Christopher Owens – författare

This book is a guide to Storycasting for futures and forecasting practitioners. A portmanteau of ‘storytelling’ and ‘Threatcasting,’ Storycasting is a supplementary application of the Threatcasting model, which develops meaningful and human-centric qualitative data that can be presented in thought-provoking narratives that illicit responses and stimulate interest in the outcomes. This book proposes that in distilling the work product of strategic futures planning, threat assessments, and long-term thinking into bulletized reports, organizations significantly diminish the interest as well as insight that can be gleaned from such efforts. In order to recapture the attention of senior leaders and decision makers, the Storycasting model covered in this book presents a way of converting the plausible into the compelling. After guiding readers through the theoretical and practical aspects of Storycasting, the book includes a case study novella, news reporting, and industry publications to demonstrate the potential of the methodology. Through this, the author creates a reality-based and human-centered scenario rooted in a possible future in which a proposed policy is realized, including anticipated add-on effects, reactionary push-back, and supplemental action that can be anticipated through speculative fiction using the Threatcasting methodology. The book closes with an analysis of the narrative output and advises readers on optimizing their own stories to best relate important projections  to their organizations, clients, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

Most education research is undertaken in western developed countries. While some research from developing countries does make it into research journals from time to time, but these articles only emphasize the rarity of research in developing countries. The proposed book is unique in that it will cover education in Papua New Guinea over the millennia. Papua New Guinea’s multicultural society with relatively recent contact with Europe and the Middle East provides a cameo of the development of education in a country with both a colonial history and a coup-less transition to independence. Discussion will focus on specific areas of mathematics education that have been impacted by policies, research, circumstances and other influences, with particular emphasis on pressures on education in the last one and half centuries. This volume will be one of the few records of this kind in the education research literature as an in-depth record and critique of how school mathematics has been grown in Papua New Guinea from the late 1800s, and should be a useful addition to graduate programs mathematics education courses, history of mathematics, as well as the interdisciplinary fields of cross cultural studies, scholarship focusing on globalization and post / decolonialism, linguistics, educational administration and policy, technology education, teacher education, and gender studies.