Knowledge and Technology Challenging the Future

Abstract

This chapter draws upon the views and opinions of international postgraduate students studying a module about educational technology as part of a full-time Masters' program in the UK. These students are all teachers working in various parts of the Middle East and Africa, and many are senior leaders in their own schools. The narrative of the chapter describes how these postgraduate students used the process of future scenario thinking to explore the phenomena of 'Big Data' and data analytics, which they identified as a significant technology driver for their own institutions and contexts. The first part of the chapter sets the context for these scenarios, expanding upon the technology discussion covered in Chap. 4. We outline the processes through which these students explored and created their own scenarios around the topic of Big Data Learning Analytics and provide the actual scenarios they devised, before considering the implications of these scenarios, and the process itself, for teacher education.