John Mahaffie

Four metaphors for the classroom of the future

February 18, 2025May 30, 2017 by John B. Mahaffie

Stepping into a 2017 classroom, a school teacher from 1917 or even 1817 would recognize where she was. Formal education long ago settled into Flatland. We put students in rectangular rooms, seated in arrangements of chairs and desks. They use books, papers, chalk and whiteboards, and tablets or computers. They follow fixed, planned curricula.

In fact, the language we use keeps us in Flatland. Our words — school, classroom, teacher, grade, class — connote that enduring Flatland system.

It’s time to finally break loose from Flatland. Here are four metaphors for the future learning place that can open up thinking:

A black box theater — A place where learners and their helpers can arrange and rearrange their learning spaces with total flexibility.

A forest — Learning in and from nature, anywhere and everywhere. Learn about the world in the world.

A maker space — The learning place has tools, materials, and room for learners to experiment, create, and collaborate.

A diner — A place to be with friends and encouonter strangers and to learn together.

There are lots of other metaphors that can help change how we think about education. What are your ideas? Please share them in the comment section, below.

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For more on the future of education, see: Education futures.

Images: all Creative Commons Attribution License. Black Box Theater, Beso17, Wikimedia Commons; Finland forest, Tiia Monto, Wikimedia Commons; Maker space. Makerspace der SLUB, Germany, 2014, Albert Steinmetz; Al Mac’s Diner, Fall River Mass, 2012. Source: “Al Mac’s Diner-Restaurant Fall River MA 2012” by Kenneth C. Zirkel.

The future of education: How for-profit business will reshape education

February 18, 2025September 23, 2014 by John B. Mahaffie

The Future of Education: How For-Profit Businesses Will Reshape Education is the fourth piece I've done for the World Innovation Summit for Education's online news and idea site: WISE.Ed.Review. My focus for them is on clear future views of what's possible and desirable in education in our future.

Previous pieces:

Future of Education: Nine Skills That Will Help Make Our Children Future-Ready

Exploring the Future for Education: Three Scenarios for 2025

MOOCs, Mobile, and the Future of Higher Education

Exploring the Future for Education: Three Scenarios for 2025

February 18, 2025July 8, 2014 by John B. Mahaffie

Exploring the Future for Education: Three Scenarios for 2025 is the second piece I've done for the World Innovation Summit for Education's online news and idea site, WISE Ed.Review. My focus for them is on clear future views of what's possible and desirable in education in our future.

More to come!

MOOCs, Mobile and the Future of Higher Education

February 18, 2025June 27, 2014 by John B. Mahaffie

Here is a piece I wrote for the World Innovation Summit for Education:

MOOCs, Mobile and the Future of Higher Education

I expect to write a series of pieces at WISE's online publication WISE.ed.review in the coming months. Stayed tuned there for great insights on education from me and others!

So you want to be a futurist

February 18, 2025November 10, 2009 by John B. Mahaffie

Gazing in a crystal ball Now and then I hear from people who want to be futurists. They get what I see as "the call" and there's no dissuading most of them who have discovered the field and what (they assume) it has to offer. It's not an easy profession to enter, but there are some ways to find out more, get training, and perhaps get started. These thoughts are necessarily U.S. focused–that's all I am qualified to talk about!

How do you get to be a futurist?

Futurists are sometimes people with a degree in futures studies, sometimes people who have gone to work for a futurist/futures organization and learned the business, and most often people who have decided they love exploring the future and have learned about the tools and techniques of foresight, and announced that they are futurists. I have to assert that there's nothing wrong with the non-degree approach–I got to futures that way myself, having on-the-job training, but no degree in the field.

A lot of people, however, become futurists not only without studying futures studies in a program, but also without working for a futures organization. They "become" futurists in whateever part of their professional or personal life they begin to focus on change, envisioning future possibilities, and deeper strategic thinking.

Go be a futurist, versus be a futurist where you are

A lot of people I talk to about being a futurist are sick of their job/their profession, and would like to go do something cool. Being a futurist is definitely cool! But for most people, it's valuable to recognize the expertise you already have. You can leverage your professional skills and contacts to give yourself a firm base on which to build a futures career. So you might want to consider being a futurist in the field you are already in.

