Every year at the annual conference of the World Future Society, the University of Houston’s Futures Studies graduate program puts together a panel of students and recent alumni to share some of the best work from the past year. At WorldFuture 2012 in Toronto, three other up-and-coming futurists and I presented some very varied work on the future of learning management systems, the future of locative media and location-aware devices, and complex systems modeling of population and the demographic transition. The panel was truly great, and all of the presenters did a fantastic job.

Friends! Comrades! Copresenters!

Jason Swanson (@jasonswanson)

Jason works as a futurist and market researcher at the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School and gave a great presentation on the future of Learning Management Systems.

Josh Lindenger (@jlindenger)

Josh Lindenger is a futurist, analyst, computer scientist, and licensed Professional Engineer with several years of experience in the national security space. He talked about the future of locative media: location-aware mobile computing, geosocial services, prosumption and co-creation, and location as currency with a sprinkling of ownership, privacy, and subtle control… all that and more! (but no augmented reality goggles).

Emily Empel (@localrat) and Heather Schlegel (@heathervescent)

Emily works as a futurist at Disney these days, and Heather is a ____ (by which I mean she always seems be doing something different and cool). This dynamic duo presented a really awesome systems dynamics model of the demographic transition. This work was recently recognized by the Association of Professional Futurists as an amazing student product, and it was great to see it after hearing so much about it. They also put together another phenomenal session at the conference about the future of retailing with an emergent, co-creative, messy (in a great way), audience-driven future retailing experience. I had fun playing anthropologist during this session and taking pictures for them.

The Twitter Backchannel (and other social media-y things)

Throughout the presentations, the other members of the panel were furiously liveblogging through Twitter, and a few of the audience members participated as well. After getting back from the conference, I curated the Twitter backchannel (and links to the presentations and such) into a Storify posting for posterity. I’ve included it as a slideshow below, but I recommend checking it out on Storify as it displays a lot better there.

Toronto from the Sheraton @ WF2012, courtesy @lloydwalker

Thanks Toronto and WFS! We’ll see you next year in Chicago!
[Cross-posted from The Futures Underground]