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Welcome foresight educators, researchers, students, alums, and advocates!

This wiki is part of the
Foresight Education and Research Network (FERN), a work and discussion community for foresight/futurres students, faculty, alums, and others working to improve and expand postsecondary foresight courses globally. Interested? Click the link above.

FERN is affiliated with Shaping Tomorrow's Foresight Network (STFN). Both FERN and Global Foresight (a community-edited directory of foresight networks, people, orgs, and resources) are projects of the ASF nonprofit.

Feel free to edit pages, make new pages, leave comments and have discussions in the threads section at the bottom of any page in this wiki. Your ideas will be read and incorporated.

At present we are working on the following projects (see Navigation to the left for project pages):

1. Growing the
Foresight Education and Research Network (FERN), into a leading community for foresight/futures students, faculty, alums, and others to advance futures education and research.
2. Helping Peter Bishop's Foresight Education Project, a wiki-based initiative to collect open access curricula of foresight eduators, and share foresight education
3. Finding all known Foresight / Futures Studies Educators globally, listing them on the Global Foresight directory, and inviting them to join the FERN social network, FEP, and other foresight educator projects and communities.
4. Compiling lists of Foresight / Futures Studies Frameworks (the models and practices used by those who do foresight work).
5. Finding and supporting all available Low-Residency Strategic Foresight / Futures Studies PhD options, both formal and informal, and:
6. Investigating online platforms for creating an Open Access Futures Journal for foresight/futures pubs, and educating futurists publishing in the current leading foresight / futures journals (most are closed access) how to do OA publication (self-archiving) for the global community.


What You Can Do - Next Steps
  • Invite academic and professional futurists that you know who are interested in foresight education development to join our social network.
  • As any of us get info of use to our community, we encourage you to add it here, on one of the existing pages, on a new page (create your own) or in comments at the bottom of any page. We'll let you know by email if there are any upcoming conference calls for any who might be interested in working on projects on this wiki.

History

This wiki was initiated after a conversation in July 2007 between myself and Garry Golden. After completing my MS in Futures Studies at the U. Houston under Peter Bishop in 2007, I developed a residential undergraduate futures studies course for the University of Advancing Technology (UAT) in Phoenix, AZ. This course, Foresight Development (see our open access, CC-licensed course wiki), is part of UAT's core curriculum. Our nonprofit, ASF, pitched UAT on the idea that, as with Tamkang U in Taiwan, all their students should have to satisfy not only history and current events but at least one futures GE course in order to receive a modern undergraduate degree. After some deliberation they agreed and to date the course has been well received by students as a core offering.

ASF seeks to replicate this success at other institutions of higher education globally in coming years. We'd like to work with you to to do the same at your local universities. We are also convinced that having quality low-residency PhD credentialing options available to futurists who are interested in teaching FS courses in areas of professional interest, at top universities on a part-time basis is one practical way to improve foresight culture in the modern university. See Low-Residency Futures PhD in (left column) Navigation bar for more on presently known low-residency PhD options.

Thanks for joining this community, and I look forward to meeting you in the future.

John Smart,
President, Acceleration Studies Foundation



JohnMSmart
JohnMSmart
Latest page update: made by JohnMSmart , Aug 5 2009, 9:08 PM EDT (about this update About This Update JohnMSmart Edited by JohnMSmart

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abmoniz New PhD Program on Technology Assessment at UNL (Portugal) 0 Jul 1 2009, 5:01 PM EDT by abmoniz
Thread started: Jul 1 2009, 5:01 PM EDT  Watch
Was aproved and will be launched already in 2009-2010 by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal) a new PhD Program on "Technology Assessment". The courses and seminars will be done at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of this University. For further information http://iet.fct.unl.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=232&Itemid=271
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Keyword tags: TA; Foresight
JohnMSmart Futures Texts (JS for Simeon Spearman) 7 May 25 2009, 12:59 PM EDT by WilliamWeb
Thread started: Feb 7 2008, 6:03 PM EST  Watch
I may be getting ahead of myself, but I thought I would mention an idea that's been floating around in my head: perhaps we should look into the possibility of creating a futures studies textbook (or curriculum) that could be put under a Creative Commons license so that they could be disseminated, reused, and translated without concern over copyright issues. One candidate project to either become engaged with, or model such a project after, would be the Global Text Project (http://www.globaltext.org). They seem to be focused on business text books and creating some texts on scenario planning, strategic planning, or visionary leadership could help the futures community assist in the Global Text Project and also increase our visibility in developing countries (and get them exposed to futures concepts more quickly).

Another possibility is http://cxn.org, where educators can create education "modules" that can be pieced together to create an entire course. This could be a more granular way of getting futures thinking in front of educators by creating a "Futures of [insert academic subject here]" that could be promoted as a good final module for courses. It would also allow futurists to create "modules" that could later be pieced together for an entire course, instead of trying to create an entire course wholesale.

Basically I think that putting more futures content under Creative Commons licenses could make it easier for futures thinking to creep its way into education organically as the futures community organizes to play a greater role in academia/primary education.

Thoughts?

Simeon Spearman
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andersj Just identifying myself 2 Feb 3 2008, 5:39 PM EST by JohnMSmart
Thread started: Sep 24 2007, 6:33 PM EDT  Watch
Sorry, I forgot to introduce myself. The last comment - A great idea - was posted by me, Janna Anderson. I'm an assistant professor at Elon University in North Carolina, US, and I also do research on the future of the internet for the Pew Internet Project under a special contract.
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