The future of work/work of the future (course)

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A new academic year has started and new courses with it. Once more I teach the course "Future of Media". This is the 13th year I teach it out of the 15 times the course has been given. This is however - as far as I know - the very last time the course is given and there are also some major changes in place compared to last year.

The course has been given in English for the last six years (and the results are archived on the web!) and it has primarily been read by two groups of students; a larger group of master's students studying Media Technology and a smaller group of (mostly international) students studying Media Management. This year, only the smaller group of Media Management students take the course. That means that fewer than 25 students are taking the course compared to the 60-70 students that usually do. That also means it will be a different course this year (with, for example, smaller and fewer project groups). We will skip much of the usual hullaballoo around the course as it does not make sense to print a book or to rack up all the younger students in our media technology engineering programme and invite/force them to come to the final presentation in mid-December.

The course has a new theme every year and this year's theme is "The Future of Work/Work of The Future". The theme is quite challenging, not the least because the connection to the Future of Media is not so strong, although we will focus on and emphasize how digitization, computers and (media) technologies are changing the face of work at the present and in the future. Work and the future of work is also a theme I'm personally interested in and have worked with a couple of times in the past - as can be seen by reading these blog posts:
- The future of work (April 2014)
- After work - Life after jobs disappear (March 2015)
- After after work (May 2015)
- Automatization and digitalization as a strategy for reaching a social-ecological just future (March 2016)

The course started this past week and while the course and its ambience will be very different this time around, I think it will be a good course. The smaller number of students means that it is possible to have discussions in ways that are difficult with a (much) larger group. I will surely write follow-up blog posts later this autumn to report back on how the course and the projects within the course develop.
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