience discussions of the issues represented by the play. These questions should encourage the audience to engage with the playwright and the players about the educational implications of information and communications technologies. They should be suitable for distribution (accompanied by the timeline) to the audience prior to the actual performance.

Previous EDTEC 296 Assignments: Consider 101 Creative Problem Solving Techniques: 91/27.

3.      Performance of One-Act Play and Leadership of Class Discussion of the Issues Represented by the Play (10%, based on performance of entire group). The play must be delivered as a crisp, well-rehearsed production, perhaps accompanied by optional PowerPoint graphics, text, and/or artwork. Actors may read their lines from scripts but must use voices and expressive intonation appropriate to the characters and storyline. Extensive acting and body movements are not required and distracting special effects are undesirable.

It will be entirely appropriate for the team to modify or adapt the original timeline and manuscript from Deliverables 1-2.

Following the performance of the play, the group will be expected to lead the audience in a discussion of the questions about the educational implications of the issues represented in the performance.

You should consider the play a public performance. It may be recorded and posted to the course website, in which case the group will need to sign appropriate waivers. Unless circumstances warrant otherwise, the playwrights will hold the copyright for the manuscript.

Web Resources on Future Trends

General

About Education

Farther Out

Recommended Film on Future Trends

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: http://www.clockworkorange.com/

Anthony Burgess and Kubrick predict the future techniques for managing human behavior of hoodlums (released in 1971; predictions target mid 1990's; still relevant to today's education futurists)

This assignment counts for 25% of your course grade.