Beekeepers, Space Stations, and the (Possible) Future of Higher Ed

Sophie White: Hi everyone. On this episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk, we get a little bit futuristic. There are some elements that I think you'll really like that have a bit of a sci-fi feel. We do talk about Star Trek a couple of times, but in this discussion, Jenay and I talked to Kathe Pelletier and Silvina Padilla about an event that all of them attended called the 100 Year EdTech Project Design Summit. So at this event, they looked at the last fifty years of higher ed as well as some foresight methodology that thought about higher ed fifty years into the future and where humans and technology may go in the next fifty years. So it was a really fascinating conversation about how as humans, we really need to retain our agency to guide technology into the future, especially as it relates to AI, how these key human elements of community and belonging, as well as human connection are really essential threads to make sure that we end up with the future that we want to see.

And also the importance of human centered, especially communication skills as we think about how technology will evolve into the future. So I really hope that you take time to listen and think about how as higher education practitioners we can craft the future that we want to see in higher education and the world.

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Sophie White: Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I'm a content marketing and program manager here at EDUCAUSE, and I'm one of your hosts for today's discussion.

Jenay Robert: And I'm Jenay Robert. I'm a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE, and I will be your co-host.

Sophie White: Great. We're really excited today to have two guests with us to discuss the future of higher ed, how it relates to technology, and some planning structures that you all can use as you look to the far future of our work and our work in higher ed. So I'll introduce our guests first and then we'll jump into it. First, we have Dr. Kathe Pelletier. Kathe has spent the last twenty-five years in higher education innovation of some form or another, and her entry point into higher ed was in an adult serving institution that was fully online. Most of her work since then has been oriented around combining evidence-based practice with innovative delivery models and the strategic application of technology and data. She has held roles in many different areas, including advising, curriculum, and instructional design, competency-based education, and academic support. Kathe's currently the senior director of community programs at EDUCAUSE.

Thanks for being here, Kathe.

Kathe Pelletier: So fun to join this podcast.

Sophie White: And next up we have Silvina Padilla. Silvina is a senior film and media studies student at the University of Texas at San Antonio. As a four-year Adobe student ambassador, she actively provokes innovation and technological advancement across campus, encouraging creative and forward-thinking approaches within her academic community. Thanks for being with us, Silvina.

Silvina Padilla: Hi. Amazing that you guys brought me here.

Sophie White: We're excited to have you. Great. So I'll just give a little bit of an overview of what we're talking about today and then we'll jump into it. All of our guests, as well as Jenay, my co-host, have been really interested in the future of higher ed and technology. And they recently attended an event called the 100-year EdTech Project Design Summit to look at the distant future of higher ed and consider potential scenarios for what it could look like. So at that event, they looked at seven design principles and created scenarios around them as it relates to potential futures. We'll talk a little bit about the process for that, but I'll just share what those seven design principles that they were working from are. So the first principle is learners must be at the center. Number two is universal access is a foregone conclusion. Number three, technology must be an enabler of principled innovation.

Four, the past is a bridge to the future. Five, we must make complex topics easier for all to engage in. Six, place matters. And seven, the future of education is multi-generational and multicultural. So with that, I'm curious to hear, can you all give us just a little bit more overview of what this event was like for you and kind of dive into the impact of those principles or the meaning of them?

Kathe Pelletier: Well, this is the first year that Jenay and I ... Well, it's the second year that Jenay and I attended, but the first year that we also got to submit our own scenario that the groups worked on thinking about what actions we might need to take in order to either get to that future or maybe stop it from happening. And so being kind of coming in with that story in mind was really powerful in thinking about a specific ... We already kind of had this specific future in mind, but just in general, I think the energy at the event and thinking about something fifty years in the future, it's really hard to get your head around that. And so the whole time, I think there was just this stretching of minds as we practiced using that muscle of really looking that far into the future.

And so it was really uncomfortable at times, but the dialogue with other participants and ideas that we kind of shared together, I think really helped to bring us into this shared story together as a way to think about it. So story was really important, I think, is where I'm getting.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. I think going in with ... And I don't know if we said this clearly. It's funny because sometimes you attend a conference like this or an event and it makes perfect sense in your brain and then you start talking about it and you realize you've jumped around.

Kathe Pelletier: Or Kathe jumps around.

