Some thoughts on the Fall semester that went by all too fast! We may have witnessed Dr. Bishop’s last class, but I don’t think we’d be surprised if he comes back. He’s still part of the Certificate program, but his primary attention now is with Teach the Future.
We also had several students graduate (we’ll cover this in a separate post).
We had several guests join us physically and virtually over the fall.

  • On August 25th, alum Christian Crews of Andspace Consulting ran an Implications session on campus ably assisted by interns April Koury and Laura Schlehuber.
  • On October 6th, alum Morgan Kauffman gave an “Intro to Systems Thinking” lecture to the Intro class. Morgan is going to be teaching the Systems Thinking class this spring.
  • October 16th, alum Jim Lee talked about “Cycles, Values, and Expression,” as a guest lecture for Dr. Frewen’s Social Change class.
  • On October 27th, former faculty Wendy Schultz of Infinite Futures discussed “Images of the Future” for Alternative Perspectives class.
  • On November 4th, student Mackenzie Dickson shared his experience as an intern with UNESCO’s foresight group under the tutelage of futurist Riel Miller with Alternative Perspectives class. He discussed the action learning approach as part of developing Futures Literacy Knowledge Laboratories.
  • On November 10, Advisory Board member Clem Bezold of the Institute for Alternative Futures, presented his “Aspirational Futures” method for the Alternative Perspectives Class.

The program also went on the road a few times.

  • On September 10th, a group of students attend the debate at the UH University Center Theater on 0 US Energy Independence: Good for the Nation? (see: http://www.uh.edu/uh-energy/features/symposium-series/)
  • On September 26th, Dr. Hines, Jim Breaux, Katie King, Laura Schlehuber, and Omar Sahi traveled to the Lumina Foundation in Indianapolis to brief the Student Needs 2025+ project to the client.
  • On November 14th, Dr. Hines, assisted by Omar Sahi and Jason Crabtree, led an “Introduction to Foresight” workshop for the Texas chapter of the QRCA (Qualitative Research Consultants Association) at Connexxion Research in Houston.

COMING THIS SPRING
Be sure to “Save the Dates” of April 17-18, 2015   for our annual “family” Gathering. This year the topic is  “Technology Acceleration” and it is being led by alum John Smart.
Also, thanks to Omar for being a great grad assistant this spring! — Andy Hines