21st Century Learning & Skills

What specialized skills and knowledge should learners develop, through formal or informal learning, to be prepared for the rest of the 21st Century? You can find this line of questioning and answers to this kind of question in academic, political, an social discussions, and even hear versions of them in commercials like the Art Institutes' Create Tomorrow commercial or Devry's "Get the Know How You Need for Tomorrow's Careers" commercial. 

I don't think the discussion about 21st Century learning activities and skills is new. It was probably asked back in the 1990s, if not later, and the question, "What specialized skills and knowledge should we prepare are learners to have for the year 20##?" is not too different from the one I posed above. They both ask about the future, the potential and factors for which are always subject to change. I think it's important to note why it is silly to ask about the specific skills needed distinctly for the 21st Century: Though there are some broad skills and basic skills that will be needed for the future as predicted, the world will likely have changed in dramatic ways due to technological innovations (and other innovations) that cohere to and advance individual, social, and business practices. The world has changed and advanced since the 1990s, and it will continue to do so, but we don't know until it happens, unless we are the ones changing the world, and changing the world involves not only opportunity to advance the world, but also the world welcoming the advances. It's silly, then, to suppose now in 2013 what skills will be needed in 2031. Who knows what changes will occur and how our efforts to advance the world together will conflict or mix. If we are talking about the future in terms of a year or so from not, it is easier to predict, speculate, and prepare, but it's a challenge to predict and prepare for beyond this horizon. Our best bet is to prepare for the specialized skills needed now and develop broad skills that may be needed later and can be further specialized later. It is also to prepare ourselves for the changes we want to see. How do we do this?

While this Future Learning Short Documentary video or resource is not the only video relevant to discussions about 21st Century learning activities and how to prepare learners for the future, it captures some important remarks from some influential 21st Century voices about the importance of motivation, self-directed learning, and engagement to both formal and informal learning. I've discussed these remarks in some other blog posts (e.g. this one), so I won't elaborate too much here, but there are also remarks in the video relevant to the discussion of skills for the future. In particular, I think that Sugata Mitra's emphasis on reading comprehension, information literacy skills, and the mechanism by which we believe is important now and to the future. He says:

“The internet is full of answers, but the internet is not full of the questions […]The future of learning—who knows what we need to learn thirty years from now, but we do know that we will need to be able to read, we will need to be good at searching for information, collating it, and then deciding whether it is right or wrong. If you frame the curriculum in terms of these questions, then the children are capable of finding the big answers. When they find the big answers, they believe in themselves and they believe in the world around them."

As he says, children now will be reading off of screens for the remainder of their lives (and so will we) due to the advancements in and the consumerization of internet-enabled computing technologies and the increasing reliance on them to advance individual, social, business, and educational pursuits. So, those skills are relevant to generations that will need to continue to consume and process information from desktop and mobile devices. I think we should also emphasize the importance of asking questions and adapting to change. The video below introduces the importance of questioning and creativity in ways that supplement Mitra's remarks:

This video is from the Macarthur Foundation's Youtube Channel.

The video opened with what John Seely Brown calls the "gaming diposition": the combination of the love of embracing change, curiosity, a questioning disposition, and a will to improve. I definitely think that this disposition is important, and I also think that game-based learning is one way to help satisfy those who have the gaming disposition and help develop it within those who don't yet have it.
Brown also notes the "Gamer's Mantra," which states that "If I ain't learning, it ain't fun." To an extent I think this mantra expresses an interesting fundamental truth about people when they are playing games: the game play is fun, in part, because it involves learning about things they want to learn about, experiencing things they want to experience, or developing skills they want to develop; all three are relevant to learning and gaming.

Whatever the skill or way of trying to enhance learning experiences towards developing it in formal learning contexts in the United States, it is very important that instructors and instructional designers design and use learning activities that meet the educational standards required. For example, in Georgia, these standards for k-12 education are the Georgia Performance Standards, which set forth the learning objectives that instructors should help students achieve. The key is to remember that these are not the only objectives that instructors can help their students achieve and that there are many ways to help students achieve these objectives. Whatever 21st Century skills you are trying to develop in your k-12 students, keep in mind that the way you help them achieve the required standards (e.g. GPS) can also help cultivate 21st Century skills. For a long, but great video about how to k-12 education can be more like kindergarten-- in the sense that school is not just about passive delivery and acceptance of information, but also about creativity and skills development--you might check out Mitch Resnik.