Jenay Robert: No, no, no, no, no. I just can't remember if we said that essentially what happened first was members of the higher ed community, the higher ed technology community submitted these various scenarios. Like Kathe said, we got to submit one, but there were others. I think there were eight total, if I'm not mistaken.

Kathe Pelletier: Twelve, maybe.

Jenay Robert: Okay. And there's a playlist of these little videos that describe each scenario, so we could link that in the show notes. And so we were able to really focus on one of those scenarios, the one that we wrote. And we wrote that scenario out of the Horizon report scenarios. So Kathe and I went back and looked at the most recent couple of Horizon reports that we published here at EDUCAUSE and we thought, okay, so if these are the things that our community is telling us could happen within ten years, what would that look like fifty years from now? And so that's the other piece. I don't know if anyone said about the time horizon. So it's called the 100-year EdTech project. And the reason it's 100 years is because we look back fifty and also look forward fifty. So we're looking at a full span of 100 years.

I thought when I first started getting involved that it meant 100 years in the future, but that is not the case. Yeah. So I just, yes, plus one to all that and the fact that using story to really understand what the future could look like. We're in such uncertain times and everything always feels so overwhelming. And so to wrap your head around possibilities of where we could go and then more importantly, where we want to go, the story element is really important to me.

Sophie White: Thank you for that context. I was having a hard time describing it based on our conversation earlier. So that is really helpful. Which of the scenarios did you all submit and what were you working on during this event?

Jenay Robert: Do you want to talk about that, Kathe?

Kathe Pelletier: You can start.

Sophie White: If you want.

Jenay Robert: I'll set us up. So the title of our scenario was When Everyone Survives, but Only Some Thrive. And we were not aiming to create either a dystopian or utopian future scenario, although I think maybe it did lean dystopian a bit. We were trying to be a little bit more balanced, but in the future that we talked about, people were kind of divided in terms of the access they had to technology, the amount that they wanted to interact with technology, even to the point where some people in this scenario lived on earth and some people lived in space stations. And so some people were extremely immersed in technology, whereas others were, we call them our beekeepers, the people who stayed on earth. And so you could imagine all the really interesting nuance around, well, who gets the privilege of choosing?

What if you really want to be immersed in technology or what if you don't want any technology? Does that limit access to certain things depending on the way that you make those decisions? Does it limit access to other people who make different decisions? And so I guess what's interesting about this approach is that similar to what we do in the Horizon Report, you really take that broad view of what the world looks like and then drill down into what does education look like in that environment. And I think that's a huge element of what we see right now in the way that education is higher ed is being so heavily impacted by world events, society, politics, economy, environment, that really having that bigger view is important in thinking about how we want to operate in the world in the future.

Kathe Pelletier: So I'd love to hear your perception of the scenario. Jenay and I are so close to it because we imagined it together. What was your first reaction or why did you choose that scenario as one that you wanted to participate in?

Silvina Padilla: Yeah. Well, going into the conference, I was kind of just thrown into it. It was hosted in my university. It was a free pass. I was like, "Okay, let me have a good time. Let me learn about what people are thinking." You know what I mean? I kind of just stayed, I think it was either Jenay or someone, I don't know. They kind of just looked at me and they were like, "You come to the table." So I finally went to the table. I was kind of just thrown into it. But after a day and after learning about what the scenario was, learning about what people were actually thinking, I kind of had the motivation to just speak out my perspective because everyone was of higher age than me and I just brought a new perspective and I was telling them, "No, I don't think you understand what young people are thinking." And I was gracefully accepted into the group, but the scenario, the more we dug into it on day two, the more I was like, "Oh my God, this is possible.

This is terrifying." Because right now things are not going good in our society, in my opinion, but there's hope. There's a glimmer of hope. But that scenario really, I guess, put it all into perspective that this is possible. And we had several talks, "Well, how are we going to prevent it? " Because most of our talks were, "How are we going to get to this future just to design the fifty years or the one hundred years?" But most of the time we were like, "Guys, we have to prevent it. We can't keep forecasting what is going to happen and what we think is going to happen to the scenario." Overall, it was a very informative scenario. It was a very predictable scenario. I got scared for a second, but we ultimately managed to just get our message across that education is valuable, there is hope, and the things that we have to do to prevent this scenario is the things that we have to start doing it now. We can't wait.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. There was definitely a sense of urgency that I was feeling, not just with our scenario, but in just thinking you feel like fifty years is a long time and we can kind of just let things slide for a while or check out because it's hard right now. But the more that we talked about what are the levers that would either make this scenario happen for sure or maybe prevent it or soften some of the impacts, the more I realized that we really have to act today and that the structures that we established today might make or break, whether we go in this direction or a different direction. And that was ... With the foresight practice that we do at EDUCAUSE, we only look ten years out at the most. And I feel that urgency a little bit, but more it just feels natural like, of course you need to plan now for ten years.