Some first steps

Your best way to explore the futurist profession further is to meet some professional futurists and get their advice. Some ready ways to do that are:

call them on the phone for a chat–most are generous with their time and will gladly talk with you
go to a professional futurists event–the Association of Professional Futurists Spring meetings are a great place to meet and get to know futurist professionals, and the World Futures Society conferences (normally in late July, rotating among different cities in North America) offer a mix of people interested in the future and those working as foresight professionals
Join the Foresight Network, an online community of futurists and people interested in the future
Find the futurists at Poptech, TED, SXSW, and other events that draw forward thinking people

Then, you may consider taking a course and seeing how your skills fit, whether you like the kind of work futures involves, and so on. There are online offerings from several futures studies programs.

Resources for futures degree programs

I am best informed about the U.S.-based programs in futures studies, including graduate programs at:

Each offers a first class program in futures. I know the key faculty at all three.

There are also foresight events and educational programs around the world, including those connected with:

The Australian Futures Foundation [www.futuresfoundation.org.au]
The University of Stellenbosch, South Africa [http://www.ifr.sun.ac.za/]
Swinburne University in Australia [www.swinburne.edu.au/index.php]
Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University, Taiwan.

The Acceleration Studies Foundation offers information and links to the main futures/foresight graduate programs around the world

The Association of Professional Futurists' What is a Futurist? is also a resource for people interested in the profession.

World Future Society courses

The World Future Society annual conferences offer introductory courses that are inexpensive, and taught by leading practitioners in the field. They are a good way to learn a little more about the work of a futurist without committing to a degree program. The WFS meetings are a smorgasbord of futures sessions, and you may find good ideas there, good conversations, and people to talk to about the work of the futurist. WFS courses. See the World Future Society annual conference courses at www.wfs.org under "Interact".

If you really decide to make a go of this, great. And let me know how it goes, and how I can help further.

Image: seanmcgrath, via Flickr, cc license

Foresight illustrated: Making change — Beyond the low-hanging fruit

February 18, 2025June 13, 2009 by John B. Mahaffie

For exploring and explaining sustainability, I developed the diagram at the right. It is a forecast. It focuses on change over time, showing rising degrees of transformation starting in the 1990s, and continuing to about 2025.

In the recent past and today, most green efforts involve things we can do easily, such as replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, selling more gas-electric hybrid cars, and buying carbon offsets for some of our impacts on the planet. Those steps are valid efforts to be greener, but they are Low-Hanging Fruit—that is, they can be done at only slight expense or inconvenience.

In some places, we can say we are Getting Serious, with initiatives to install alternative energy, increasing regulation, and more economic incentives. Cap and trade systems for emissions are a “getting serious” initiative. For some people, Getting Serious also includes changing their lifestyles and consciously trying to reduce their carbon footprints, for example, by eating more locally-produced foods. Voluntarily home-installed solar panels are another example.

A further stage we can anticipate is Big Systems. Mostly aspirational, that is when we will or could substantially replace carbon-based energy, require people to change their lifestyles, radically cap emissions, or force reductions through regulation, and so on.

You can argue with the years spanned by each period. You can also challenge the forecast: Will we really get serious, and ultimately make big systems change? But the years are approximate–I only mean for them to help people think about the changes we are seeing and can expect to see over the next 15 or 20 years. The chart has proven useful to our clients, and I thought it worth sharing here, as well.

You can also look at this chart a different way. Considering only the vertical axis, it differentiates our degrees of willingness to change. Then, the bottom is easiest, the top, hard to imagine. That is why most people expect that the big systems change will happen gradually over the next generation. That is a reasonable expectation, but our situation with energy and other systems may force Big Systems change sooner than we want, and sooner than this chart suggests.

I’ve already found this basic breakdown, Low-Hanging Fruit, Getting Serious, and Big Systems, to be useful in looking at other kinds of change, too. Examples include primary education, where teachers have begun to introduce some experiential moments in their classrooms—e.g. showing video clips, role-playing, but our classrooms are still typically four walls, one adult, and kids in chairs. Big systems change might mean immersive learning using virtual reality, or sending older students out to teach themselves using a city as their classroom.

Another example is corporate change. Companies routinely innovate on the margins, e.g. by introducing a new product at relatively low risk, before truly getting serious and challenging their broader strategies. Low-hanging fruit means brand extensions, or adding related and complementary products, for example. Big systems change means entering a new market, radically changing the mission and product mix of the company, and so on.

If you know you want to get beyond Low-Hanging Fruit, and want or expect to have to make Big Systems change, you need to begin the process of comprehensive change now. In that sense the bars on my chart are deceptive. You can’t wait until 2012 to launch big systems change for sustainability. The work, the discussion, the plans, the research have to start now.