Overview

Led by Dr. Angela Gunder (Opened Culture, University of Arizona), with co-authors Dr. Ruben Puentedura (Hippasus), Dr. Lev Gonick (Arizona State University), Dr. Melissa Vito (UT San Antonio), Samantha Becker (SAB Consulting), and Dr. Melody Buckner (University of Arizona), this paper takes up a paradox in educational futures work. Organizations invest heavily in strategic planning, yet the visions they produce are often bounded by three-to-five-year horizons, shaped by a narrow circle of decision-makers, and disconnected from the communities whose learning those plans are meant to serve. The paper argues that participatory, narrative-driven futures methodologies can function as infrastructure for collective imagination, collapsing the distance between speculative imagination and operational strategy.

The argument draws together three conceptual strands. Futures literacies name the capacities that enable communities to imagine, interrogate, and co-create multiple possible futures, distributed across the distinct vantage points of students, faculty, administrators, technologists, and community members. Narrative digital learning practices supply the pedagogical engine, structuring scenario submissions through a story spine, translating them into immersive short films, and using backward design to move participants from an imagined future to the milestones required to reach it. Open remix provides the design logic, treating the methodology itself as an artifact meant to be taken apart, reconfigured, and redeployed by others while preserving its generative core.

The paper traces the 100 Year EdTech Project across four iterations. It began in June 2023 as a founding retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, where 25 changemakers established seven design principles and four solution categories: Policy, Innovation, Resources, and Social Capital. The first public Design Summit at Arizona State University in spring 2024 convened 185 participants from more than 60 organizations around eight scenario films and produced the openly published 2074 Guide. The 2025 summit at the University of Texas at San Antonio introduced crowd-sourced scenarios through an open call and a 10-25-50 backcasting framework, drawing 174 participants from 71 organizations and yielding the 2075 Guide. The 2026 summit returned to UT San Antonio with eight community-submitted scenarios produced as short films. Across these iterations, student partnership deepened steadily, moving from an opening all-learner panel in 2024 to a student who, by 2026, independently authored a scenario through the open call and facilitated its design sprint on his own.

At the center of the paper is a two-level thematic analysis of the 2026 summit, comparing the eight scenario videos that opened the design sprint with the eight community presentations produced through backcasting at its close. The comparison makes the methodology’s transformative function visible as speculative narrative becomes structural strategy. Cross-cutting themes increased from two at the video stage to three at the presentation stage, indicating that more shared common ground emerged as participants moved from speculation to strategy, while the network of scenarios stayed fully connected, producing convergence without flattening what made each scenario distinct. The themes themselves shifted from registers of imagining and affect toward domains of action and ethical concern, with the relationship between human agency and automation surfacing as a baseline running through nearly every operational presentation. External partners have begun to remix the work as well, from a half-day mini-sprint at a STEM ecosystems convening to a large multi-sector conference at Arizona State University, evidence that the field treats the methodology’s processes and artifacts as immediately usable.

For distance education, the paper offers two implications. The first concerns the democratization of strategic imagination: the project’s crowd-sourcing infrastructure, including open-call submission, online community voting, coaching webinars, and asynchronous collaboration, shows how geographically distributed stakeholders can shape futures work without sacrificing the depth that in-person design sprints require, while community-authored guides released under Creative Commons travel from the summit to the reader’s own planning table. The second is methodological: sustained, community-driven futures work can serve as a sensitive barometer of the field’s evolving concerns, a form of continuous environmental scanning grounded in practitioner experience. The project’s larger contribution is a demonstration that authorship of the future can be shared, along with a road map for how to do it.