But it was interesting to also feel that urgency around this fifty-year time horizon where what we do today really can make an impact on our future, even long-term.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. And so it might help to kind of talk a little bit about what some of those themes are that we were trying to aim towards or away from. So to be a little more specific about the scenario that we were working on, one of the outcomes was a very divided society. So some people being fully immersed, like I said before in technology, some being completely against using technology. There was also another theme around a balance of power. So thinking about how does society get to this point that is in that much of an extreme? So the idea is that some people would have enough power to influence that division or encourage that division. And maybe an interesting element of that discussion was that it might not be for nefarious reasons. I think oftentimes we think about societies becoming divided for bad reasons that we have negative impacts on us.

But sometimes, and what we explored in this scenario was the idea that in order to save people and help people, and one of the positive aspects of this scenario was that as a society, maybe fifty years from now, we have figured out how to end global wars and hunger, and there's almost no crime anymore. It's kind of that Star Trek future. All your basic needs are met, but in order to get there, maybe society slowly gave up power so that there was this real concentration of wealth and power and control, particularly through technology. And that's something that I think in the moments when we as a group were saying, "That felt scary." It's because we are seeing the early stages of that happening right now. And so you get that sense of urgency, like Kathe and Sil were saying. So for me, yeah, I think it's very powerful when you're able to think that far ahead, you can say, "Well, right now, here are the things we can do to prevent these negative outcomes."

Sophie White: Do you have any examples, just trying to add specifics for anyone who wasn't in the room, what are some examples of actions that you brainstorm that we could take now that get us to maybe the more positive look at the world in 2076?

Jenay Robert: Do you guys have it pulled up? Because I do, if you want me to talk about it.

Kathe Pelletier: Go for it.

Jenay Robert: If anyone's not watching, the look on Sil's face was like, "I know we talked about things."

Silvina Padilla: The one that I remember most was not being, I guess, one-sided against AI, but using it as a tool. And that's one of the big things that we're probably going to get into in a little bit. But yeah, that's the one thing that I remember, which I'm currently, as I'm learning in my university, I'm currently trying to implement AI as much as I can in the good ways, not the bad ways, but I find it hard and we can talk about that later.

Jenay Robert: No, I think that's a really important one that we tried to boil it down. I mean, you can imagine you get a group of people passionate about education in a room and we had a lot of ideas, some not so good, some awful, but we kind of boiled it down at the end, I think, to three main things. And that one about, let's see, we phrased this, I have to give Kathe credit. I think she phrased it this way. I'm looking at our notes. Claim agency and the future of AI was a really important one because in the scenario that we discuss, the way things kind of seem to be going at this point is that most of us don't really have that much of a say in how AI technologies are developing, how AI is being integrated into the daily technology that we use, and then specifically in higher ed, how is AI proliferating across our campuses?

And anyone who knows me and has listened to this podcast before knows I am not an anti-AI person in any way, but that I do think it's incredibly important. And the group, I think as a whole agreed with this, that we all think it's incredibly important that we are thoughtful and claim our power in these situations. So the worst thing we can do at this point is to say, we're concerned about all these potential negative impacts of AI. And so the way that we're going to combat that is to just not be involved in it at all. I'm not going to put my hands on it. And I personally think that's the worst thing you can do. I think that getting involved, increasing your own personal AI literacy, increasing AI literacy at your institution, and figuring out intentionally how do we want to use this technology or not use it in what different situations.

So that was a really important piece.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. And I will add another one that actually threaded through most of the other scenarios as well was to emphasize community and belonging. And as we've been kind of piecemeal describing our scenario, there were three different societies that essentially kind of splintered off and were completely separate and isolated from each other. We had the beekeepers that were off grid. They did not use technology at all. They really kind of went back to the basics to being kind of close to the earth and really valuing that. We had the folks in the space station that were, maybe all their basic needs were met, but everything was really bland. There was no crime, but there was also nothing really interesting that was going on. But they really prioritized that kind of getting needs met and reducing crime, but that has implications for it. And then the third society was living on earth, but they were very highly digitized.

