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Are the old basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic relevant in the 21^st century? Or, is it time for an upgrade?

Arthur Harkins and John Moravec assembled a list of New Basics for education that can help us leapfrog to an education paradigm that is both innovative and relevant for the 21^st century and beyond. These learning outcomes are not intended to be definitive. They are, however, designed to serve as starting points for conversations on how youth-oriented human capital development systems may become more innovative and encourage learning that is more meaningful.

Youth will…

1. Think systemically: Perceiving existing patterns and constructing alternatives to them. This means that youth will think comparatively, through patterns, develop understandings of the underlying systems, and leverage the systemic patterns to meet their goals.
2. Think simulationally: Conducting “what if?” thought experiments and mental rehearsals using controlled imagination and projections. Applying imagination to simulational thinking, youth may create eye-opening stories both within and among patterns.
3. Thrive in the midst of changes, challenges, and unknowns: Developing perspectives, knowledge, and choices to cope with and leverage complexity and uncertainty. This means that youth will produce new thought tools to help them cope with increasing chaos and ambiguity in the modern world.
4. Create and manipulate alternative pasts, presents, and futures: Creating and managing virtual time; developing flexible definitions of social and personal time; and, selectively associating alternative pasts and futures with multiple presents. This means that youth will counter the tyranny of traditional perceptions of clock time through their personal time constructs, including conceptualizations of history, the present and future that can be strategically compressed and stretched.
5. Develop and respond to goals and challenges: Setting goals and objectives; detecting and anticipating impediments to success; and, designing solutions to impediments. This means that youth will take charge of their lives in more and more ways, in particular through energetic applications of their values and intelligence.
6. Understand and effectively utilize existing information: Accessing and selectively employing information in pursuit of opportunities and problem resolutions. This means that youth gravitate toward the acquisition of new information, rather than shying away from it; and that the abundance of information will be valued as a socioeconomic resource.
7. Construct and utilize personally applicable knowledge: Purposively transforming information into personally usable knowledge; building a personally styled capability to add intellectual and other forms of variety to the world; and, enhancing their decision-making options through the formation of new understandings. This means that youth will devote their lives to the construction and application of meaning, both explicit and implicit.
8. Construct and utilize new knowledge related to contexts, processes, and cultures: Perceiving, designing, and constructing real and virtual contexts suitable for specific tasks; compiling and utilizing many perspectives on given subjects; and, enhancing decision-making options. This means that youth will become increasingly capable as designers and architects of alternative knowledge foundations to improve their lives.
9. Effectively utilize current and emerging ICT systems: Staying atop the technologies that permit modern learning and economies; and, being at the forefront in the adoption and effective use of new technologies. This means that youth will expand their efforts as digital explorers and developers, and facilitate the technological adoption of technologies throughout society.
10. Acquire and assess knowledge of various global trends: Constructing “big pictures” of the world using different resources for each picture; becoming a global thinker and citizen; and, employing these viewpoints to help contextualize relatively localized problems, opportunities, goals and means. This means that youth will participate in the development of new and compelling visions for the planet and beyond.
11. Write and speak in a unique voice: Developing and utilizing personal uniqueness; applying uniqueness alone and with groups and teams; and, developing identity and character. This means that, through open, creative expression, youth may develop into exemplary representatives of democracy, freedom, and the courage to act on both.
12. Take personal responsibility for intentions and performance quality: Ethically accepting accountability for personal actions and inactions; and, constructively responding to personal and social assessments of performance quality. This means that youth will not only enjoy learning from their mistakes, but also aim to turn mistakes into successes.

Greetings Leapfrog Enthusiasts!

Thought you might be interested in this article…

Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning,
by Cooney Center Industry Fellow Carly Shuler, makes the case that our nation’s leaders should not overlook the role mobile technologies can play, if well deployed, in building human capital and in helping to stimulate valuable innovation. As Sesame Street has proven over four decades of remarkable work, exposure to research-tested educational media starting early in life can accelerate children’s skills, while producing enduring economic benefits to society. CONCLUSION: “The kids these days are not digital kids. The digital kids were in the ’90s. The kids today are mobile, and there’s a difference. Digital is the old way of thinking, mobile is the new way.” Source: The Joan Glanz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop
Link: http://joanganzcooneycenter.org/pdf/pockets_of_potential.pdf

The Star Tribune’s Karen Youso interviewed me for what I thought would be a short sidebar article on accelerating change, but it wound up taking the full front page of the Variety section in today’s paper. I’m absolutely delighted to see mainstream media discuss the Technological Singularity! … especially since the article contains questions for human capital development and our education systems!

