What does the future bring us? Five scenarios on teachers' collaboration networks in 2025
November 22, 2011 6:14 AM
Five scenarios that take place in 2025 have been developed to better understand what are the needs of collaboration networks in the future for teachers continuous professional development.
Collaboration networks, like learning networks, are technology supported communities through which participants share knowledge with each other and jointly develop new knowledge. In this way, learning networks enrich the experience of formal learning (e.g. school, university), but more importantly, form a viable setting for professional development and lifelong learning. An example of a learning network for professional development are communities like eTwinning where teachers can share and learn from one another.
Context of work
Five futuristic scenarios have been developed by the Tellent partner organisation the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS). Although we cannot be certain of how the future will look like, the use of fictional future scenarios will provide some ideas of how the future of teacher collaboration networks in 2025 could look like. The departure point of these scenarios is the development and expansion of eTwinning (www.etwinning.net), a community of schools in Europe with close to 150.000 participants
About scenrios
These short scenarios are based on various issues and dimensions identified during an expert workshop on the future of teacher collaboration networks which took place in June 2011 at IPTS and on research carried out by the same institute on the future of learning (http://is.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pages/EAP/ForCiel.html).
Validation of scenarios
The Tellnet project has conducted two rounds of validation workshops on the scenarios. The feedback will be incorporated in the next version and the final scenarios are expected to be out in Spring 2012. First workshop took place with the conference Twinning: leading 21st centry schools where school heads of all over Europe participated. The second workshop took place in conjunction with European Schoolnet's Policy Innovation Committee, where close to 30 education authorities from Europe participated.
The scenarios can be downloaded here. We invite you to take a look at them and discuss them with your colleagues. We are interested in your feedback, please sent it directly to the project manager riina . vuorikari @ eun . org.