So they essentially lived through virtual reality and maybe created beautiful things through digital art, but they were individually isolated from each other in a real flesh and blood kind of way because they were operating through completely digital means, excuse me. And there were themes of community there where within each of these splinter groups, there was kind of a sense of identity and a sense of value and a sense of who we are as a unit. But because these groups had splintered off, there was this ... We didn't know if they were even actually aware of each other. So did the beekeepers know that these digital creators actually existed or did they think that they were the only ones left? And so we were really thinking about, do we want to bring all of these groups together and how can we and how might we, and here's another place for agency, how might we ensure agencies so that you as an individual might elect which flavor of community you might want to live in or maybe even threading through, this is where the thriving comes in, where each community had some really basic kind of affordances of the choices that they had made over time, but they were missing that thriving factor, which sometimes comes with disruption or comes with a little bit of chaos or comes with overcoming challenges, et cetera.

And so that community and belonging thread was really important as we were thinking about what we can do now. And again, similar to Jenay's comments around claiming agency with AI, not just sitting back and checking out because the world is hard right now, but also really enabling that human connection. And we were reflecting on some of the events recently in Minneapolis where the community really has come together organically and without an individual leader necessarily, but people are just helping other people and that kind of caring and human connection, again, just felt really important for us to pay attention to and intentionally value and cultivate.

Sophie White: That's really helpful. So I'm thinking about how you framed it at the beginning as the division being a potential negative scenario that could happen. And I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. The community and belonging piece you're saying could kind of address that potential division in order to create community among these three types of communities, as well as potentially in between all of them.

Kathe Pelletier: Or maybe avoid the splintering of these groups entirely. So if we are intentionally creating community now and intentionally paying attention to belonging and pulling people into our communities, we as humanity may not find the need to go off and go somewhere else because we are not happy with things as they are. We don't feel like we belong in the kind of main community. So these are things that we need to do now. These are the calls to action that will mitigate this future that, again, we didn't really set out to create it as dystopian, but with that absence of thriving, it felt like, oh, there's something missing. This isn't necessarily a future that we would want, even though everyone has survived, but no one is thriving.

Jenay Robert: Right. It feels like a good-

Sophie White: Yeah. Wall-e dystopian future. Everyone has their needs met, but there's an absence of this thriving community, emotional, spiritual elements, all of those things that make us-

Kathe Pelletier: Exactly. And they literally can't walk on their own without being ... Yeah. Yeah.

Jenay Robert: Multiple people mentioned that movie in the course of a couple days.

Silvina Padilla: I want to add on real quick to the sense of urgency that Kathe was saying. The reason why I found it so predictable and scary was because we're already seeing that divide in technology and in trust within technology in our society. So the one thing that we're urging people or ourselves to start right now is because ... Sorry, society needs trust in technology or community to be able to lean on either or both. So for example, what's happening with AI in the data centers, those people who are being damaged, their homes by those data centers, they're not going to trust AI. And that is a big, big part of why people just don't want to use AI, and which is rightfully so, because why would you? So that already starts the divide versus someone having their home security all powered by AI and technology, and then literally giving them their life for them to protect their home.

So protecting home or damaging home, AI can do both of those. It's a power dynamic. And because we're seeing so much distrust and trust in one technology, we can already see that divide. So you can already predict that in the next five years, if we don't stop it right away, things are just going to continue as they go. And then Kathe and Jenay's prediction becomes more and more and more the result. And that's why I just wanted to stop and be like, this is how society is starting and that's why we though about it. I'm not in their brains, but that's how I interpreted it.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. We definitely have the signals today that these schisms are starting to happen.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. And I do want to reiterate that the process of creating scenarios, and anyone who's done this for strategic planning purposes could probably identify with this, that you're not necessarily predicting what will happen. Nobody has that power. And look, I'm a researcher, I'm about real data. I'm not about trying to ... What do they say that the quickest way to lose trust or something is to try to actually predict the future. I mean, you'll make enemies faster, but-

Sophie White: You have no crystal ball.

Jenay Robert: Yeah, there's no crystal ball. But I think the power of this process is to use data about the present day to think about many different potential futures and potential outcomes of what's happening today. So the fact that it feels so realistic and like it could happen, that means we did a decent job of looking at current day data and yet we're not trying to claim that this is the future or that this is even a very, very probable future. We're just saying this is one way things could go. And so it gives you the power to kind of stretch your imagination and think, how do I actually want things to go? And then how do I change my behavior today to make things go in the way that I want them to instead of these many other potential outcomes?