Read the article here.
My favorite part:

“We send kids to school, they move grade by grade, using the 18th-century model, and during that time, the whole world has changed so much. How relevant is that education?” asked Moravec. “We’re training them for jobs that existed 20 years ago, not for those that’ll exist when they finish school.”

Want more? Here are online resources for learning more, gathered by the StarTribune.

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

More elsewhere:

• Siftables at MIT
• D. Merrill, J. Kalanithi and P. Maes. Siftables: Towards Sensor Network User Interfaces. In the Proceedings of the First International Conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction (TEI’07). February 15-17 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.

Inter-district collaborations for innovation

with

Dr. Jon Voss, Intermediate District 287

and

Pamela Schroeder, Minnesota Destination ImagiNation

Monday, February 23

11:15am – 1:30pm

Conference Room 325, Education Sciences Building (University of Minnesota East Bank)

Dr. Jon Voss (Academic Program Supervisor, ISD 287) and Pamela Schroeder (Affiliate Director, Minnesota Destination ImagiNation) will lead a discussion on their experiences in gifted education, DI and other programs in fostering inter-district and state-wide collaborations that breed innovations.

Lunch and validated parking will be provided, but space is limited.  Please RSVP your attendance to the University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development’s Preparation to Practice Group at ppg@umn.edu or call 612-625-5060.

Remember nomads?

In the pre-industrial age, nomads were people that moved with their livelihood (usually animal herding) instead of settling at a single location. Industrialization forced the settlement of many nomadic peoples…

…but, something new is emerging in the 21st century: Knowmads.

A knowmad is what I term a nomadic knowledge worker –that is, a creative, imaginative, and innovative person who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere. Industrial society is giving way to knowledge and innovation work. Whereas industrialization required people to settle in one place to perform a very specific role or function, the jobs associated with knowledge and information workers have become much less specific in regard to task and place. Moreover, technologies allow for these new paradigm workers to work either at a specific place, virtually, or any blended combination. Knowmads can instantly reconfigure and recontextualize their work environments, and greater mobility is creating new opportunities. Consider this coffee shop in Houston:

The coffee shop has become the workplace of choice for many knowmads. What happens when the investment banker sitting next to the architect have a conversation? What new ideas, products, and services might be created?

The remixing of places and social relationships is also impacting education. Students in knowmad society (or, as I also like to call it, Society 3.0) can learn, work, play, and share in almost any configuration. Remember our videoconference with a fifth grade classroom in Owatonna? The purposive use of technologies allowed standard desks to be removed from the classroom and for students and teachers to instantly reconfigure their social learning environment, allowing for more individualized instruction …and co-instruction among students and their teacher. The differences between students, teachers and colleagues are beginning to blur.

Who are these knowmads in Society 3.0? Workers, students or coffee shop patrons?

(To find out, click on the picture)

Are you a knowmad?

The world continues to get “smaller” and “flatter.” But we see now that being connected isn’t enough. Fortunately, something else is happening that holds new potential: the planet is becoming smarter.

That is, intelligence is being infused into the way the world literally works—into the systems, processes and infrastructure that enable physical goods to be developed, manufactured, bought and sold. That allow services to be delivered. That facilitate the movement of everything from money and oil to water and electrons. And that help billions of people work and live.

Furthermore, they write that the smarter planet is powered by three drivers:

• The world is becoming instrumented. By 2010, there will be a billion transistors per human, each one costing one ten-millionth of a cent.
• The world is becoming interconnected. With a trillion networked things—cars, roadways, pipelines, appliances, pharmaceuticals and even livestock—the amount of information created by those interactions grows exponentially.
• All things are becoming intelligent. Algorithms and powerful systems can analyze and turn those mountains of data into actual decisions and actions that make the world work better. Smarter.

What does this mean for the futures of our various institutions? For our hopes in quality of life? IBM examines these questions in their blog, Building a Smarter Planet. They don’t provide answers, but they get the conversation going.

With the world becoming increasingly instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, what new opportunities and challenges are presented to education and human capital development systems?

Tapscott said: “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge — the internet is. Kids should learn about history but they don’t need to know all the dates.

“It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorise that it was in 1066.

They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google. Memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.”

Absolutely! “Download”/banking style pedagogies are made obsolete by Google and Wikipedia.

In our Leapfrog series, we have argued that education should concentrate on “upload” pedagogies, based on knowledge production by students and collaborating faculty, together with augmentations provided by a new category of community-based volunteers. Using the most advanced forms of information search engines, networks, early artificial intelligence, and the aforementioned volunteers, there is an opportunity to leapfrog education beyond any of the competition. This will require fundamental changes in the mission, structure, and curricula of education at all levels.

Time to drop memorization and refocus education on the liberal skills?