Here are my takeaways/notes from a May 2nd session titled Web 2.0: Research Issues, Results, and Future Directions hosted by Lynne Schrum and starring Chris Dede, Dan Hickey, Diane Jass Ketelhut, Donald Leu, and Allan Collins.
These reflections are my synthesized notes and not direct quotations. My hand/brain speed and coordination are no match for the rate of human speech, but, I do try. Enjoy!
• Web 2.0 = Rorschach test — there is no one right answer/definition. It’s what we make it. (Dede)
• Web 2.0 or interactive media permits creativity, collaboration, co-creating and sharing. (FYI)
• I used to believe in collective intelligence until I attended my last faculty meeting (Dede).
• New digital media are easy to use, but not easy to use well (Dede).
• New digital media requires fluency in their rhetoric/critical thinking skills (Dede).
• Web 2.0 redefines what, how, and with whom we learn (Dede).
• In most formal learning environments, new digital media is still an add-on (Dede).
• We should be using new digital media to support wisdom building (Dede).
• Wisdom includes*:
A cognitive dimension involving rich understanding of a variety of intellectual disciplines and fields
A practical-experiential dimension of sophisticated, pragmatic comprehension about how to act given the unresolvable questions, philosophic issues, and unavoidable problems (such as personal mortality) associated with everyday life (Baltes & Smith, 1990)
An interpersonal dimension of insightfully appreciating the interactions and contributions of diverse groups, cultures, and societies in shaping civilization
An ethical dimension encompassing what the ancient Greeks meant by “knowing and doing the good”
A metacognitive dimension of reflective judgment, awareness of the limitations of knowing and of how these limitations affect the resolution of ill-defined problems (Birren & Fisher, 1990; Kitchener & Brenner, 1990).
This definition draws from, but is more limited than, the concept of extraordinary wisdom delineated by Randall and Kenyon (2001).
• What should we as a society be investing in to support the development of wisdom in children and adults? (Dede)
• Achievement tests undermine achievement in schooling (Hickey).
• Participatory assessment offers a new way to examine student work that supports a student-centered approach. (Hickey)
• Social collaboration sites present a rich resource for exploring identity for teachers and youth. (Ketelhut)
• For many pre-service teachers, there is a reported incoherence between their online identity and their in-class identity. Specifically, their in-class identity conflicted with their online identity. (Ketelhut)
• When examing online identity issues, consider examining Kegan‘s (1996) model of psychological development consisting of six “equilibrium stages”: the incorporative stage, the impulsive stage, the imperial stage, the interpersonal stage, the institutional stage, and the inter-individual stage. (Ketelhut)
• The Internet presents a reading comprehension issue for learners. (Leu)
• The Internet presents a literacy issue. (Leu)
• If the use of the Internet is limited to educational technology courses, subject area specialists will defer responsibility for integrating it into their curriculum. (Leu)
• For new digital media to be taken seriously in education, it needs to be integrated into subject areas more completely, not as an add-on. (Leu)
• Online reading represents a problem-based comprehension issue. (Leu)
• Web 2.0 is a static construct; we should recognize it as New Literacies instead. (Leu)
• To advance this notion, teacher education must focus on pedagogy, skill development, and a health professional development diet. (Leu)
• It is important for all educators to consider: What should we be teaching in classrooms? (Collins)
• What is important to learn? (Collins)
• What about Web 2.0 or New Literacies fosters wisdom? (Collins)
• New digital media does nothing to promote morals or ethics. (Collins)
• Web 2.0 has insiders and outsiders. (Collins)
• School culture (closed) contrasts Web 2.0 culture (open). (Collins)
• Do social collaboration and social networking sites invite us to questions our identities? (Collins)
• Web 2.0 is making the equity problem in schools worse. (Collins)
• There will be a tremendous price to pay if we do not address this participatory divide. (Collins)
• Critical New Literacies include (Leu):
identifying important questions
locating information
critically evaluating information
synthesizing information
communicating information
[*The definition of wisdom cited above was pulled from Dede's 2009 Educational Research article: Dede, C. (2009). Comments on Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes: Technologies that facilitate generating knowledge and possibly wisdom. Educational Researcher, 38(4): 261-262.]
Here is a collected list of notes culled from my first day reflections at the American Educational Research Association 2010 annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. Names appearing in parentheses are referenced at the bottom of this post. While I tried to capture speakers’ thoughts directly, most are paraphrased and filtered through my limited ability to listen and write at the same time. I apologize in advance for misrepresenting any of the speakers’ thoughts and ideas.
