The next liveblog from me (Sheila) the ECIL conference in Bamberg is Educational Futures on Social Media presented by Stig Børsen Hansen, Martin Rehm, and co-authored with Tove Faber Frandsen (University of Southern Denmark, Denmark). As this is a liveblog it is just my impression of what was said.
First they looked at what prediction of the future can involve, where you can design scenarios for the future, but also there are moods or feelings about the future (e.g. people feeling the future is doomed).
Then they moved on to discuss Futures Literacy (see https://www.unesco.org/en/futures-literacy/about) you can look at technologies or consult industries to predict the future, but these approaches can miss out groups and the neccessary attitudes for future literacy.
Coming to the question of how to study futures. Studies are often based on big data analysis, but also you can use more qualitative methods. The presenters wanted to focus on moods and feelings because there are both pessemistic and optimistic feelings about tech, and also the idea of "futurelessness" has been identified (with feelings of anger, depression, hopelessness).
One research question was - to what extent can we find collective feeings about education on X. They did this by using hashtags such as #futureoflearning July 22-November 23. They used NLP (Natural Language Processing) to do sentiment analysis and opinion mining and also used Social Network Analysis (SNA).
They discovered that people talk mostly about the present, next most about the past and least about the future. Anxiety, anger and a bit of sadness drive the negative side. Delving more deeply shows the nuance e.g. anger about less funding to school libraries currently, anxiety about the future, but also constructive discourse about what the future could look like. From the SNA, negative feelings about the future of education had gathered a larger following, but you can also discern the conversation under this.
They concluded that this use of data science also can be used to include and discover creative minorities, that are drowned out in the bigger discussion, and (for example) enable them to connect with each other or promote themselves better.
Photo by Sheila Webber: courtyard of museum building, Bamberg, September 2025
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