Sophie White: Yeah. Yeah, that's really helpful. It makes me think, I really love the historian, Heather Cox Richardson and a lot of work that she does, but I was listening to a podcast with her recently where she was basically talking about how we can look at history and you can replace that with data as a way to consider indicators and signals and patterns, but the future is unwritten and we don't know what it will look like at this point. So all we're doing is really considering all of these levers that we could pull or not to consider what the future could potentially look like.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. I have one more ... We've mentioned too, and there's three of these calls to action. So I don't want the third one to be left behind if we have a little bit of time for that. So the third one was to prepare for skills as currency. And this got a little bit into the science fiction-y realm, but you could think of currency as literal currency if the economic system collapses and how are we actually exchanging goods and services, but maybe less science fiction-y would be just the emphasis on skills and really anchoring how we think about preparing ourselves for the future as students of any age, whether it's the traditional age college student or someone who might be older and returning to education to upskill or reskill, but really making sure that we are thinking about what people know and can do and how that's applied in the real world was a big thread that we thought would help to perhaps either bring folks together, but also maybe add to the belonging and community aspect if we're all thinking about what skills we each bring to the table and how that collectively creates a healthy, productive society.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. It was one of the points of tension I would say in our group

Kathe Pelletier: It was.

Jenay Robert: That element in trying to think about what is the role of humanity versus technology or with technology or what does that relationship look like? What about our skills? And even before this AI explosion, in higher ed, this conversation around the value of teaching people discreet and specific skills, even that can be sometimes a point of tension outside of the realm of this technology overlord situation that we're talking about because there's still value in, at least in my opinion, there's still value in that liberal arts education. There's still value in writing poetry. But that to me is a skill.

Kathe Pelletier: Those are skills, yeah.

Jenay Robert: Great thinking. That is a skill. I think sometimes we turn against each other in some of these semantic issues when it comes to the skills conversation. So I just wanted to call that out that if you're sitting there listening to this and you're thinking like, oh, skills is a currency.

Yes, that's a heavy phrase and it is something that should be discussed.

Kathe Pelletier: Yeah. Thanks for adding that nuance, Jenay.

Jenay Robert: Yeah.

Sophie White: Yeah. I was curious thinking about this big picture, the world, space stations, beekeepers, how do we look at our role as higher education practitioners here in terms of pulling these levers to hopefully work towards a better scenario for humanity? So what do you think the role of higher ed is? And then Sil, I'd be curious to hear, what does this bring up for you as a student when you're thinking you're in your senior year, I'm going out into the world in some capacity after graduation. What do you think about this whole conversation of the skills that you're building in terms of adding to the world, supporting humanity in this age of technology? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Silvina Padilla: I can definitely say that higher ed right now. Well, it was very pushed to me in my childhood in high school, so I really do value it. And I'm trying to learn as much as I can. Right now I'm in film and media, but it's not just, oh, I want to be a director or producer. It's about learning the sound, editing, posts, pre-, grip, learning all these positions and then sticking to a niche when I graduate. As of right now, from my freshman year to my senior year, my skills have completely changed because of how fast AI and just technology as a whole has advanced, evolved. I don't know how else to say it because I remember in freshman year, it was pen and paper, no AI, no ChatGPT, no Claude, no nothing. So it was pen and paper, me trying to research YouTube university, like what is this equation?

But then now it is so easy to the point where I ask my friends, "Hey, they can't even calculate how much rent they're going to pay maybe next month without using AI." And it's kind of embarrassing. But it's just so different on how my basic skills or my basic critical thinking skills now in math are kind of useless. I see my friends, I was studying computer science around two years ago, switched to film and media, but now my computer science friends can't find jobs because their skills are useless. Right now, in combination with the layoffs, not having money anywhere, the war, just things that are going on in society. And then you have AI just replacing people and coding an app is not unprecedentable. It was five years ago, now it's not. And so higher education needs to change now if it wants to keep up with current times because as of what I'm seeing, it stayed the same within five years, but our world drastically changed to where my communication skills are doing more good than they are than my math skills, which is kind of weird because I never thought that my public speaking or my communication skills or even just my management skills would have more of an impact than studying the triangle

Just to make it more of a summary. But yeah, it's weird to say the least.