• Most schools are surrounded by fences. This is a loaded metaphor. (Ching)
• How should we define learning?
• Why does learning inside a school define learning outside of school? (Ching)
• How is learning outside of school relevant to school learning? (Ching)
• What role does technology play in learning outside of school? (Ching)
• Kids’ access to culture of participation is increasing. (Barron)
• Research suggests production activities using the computer build technical fluencies (Barron).
• There are multi-fold learning opportunities despite the myth of the digital native.
• Parents are a critical factor as learning partners (Barron).
• Given roles parents play in kids’ lives, there are significant experience divides (Barron).
• There are significant divides between the ways in which kids use technology as producers of content. (Barron, 2009).
• Production uses of technology depends on community that surrounds kids (Barron).
• In terms of the different forms and pathways of engagement with technology, parents can play several roles (Barron):
Teacher
Learning Broker
Project Collaborator
Resource Provider
Non-technical Support (consultant)
Learner
Employer
• How parents engage technology personally and professionally impacts kids’ use.
• For more information on informal learning research, visit http://life-slc.org
• Design Experiment Methodology reference: Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2 (2), 141-178.
• “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” — Henri Poincare, 1905 (via Steinkeuhler)
• Examples of learning in out-of-school environments: Computer Clubhouse (Chapman) and Casual Learning Lab (Steinkeuhler).
• There is a tension between intentional learning (other directed) and interest-driven learning (self-directed). (Steinkeuhler).
• Research shows when students are allowed to choose reading material, reading scores are markedly higher on standardized measures associated with fluency and reading level (Steinkeuhler).
• Paradox: Out-of-school learning is always compared to in-school learning. (Sessums)
• Learning happens. Schools need to rethink time, space, and their purpose. (Sessums)
• Let students do more of the driving. (Steinkeuhler)
• Teachers need to play more of a designer and advocate role in schools. (Sessums)
• More research is needed around critical periods for learning (Kuhl).
• Research shows social context and social support are CRITICAL when it comes to knowledge acquisition and skill development (Kuhl).
• Given the critical nature of social context and social support in learning, the garbage-in-garbage-out rule is easily measured. (Sessums)
• The complexity of language use impacts a child’s language and knowledge growth and development (Kuhl).
• Imitative learning is powerful (Meltzoff).
• Imitative learning is closely associated with observational learning (Meltzoff).
• Shared or joint attention is a powerful learning mechanism before we formally acquire language (Meltzoff).
• Cultural stereotypes effect a child’s’ self-concept and learning ability (Meltzoff).
• Cultural stereotypes and self-concepts are effected by observation of and engagement with peers, parents, media, teachers, and mentors (Meltzoff).
• Stereotypes can be overcome with the help of peers, parents, media, teachers, and mentors (Meltzoff).
• Educational policy: How we choose what to do defines a course of action (Malcom).
• Educational policy is influenced by our ability to choose between alternatives, by our present circumstances, and by future goals (Malcom).
• Educational policy challenges (Malcom):
Over (and under-) interpreting research findings (looking for the silver bullet);
When research collides with conventional wisdom;
When research collides with politics;
When action is seen as too hard and/or too expensive; and
When it is unclear how to get from the present to a future informed by research.
• Educational policy is a blunt instrument (Malcom).
• The “work:” converting research into practice (Sessums).
• To get teachers to change how they conduct their classrooms requires a skilled expert to “tow them into the big wave” (Hickey).
• What are teacher practitioner’s learning about/sharing on Twitter? (Craft)
• How teacher practitioners are being educated about integrating technology into their curriculum varies (Sessums).
• Many technology integration courses are still focusing on teaching PowerPoint, Word, and Excel (1990s) (Sessums).
• The use of participatory media is limited in many colleges and schools of education (Sessums).
• Given an imitative learning model, many teacher practitioners are not being exposed to meaningful uses of participatory media (Sessums).
• Research suggests that most teacher practitioners are at the early stages of technology integration (Mouza, Hughes, Richardson, Niess).
• Reasons cited for limited technology integration include lack of resources, prescribed curricula, and practitioners/administrators being less open to innovative ideas (Mouza).
• What is effective technology integration? What does it look like? How should it be defined? (Sessums)
• What are we trying to achieve by integrating technology into the classroom? (Sessums)
• In what ways does participatory media transform teacher practice? (Sessums)
• Technology is still considered an add-on. It is not yet viewed as an essential part of the educational process in schools (Sessums).
