Christian Knudsen’s New Course Examines The History of the Future!

By Christian Knudsen

Humans love imagining the future. We’ve always done it. When people in the 1950s and 60s thought about our time,  they often imagined a world filled with flying cars, robot servants, and family vacations to Mars. These were decades of optimism about technology, driven by the Space Race, rapid economic growth, and the promises of science fiction. However, while we do have some amazing things today, many of which were never predicted — powerful smartphones, streaming entertainment, social media, and the Internet — we never got our jetpacks, flying cars or hover boards. The future that they imagined back then looks very different from the world we live in today.

So why do imagined futures so rarely match reality? My new online breadth course The History of the Future which is running this fall for the very first time explores how past civilizations and societies understood and conceptualized the future. Rather than focusing on past future predictions as failed guesses, my course teaches students to read them as cultural evidence of the time and place that created them.  From ancient prophecies and divinations to medieval eschatological fears of Judgment Day, and modern visions of cyberpunk dystopias, zombies, and Star Trek, conceptualizations of the future almost always reflect the anxieties, hopes, and dreams of their historical present.

Since this course has been designed from the ground up in the post-ChatGPT era, I set out to develop assignments that are non-traditional, but still challenging and engaging. Given the course subject matter, I have also tried (as much as possible) to involve technology rather than exclude it. For example, in the first assignment, students examined a 3D model of an Old Babylonian clay tablet from the British Museum (BM 96948) which was inscribed with cuneiform omens describing signs found in the organs of sacrificed sheep. As part of the assignment, students had to learn how to identify cuneiform words and syllables, transcribe them, and locate the corresponding omens on the 3D model. For these tasks, ChatGPT and other language models was little help. To be successful in the assignment, students had to use both critical and creative thinking.  The assignment also included a bonus activity where students were encouraged to produce their own faux divinations using the ancient tablet and a separate 3D model of a sheep’s heart.

All of this work was presented in student made-videos, and the predictions were hilarious — including predictions about the romance between Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry and who would win the World Series. Other assignments of the course included a digital timeline and a final  “future history” online exhibit, in which students examined a movie, TV show, book, or newspaper article which made predictions about the future to understand the historical context in which it was made. 

You can click to watch here:

I have also been experimenting with using greater interactivity within the course lectures. You can view the introductory lecture for the course below, which was built using the free, open-source H5P framework. It’s an interactive lecture which challenges students with mini-activities and quizzes throughout. The feedback so far has been great.