EdFutures

Hey random people who may or may not still read my blog! I’m going to be posting about an open course I’m participating with called Education Futures. It is looking at how/why/whether we should be looking towards the future and planning for them.

To explain why I’m interested in this course, I think that it is necessary to describe myself. I’m an academic librarian (tenure track and all – which, let me tell you, is NOT designed for someone who works 40 hours a week), and I’m planning on a LONG career in academia. Why is long capitalized? Well, I’m in my early/mid-20s, so hopefully I will continue to be working in an academic environment when some of these future situations actually come to be.

Studying, preparing for, and imagining the future is so important in higher education, which is what I have experience with. We get students when they are young enough to be the canaries of society (meaning we see the changes in environment through them first), but old enough to confident that they know exactly what they want and that whatever we are offering them isn’t what they need. In many ways we are constantly reacting to changing students and constantly trying to catch up to them. I’m hoping that this course, and hearing everyone else’s opinions, will give me a chance to feel a little more prepared so that even if I’m 2 steps behind the newest crop of freshmen, I will have previously prepared a list of potential scenarios and ways to react to them so I won’t just be blindly careening from one potential solution to the next.