• What will it take for parents, teachers, school officials to move beyond thinking of technology as a teaching tool? (Sessums)
In an effort to catalog the various tactics/tools and resources employed in my undergraduate course, Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum, I offer the following list of items we experimented with over the last sixteen weeks. Students reported that while they have not continued to use all of the applications listed below, they do continue to use many for a variety of purposes. There were many additional resources employed that I have not listed. Most of these can be found by visiting my Delicious account and searching under 4406 and/or 4406spring2010.
GMail
I always invite students to create GMail accounts on the first day of a class. GMail is the gateway drug to the entire Google suite of applications that I find myself using multiple times a day.
Google Docs Google Docs includes spreadsheets, presentations, word processing, forms, that can be shared and posted online.
Google Sites Google Sites was used to support student portfolios. It’s free, easy to use, and easy to edit.
Google Buzz
We talked about Buzz but did not spend much time with it. Like Wave, Buzz seemed like a solution looking for a problem. It did offer a wonderful collaborative potential, but did not replace our other means of working together.
iGoogle & Google Reader
Students experimented with personal start pages like iGoogle and PageFlakes, and were assigned to explore Google Reader as a means of pulling information across the Web to one site.
Blogger & Word Press
Students kept a learning journal throughout the term and were given a choice between Blogger and Word Press. I chose these applications because of their ease of use and customizablity. I used to use Edublogs, but alas, the embedded advertising made my stomach turn.
Tumblr & Posterous
Students were invited to play with Tumblr and Posterous for projects involving audio, video and pictoral posting and sharing. I also introduced Flavors.me to create websites using personal content from around the Internet.
Twitter
We played with Twitter as a means of informal communication, formative assessments, social networking, personal learning, and sharing.
Flickr
Students were introduced to Flickr for photosharing and digital storytelling.
VoiceThread
We used VoiceThread to support teaching, learning, reflection, and collaborative learning. VoiceThread worked well when I was out of town as well. I could leave instructions and solicit feedback. Students also used VoiceThread as a broadcasting medium for providing instructions and how-to’s in their own lessons.
Social Bookmarking
While I am still experimenting with Diigo, students were introduced to Delicious to support bookmarking and resource searches.
Wikis
Students were given an option to use PBWorks and Wikispaces to support a collaborative Web presence. One of my major major emphases this term was communication with parents. Wikis are easy to create Web sites that require students to think about design as much as content. If a wiki is hard to navigate, it is hard to use. We spent time reflecting and acting on this particular design aspect as well.
Podcasting
Students and I tested Podomatic to support podcasting capabilities. Overall, it worked well and was simple to use effectively. I have used Audacity in the past, however, I wanted to try something different this time through.
Screencasting
Students were asked to develop a how-to video using either video or screencasting applications such as Screenr and Jing.
Chat
While we did not look too closely at chat applications, we talked about Tiny Chat, but only briefly…
Polling Polleverywhere was a fun application to use for formative assessments and teaching about using personal learning networks to gather information and answers. Google Forms and Survey Monkey where also employed for formative assessments as well.
Animation
For fun, didactic experiences, and demonstration purposes, we played with Go Animate.
Open Educational Resources Commons (OER)
We explored a host of lesson plans available through OER Commons. We focused on the importance of sharing and modifying lesson plans (with an emphasis on re-sharing).
Open Text
For my student microteaching activity, I asked students to sign up for specific chapters in How People Learn. Students were asked to develop a 40 minute lesson on a specific chapter. Chapter presentations were not summaries, but focused on relevant aspects of the chapter content. Students were required to prepare a presentation, group and/or individual activities, and an assessment for the content presented. They were also forbidden to use PowerPoint (hee hee!).
Browser
I regularly recommend Firefox as the browser to use. It integrates well into our online course management system, Moodle.
Video
Students and I used YouTube regularly to find and share audio visual resources. TeacherTube was also used to support knowledge building.
Finally, all tactics, texts, and presentations described were chosen because they are free and relatively easy to use and integrate into one’s curriculum. I have avoided prescribing proprietary software, applications, and texts in an effort to support the open sharing possibilities that the Web affords.
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” — Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models
After reading this quote from Shirky, I could not help but think of the current state of educational institutions across the U.S. The way most tax-based educational systems are constructed, there are limited ways in which these institutions can cut expenses below their revenue. Consequently, many educational institutions (read: schools, school districts, colleges) will fail and fail dramatically.