Kathe Pelletier: One of the things too that we haven't really touched on in terms of how we process through this scenario to get to these calls to action was to really differentiate between the good that AI might do. So AI might solve problems like world hunger or it might create opportunities that we haven't yet imagined. But again, getting back to the skills as currency piece, I think higher education is in a really, really powerful position to identify what really is human, what makes us human, and what are the things that only humans can do that AI can't? And how can we feed our resources into developing our students and our minds around those things like Sil was talking about in terms of communication or judgment, management, creativity like Jenay was talking about, and really focusing on those types of skills, which kind of brings us full circle to potentially a liberal arts type of education where we're focused on the whole person and those kind of integrative skills that maybe transcend technology or can work with technology, but with the human at the center.

So that felt like an important theme that we thought that was important for us to think about as higher education professionals.

Jenay Robert: Yeah. And that combines with this intentionality around what role emerging technologies. And it's not just AI.

There's other technologies we need to think about and that the scenario in fact did feature like virtual reality and other things. So we talked about this intentionality around what role the technology plays in our lives and what role we play in creating, shaping, evolving the technology, leveraging the technology as a tool. And one of the things that I said off the cuff, I think when we were in our group at the event, but I've said it since then, because I feel like, oh, that was a thing. Once in a while you say something, you feel like it hits. So we were talking about how our technology is evolving to the point where it really could fully automate a lot of our lives, like what you're eating, what your entertainment is, if you're watching TV, if the temperature of your house could be completely automated, there's so many things that could be just fully automated.

And then thinking fifty years into the future, it was like, yeah, that could be an extreme version of automation, which was our Space Station residence where everything was very automated. And knowing that this is a potential future, when we ask what is the role we want to play in this, I kind of think about how, okay, is this the second time I'm mentioning Star Trek? This is a problem. I'm starting to become more of a nerd than I want to be. But if you think about Star Trek ships could be fully automated and yet on the shows and the movies, we still always have captains of our ship, human or not always human even, but sentient.

Kathe Pelletier: Living.

Jenay Robert: Say it. Yeah. Captains of our ships. And okay, I mean, yes, it's science fiction, but humans wrote that science fiction. So what is the human core of that?

And I think it comes down to us really valuing that humans are using the tools and the tools aren't using humans. And we can make that choice as we move forward. But as Sil said, we have to do it right now. It has to be in the earliest stages that we're always reinforcing the intentionality around, this is what I want the relationship between humanity and technology to be.

Silvina Padilla: Yeah. I also wanted to quickly just take a note of what makes us human is our emotion and our unpredictability. There is a reason why engineers take so much time out of their day, or student engineers and nothing, take so much time out of the day just to prepare for interviews because landing a job or getting to work with a company or just getting to work somewhere where they want to and share their skills isn't just about knowing the skills, it's about understanding emotion through the interviewer. You know what I mean? And that's like an underrated skill that STEM students have just not leaned into. And so predicting out of the top of my head right now, I feel like higher education is going to focus with more liberal arts or more psychology, maybe sociology on how to just be better emotionally wise, how to read a room per se, or how to read someone's perspective through body language, because I feel like we're missing that in combination with COVID and then all our youth not really understanding that being so distanced, they've been through emotion through a screen instead of person to person communication.

So that's like a really big thing that you mentioned.

Sophie White: Yeah. This is a fascinating conversation. I'm just thinking of what an interesting time that not too long ago there was an emphasis on only these STEM careers and having the tech companies were encouraging, let's get as many computer science majors out of institutions as possible. And now Sil based on your story, you switched from computer science to majoring in film and you're saying that your communication skills have been more helpful. So it's really interesting how cyclical these things are. And I love the focus on how we can look at our own agency and how we opt to use technology. I'm trying to think where else I was going with this. I think I'm getting excited as a liberal arts major to see this discussion of the foundations of human connection and emotion as something really important that we can be investing in at our institutions.

I think we only have a couple minutes left, so I want to make sure that we are able to wrap up with any closing thoughts that you all have. So for someone who didn't attend this event, who maybe won't be able to in the future, what are some things that you think we should all be focusing on as we look at creating the future that we want in relation to our relationship with technology and making sure that we're still holding onto these elements of our humanity that are so core to who we are in these communities that we need in order to build a stronger future?

