Topic outline

  • Humanity in the 21st Century and Beyond

    Collapse all Expand all
    Humanity in the 21st Century and Beyond

    Welcome to Humanity in the 21st Century and Beyond. You are joining learners from all over the world who are currently enrolled in the course. We are excited to have you in the class and look forward to your contributions to the learning community.  Each of you brings to this course your own unique background, perspective and skills and as such are a vital resource to the learning community. We encourage you to openly share your persepctive with others throughout the coming weeks. 

    Welcome to the course

    To get started, we recommend taking a few minutes to explore the course site. Be sure to introduce yourself to everyone in the Meet and Greet forum. Learning with and from each other is a very important part of the course. We have also included a "coffee shop" forum for general interest discussions that may arise out of the weekly topics or other issues which may not be covered in the course. Please refer to the handbook for the guide to forum ettiquette.  

    If you have questions about course content, please post them in the forums to get help from others in the course community. For technical problems, alert your tutors in the Help Desk forum.

    We hope you will develop some lasting engagements with colleagues beyond the course and we would encourage you to join groups on the pages we have created on various social media platforms. These can be accessed here or through our website, Education for World Futures. 

    Good luck as you get started, and we hope you enjoy the course!

    Introduction

    We humans (Homo sapiens; wise human) emerged around 200,000 years ago. For most of this time we lived relatively stable lives as hunter gatherers with little impact on our environment. But in just a few centuries, a tiny fraction of world  time, we have made phenomenal progress in technologies and economies and undergone massive change in social organisations and world views. We now have the power and propensity to change our host planet, its climate, its life forms and indeed humanity itself for better or for worse. How did we humans get to this stage, what does it mean to live in the 21st century and, above all, how can we live our lives and contribute to our communities to promote human wellbeing in a sustainable world? These are the central concerns of Humanity in the 21st Century and Beyond.

    Professor Bruce our course convener, who will be delivering many of the lectures in this course, presented at talk through TEDX Perth in 2014. This we hope will give an insight of our purpose at Education for World Futures and inspire you to really engage with the course material and each other 

    Aims of the Course
    At the conclusion of the course, participants should:
    • Elevate one’s understanding of human biological and cultural origins and how these relate to our present condition, worldviews and future
    • Recgnise that sustainability must now be a crucial component of all future planning and includes: social sustainability (human wellbeing), environmental sustainability (our biosphere), economic sustainability ( our means of wealth making and distribution) and governance (how we organise and manage social relations and interactions)
    • Reflect on one’s capacity for futures thinking through familiarity with organisations with an exemplary approach to human wellbeing and environmental health
    • Consider further education and action to help shape desirable human and world futures

    Commitment
    3 hours per week comprising reading of materials, watching videos, discussing issues with peers, writing a reflective blog
    Assessment
    To obtain a Certificate of Accomplishment for this course you will need to submit a short essay reflecting on how the course has impacted on your understanding of Humanity in the 21st Century and how your capacity to contribute to shaping the future of the world may have changed as a result. You will be required to assess the reflections of five of your peers in a guided peer assessment exercise. More on this in week 9.
    We hope you have joined this course to become inspired, informed, motivated and challenged to become part of the solutions for some of the world's most complex problems. However, we are keen to encourage to to engage with your fellow course participants to better understand their perspectives on the big global issues, and even more importantly, we hope you can develop a better understanding of yourself and your place in an increasingly complex world. There will be opportunity at the end to evaluate your own learning as well as provide feedback on the experience.
     

  • Week 1: What could it mean to be human?

    Our species is by far the most intelligent on planet earth. We have achieved amazing success in populating all corners of the globe; space itself is now within our reach. We are no longer at the mercy of the environment, the environment is at the mercy of us. Surely these achievements justify our species name; Homo sapiens (wise human) or do they?  This topic explores what it means to be human in an exciting but turbulent world, a world of our making, a world of unprecedented opportunity and challenge and above all, a world requiring great wisdom and responsibility from its current custodians; us.

  • Week 2: How have our biological and historical origins shaped us?

    Are we just a passive product of our past or are we masters of our destiny?  This topic explores our origins from a small vulnerable group of naked apes to a species that now dominates the planet.  It explores likely environmental forces that may have contributed to our genetic evolution and biological and innate behavioural propensities.  It balances that with social and cultural histories that may have nurtured and contributed to our current world views and behaviours.

  • Week 3: What is ‘human nature’: is it fossilised or evolving?

    Here we explore our ‘nature’ as an individual, as a group and as a global community. Human wellbeing and world futures are predicated on understanding our nature. As individuals we can think of our nature as comprising body, mind and psyche (identity, self-consciousness). As members of a group (family, tribe, ethnic or religious affiliation, nation) we can think in similar ways. Individual and group natures are where most of the world resides now, it seems ‘natural’ for this to be so. But we may be, and arguably need to be, identifying ourselves as a member of the global community. This is a very recent evolution of thought and practice for humanity. It underpins the rise of sustainability movements, world order and governance and may ultimately decide the position of Homo sapiens in a brave new world.

  • Week 4: How does our global community live now and what conditions our lives?

    This topic can start with an analysis of global and regional levels of economy, governance, health, education and equality and the broader internationally recognised metrics of wellbeing, quality of life, happy planet indices etc. This would then lead on to an analysis of how technology, governance, economics, business etc have conditioned our present state.

  • Week 5: What is sustainability and how is it practiced now?

    The last two centuries spanned massive advances in science and technology, industrial and economic growth, information and communications technology, health care and life expectancy. The average person now enjoys a standard of material life that medieval kings may have envied. But the past 200 years have also been a time of alarming population growth, resource depletion, pollution, global warming, unleashing of weapons of mass destruction and gross inequity between peoples. Collectively these forces have impacted and will continue to impact on human lifestyles and values throughout this century. How can we recognise and evaluate such changes and how can we use this understanding to better promote human wellbeing? 

  • Week 6: Where are sustainability movements going and how can they be accelerated and enhanced to secure the world that we want?

    This topic leads on from topic 5 which essentially discusses the present.  Here we examine each sustainability domain and listen to experts views on what next.  The issue of education for world futures comes in here.

  • Week 7: Where is humanity heading?

    Are we looking at a business as usual model, a descent into barbarism or a brave new world for our species?  Will our species itself change; are we just a transition between primitive ape and civilized human? This topic incorporates the Great Transitions Initiative and scenario building and other tools as a theoretical background. It then goes on to more practical approaches to desirable futures such as Global Millennial Goals etc. It then moves on to explore local examples such as practiced in the Transition Towns movement or the more global approach of the ‘Earth Charter’ (officially endorsed by UWA and practiced eg. in this MOOC).

  • Week 8: Technological and other massive developments likely to affect our lives; from artificial intelligence, to trans-humanism to the bomb!

    We may agree in general terms on what sort of a future we want and we may agree on what we need to do to get there. But often seemingly small events or technological advances such as the computer can have a profound impact on all of human life and futures. Such possible events need to be built in to our thinking. If humanity is to thrive it will need resilience to cope with both the expected and the unexpected and to have confidence and optimism that it is on the right path.

  • Week 9: Shaping our futures wisely: the ultimate call for Homo sapiens!

    This concludes the course by asking all participants and presenters to reflect on the course, consider how they might be part of shaping world futures and encouraging them to collaborate towards this end.