In Shirky’s analysis (based on the work of Joseph Tainter), complex societies and systems collapse because, “when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.” When schools and colleges are unable to provide the services, support, skill and content knowledge necessary to support a changing and evolving world, then these institutions will collapse.
The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. Schools and colleges need to recognize this shift and develop new ways of thinking how to engage and support learners and learning.
Given the communal nature of schools perhaps we can begin thinking of them as a community organization that supports learning from cradle to death. The school house can become a place that supports and nurtures socially responsible community values such as health, education, sustainable growth and development. School clinics can serve as public health clinics providing medical, psychological, and social services to the community. Schools can become a place generations can mix, learn, and support one another. In essence, why can’t a school be the place that serves the community and that the community serves in return?
If we do not take the time to re-imagine the role of schools in our society now, we will soon be left with nothing but the rubble of good intention. This process of recycling our schools into useful social institutions does not require replacing the professional administrators currently in office. Instead, it will require you and me and the people of our community. I am currently exploring sets of protocols that can provide a means to begin the conversation that in turn can lead to meaningful action.
As Shirky deftly points out, “it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” While this may appear as an over-simplification, until we get involved and work with these issues, we will never know. To paraphrase Shirky, when schools and educational institutions fail to respond to reduced economic circumstances and cannot create effective reform measures through orderly reflection and re-sizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. This is important for educational reformers to think about. Yet, more importantly, this is something we as members of our local communities must addresses today.
image: via csessums http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2121/4506467325_36818326eb.jpg
Institutional change surely will come, often starting at the periphery. There are market opportunities in offering services related to responsiveness, yet, big, traditional organizations such as school systems will be slow to adapt.**
“Ten years is too little for major changes. Efficiencies will of course occur, by automating more interactions – just as all became telephone operators, so we are increasingly all becoming travel agents, information managers, and so on. Small businesses will spring up that are more customer-centered and others will become more responsive at one level by some customized interfaces, but also more impersonal and less responsive to exceptional requests. On the whole, though, change here will be slow. Educational institutions will be the ones to watch, they are highly logical candidates for change, yet it is difficult to imagine much by 2020. By 2030, definitely.” – Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher, Microsoft
“There is a tipping point on the horizon between competition and cooperation. Scarcity of natural resources will require us to work together in ways we have never been required to before. It will take us a few generations to really see a significant change in the ways we currently do business, but it will come. This type of change requires us to plan for a long ‘now,’ which is antithetical to the way populist governments often work. Change will come from the edges and work its way toward the center. First, businesses will see the value-added new digital media provides in terms of access to markets and supporting quality interaction, distribution and customer feedback. This model will then be slowly adopted by government. I also believe the US is too big to govern the way it has been (thus all the red tape and claims of ineffective programming). Perhaps government would be more nimble as productive/supportive if it were to focus geographically (think Netflix or FedEx).” – Christopher D. Sessums, post-doctoral associate at the college of education, University of Florida**
** “This material was gathered in the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes. You can view detailed results from the 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010 surveys here: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/Future-of-the-internet.aspxand http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/default.xhtml. Expanded results are published in the “Future of the Internet” series published by Cambria Press.”
Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!
Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.
First, I want to thank the editors at the New York Times Magazine for featuring an article that focuses on teacher education (Elizabeth Green’s “Can good teaching be learned?” 7 March 2010). Since most of us attended school at one time or another, teaching and teacher education are always hot-button topics in which most people have an opinion. This opinion is often based on what one researcher dubbed an apprenticeship of observation, that is, we think we understand teaching because we have watched it happen to us and others for many years.
The truth is, effective teaching is a complex art that requires the practitioner to be part subject matter expert, part psychologist, part instructional designer, part expert communicator, and part performance artist. While teaching and wisdom do seem to come more naturally to some than others, what is important to consider is that good teaching ultimately happens by design. The trouble is this design sense is often implicit in teachers. Many good teachers know how to effectively work with their students without being able to describe what it is that they are actually doing. This is turn sheds light on the trouble with many teacher education and staff development programs: teachers are not educated explicitly to be designers.
