Overview

Beyond Prediction explores how storytelling can serve as both a research method and a strategy for institutional foresight. Led by Dr. Angela Gunder (Opened Culture, University of Arizona) with co-authors Dr. Melissa Vito, Dr. Lev Gonick, Samantha Becker, Dr. Ruben Puentedura, and Dr. Melody Buckner, the project reimagines educational planning as a participatory act of narrative creation.

The 100 Year Ed Tech Project began with a community of educators and innovators meeting online to discuss what it means to plan for change in a rapidly evolving world. Those early conversations led to two in-person gatherings in 2024 and 2025. Each convened global participants for multi-day design sprints that used storytelling, speculative artifacts, and collaborative dialogue to prototype possible futures for education.

Rather than focusing on prediction or trends, the summits invited participants to backward-design the future — to imagine what a flourishing, equitable, and human-centered learning ecosystem might look like 100 years from now, and then identify the steps to move toward it today. After each event, the team synthesized the results into open scholarly publications that serve as blueprints for the future of learning.

The findings reveal that storytelling offers more than inspiration — it is a powerful method for collective strategy-building. When educators co-create stories about the future, they begin to see themselves as co-authors of change. Shared narratives become anchors for action, helping institutions align vision, culture, and design around what truly matters.

The presentation calls on participants to join this global effort: to use storytelling as a design practice, to build futures worth living in, and to keep writing the stories that refuse to wait.