“The Proffer”: Using Scenarios for Instructional Technology Planning

About The Scenario

This scenario is focused on J4, who has a time-critical challenge. As a government agent, he is trying to meet up with an elusive researcher whose brilliant and shadowy work is threatening to the present social order. This scenario tracks with real-world realities of nation-states constantly assessing each other’s capabilities—including those of their respective populations. In this world view, ideas are dangerous; ideas are salvation. This confrontation has the potential for long-term implications—none of them fully predictable.

This short story then is debriefed factually given the extant research information of where the online learning environments technologies are headed. With the disappearing of computers being built into the lived, carpentered environment, the artificiality of virtual immersiveness has seeped into augmented reality spaces. Objects in this space have become metameric (different essential objects that share similar stimuli signals and so misleading perceivers as to their actual natures)—with experienced mixes of the real and the coded. The real seems digital; the digital seems real. Information is pervasive and atmospheric and delivered and interchanged within the system as part of the lifeblood of the mixed environment. The learning is moment-to-moment, fast, and occasionally high-value and high-risk. “The Proffer” plays on the idea of transactional exchanges (with people trading strategic information and benefits with each other), in an asymmetrical data environment, with known and unknown effects.