Kathe Pelletier: One thing that for me was a really great accessible process to get your head in the foresight mode was something called the story spine. And it is basically you start out with a kind of wacky scenario and it was maybe like three sentences, four sentences long, a brief paragraph that you could use AI to create the some wacky, like almost fairytale kind of magical scenario. And then you can do it in a group or you can do it individually, but it's essentially asking you to say, if this is true, then this happened, then the next thing happened, then the next thing happened, which led to this implication, which led to this. And you can wrap that as many times as you want. Sometimes you throw in a twist where you go back and say, "Actually, this didn't happen. It happened in a different way, and that can send you in a different direction." But that kind of step by step of if this, then this, then this, then this really kind of helps your brain get in the game of thinking long term instead of just magically trying to get to fifty years in the future.

And the story spine isn't intended to get you fifty years in the future, but it's just a practice to kind of warm up those muscles in your brain. Plus it's fun. And you get to, again, the story component, you get to kind of make up a story as you go.

Jenay Robert: I'll just say about the story spine, a shout out to Ruben Puentes, he's the storyteller who walked us through that. So we could probably figure out if we need to ... He probably has a website or something we could link in the show notes that he led us through those exercises. You can also just Google the story spine and you'll see the steps. It's actually a really well known format for constructing story. And fun fact, I have the steps on a little card right here that I've had on my desk ever since the event, which at this point was a couple of months ago, because I use it to just write little one paragraph stories every few days or something. I just decide to use it to be creative.

Kathe Pelletier: And I think it actually came from the improv world first and Ruben has adopted it for foresight, but it's the kind of 'yes and' energy that's really generative.

Sophie White: Yeah. Yeah. Jenay, I'm curious if you have any other takeaways. I was just going to say that we've heard several folks on this podcast saying when you're looking at this big thing in the future, big project, big goal, just starting small with small wins, small steps to get you moving in the right direction is so impactful. So I love that as it relates to stories. I've seen that used for journal prompts too, just to get our creative hats moving. So I think that's good practice for all of us. AI can't necessarily journal for us or create stories out of our own mind, so it can be a really helpful way to practice those muscles too. What else do you want to leave us from this conversation?

Jenay Robert: Yeah. I think the impact for me as usual when I do anything foresight related, so our horizon research does the same, gives me the same excitement and energy, is really feeling that sense of agency over the future. So often we feel, and I think because especially right now, things are quite turbulent from a day-to-day basis, but Amy Webb, who's a pretty well-known futurist in the technology world, talks about how in the short term, if you're tracking events as they unfold, things feel like they're up and down and up and down. And she kind of draws out this line that's up, down, up, down. And she said, "But if you take the much longer view, so look at fifty, one hundred years, that up and down and up and down, it actually sort of evens into some sort of a curve and you can start to see whether things are progressing or maybe the opposite.

But when we're talking about the evolution of our society in particular, she'll say that these things kind of even out into an overall upwards progression, even if we're in down slopes at times. And this is not to make any of the serious things happening right now sound less serious or less difficult or less awful. There's certainly many things that we deserve our immediate attention, but also when you have to find that energy to get up every day and do the work and move things along, for me, remembering that the longer view of time, we're one more link in that chain of progress and just helps me kind of keep going. And that speaks to what you were saying about the small things. We'll let Sil end.

Silvina Padilla: I also, I just had a little message for anyone that's listening. Even though times are tough and it looks like higher education might be on the decline, I say that with a grain of salt because right now when I was little, college was always like, okay, you're going to go to college and then you're going to get a job. So I have to go to college to get a job. And so that was always the pipeline, but now you can get a job without college. So therefore, I see a lot of young people questioning themselves, then what is college for? And college and other higher education, it's not just for getting a job, but it's for literal higher education. And I will say with full confidence that even though I might not have a full-time job yet because I'm a senior, I haven't graduated yet, but it's made me ultimately a better person to appreciate life, appreciate the earth, appreciate my friends, appreciate my family, appreciate technology.

But just a message for anyone that's listening that is young, don't let someone tell you that higher education is useless. I've already seen ... I'm 23 and I've seen the effects of someone who has and someone who has not. So you're definitely going to either regret it or you're going to wish, but yeah, it's just to have a higher mindset of what younger me or younger you is going to have. And then if you're just going to college to have the college experience, have fun. That's it.

Kathe Pelletier: Love it.

Sophie White: Beautiful. Thanks for that. Well, thank you all so much. This was really fascinating and I have a lot to think about related to our own agency and hopefully shaping our future. So thank you for bringing these insightful questions and observations, and it was great chatting with you all.