Thinking and acting like a designer involves more than the ability to teach students to work with graphing calculators. It requires an awareness of one’s belief systems, an awareness of the classroom culture, the social norms and subject matter norms. It involves an awareness of how instructional sequences impact learning and an awareness of the instructional tasks necessary that can lead to the transfer of knowledge and understanding on the part of students. It requires an understanding of assessment and the various ways one can assess student learning. Finally, it requires an understanding of the ways in which people learn.
Ultimately, Lemov’s taxonomy may be quite useful. From a design perspective, the taxonomy should not be considered a set of recipes for success, but instead they may be thought of as a way to help teachers select and apply the most substantive and useful procedural knowledge for specific tasks in their own learning ecologies. From a neuroscience perspective, it is important to consider that the taxonomy in and of itself can only be of limited use. Research has shown that the brain is good at interpreting information, not simply memorizing it. What might work best with such a taxonomy is an iterative cycle of learning, application experiences, and reflection repeated over an extended period of time to enhance long-term memory processes as well as the potential deepening of the practitioner’s understanding of how effective teaching and learning can be designed.
Teacher education will always present us with numerous challenges. Yet, it is important to remember how important this education process is. Teachers are the marrow of our society. They are responsible for inspiring and guiding learners and families that in turn act, guide, and inspire generation after generation. The more research and attention we can bring to this topic, the more we as a civilization will gain.
Reference:
Green, E. (2010, March 7). Can good teaching be learned? New York Times Magazine, pp 30-37, 44-46. Retieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
“We lack a coherent and comprehensive way to study media and learning that would help us make wise enterprise decisions instead of the constant lurching we’ve sponsored during those 20 years. Where to turn for this new knowledge and wisdom?”
My contention is that this is both near-sighted and patently untrue. Batson himself, a former professor at a large university, clearly suffers from what many at large and small higher education institutions suffer from: individualism. Given the comforts of tenure and the lack of sociality and intra-college mingling that can be documented in one institution after another, it’s hard to see what is going on in college classrooms much less know who is using what digital media to enhance teaching and learning or to what end.
Batson asks:
“But where is the field of media and learning that encompasses all this scattered inquiry?”
In my college and many others like it, it is in the educational technology department. One that is often parked in a remote region of an education college or psychology department. One that you would easily overlook given the culture of individualism that dominates the institutions. (Perhaps this isolationism and individualism is a leadership and policy issue which should be re-examined by those at a much higher pay grade. Yet, I digress.)
While I agree educators and college professors need to spend more time reflecting on how we, as practitioners, conduct the collegiate enterprise, the chances of this happening are slim on a large, continuous scale. And while this may sound at first like a bad thing, I have come to realize that this is actually a wonderful thing. Let me tell you why.
This thing that we call a call a college education is about to implode. And it will happen in our lifetime. I have heard this over the past decade within the halls of academia, in journal articles, editorials, and blog posts. But now I am hearing it from the students themselves. They see that to succeed in life and develop the requisite knowledge and skills to support a nimble civilization , they do not require university professors. And I could not agree with them more.
As an educational technology professor in a higher education institution, I see it as my job to train and educate the next generations of teachers to make inquiry and participatory intelligence the norm thereby rendering the ivory towers useless (or at least rendering them into wonderful Smithsonian-like museums showcasing relics and antiquities of “what used to be”).
Sure colleges can still offer researchers a place to conduct studies of the hard and soft sciences, but it will no longer be a knowledge accreditation agency or a ticket to future success. We will have all that we need at our fingertips and at the touch of a screen. Teachers in secondary institutions will be equipped and available to model the skills necessary for practical and creative living. At least, that’s my goal and the goal of many educators I know and practice with.
Several months ago, James Gee came to my college and shared an insight with us. He remarked that in the future, colleges of education would become obsolete. That instead, those of us that specialize in pedagogy, androgogy, and technological pedagogical content knowledge, would serve the other colleges and departments on campus by teaching these professors how to create robust, engaging, and media savvy learning environments. This would serve both the hard and soft scientists, educators, and students well by deepening each subject matter experts’ ability to serve up the skills and knowledge necessary for students to become the best, brightest, and most creative stewards on the planet. Not a bad vision.
So while “media and learning” could serve as a new department or enterprise, as Batson suggests, it could instead become a part of every subject area’s enterprise. How’s that for a solution: Let’s work ourselves out of our jobs.
Remember, it was not that long ago that universities employed a Dean of Electricity.
Recently I was thinking about ways to connect my classroom to the larger world outside our door. I noticed each morning on my way to work, a beautiful space in my building that was not being used for anything. Long corridors of empty wall space. