Rethinking Learning Podcast
Podcast Episode #114: Human-Centered Learning with Katherine Prince
One of the United States’ foremost educational futurists, Katherine Prince leads KnowledgeWorks’ exploration of the future of learning. As Vice President of Strategic Foresight, she speaks and writes about the trends shaping education over the next decade and helps education stakeholders strategize about how to become active agents of change in pursuing their ideal visions for the future learning ecosystem.
Katherine’s Background
Before joining KnowledgeWorks in 2006, Katherine supported large-scale changes in working practice at Britain’s Open University and helped federal agencies and other clients increase service quality by incorporating a customer perspective into their organizational planning.
Katherine holds a BA in English from Ohio Wesleyan University; an MA in English from the University of Iowa; and an MBA from The Open University with emphases on creativity, innovation, and change and on knowledge management. She also earned a certificate in Foresight from the University of Houston. Katherine serves on the board of trustees of the Union Institute and University and is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists.
KnowledgeWorks
Since 2007, Katherine has worked with education stakeholders around the country to explore how they might transform education to create better possibilities for all young people. For the last fourteen years, Katherine has worked at KnowledgeWorks, a non-profit social enterprise that seeks to foster meaningful personalized learning that enables every student to thrive in college, career, and civic life. As Senior Director, Strategic Foresight, she leads the work on the future of learning.
Katherine and her colleagues look ten years out to explore how trends shaping education today might impact learning. About every three years, they publish a full forecast on the future of learning (see Recombinant Education: Regenerating the Learning Ecosystem). They use those insights as to the basis for working with education stakeholders around the country to examine strategic possibilities and to explore how each of us might act as agents of change in creating positive futures for all young people. They also produce other publications and provocations to help people explore the implications of future trends.
In addition to helping others consider strategic possibilities, Katherine gest to dream herself. In November 2015, she had the chance to share her personal vision for the future of learning as part of TEDxColumbus. Her talk, “A Vision for Radically Personalized Learning,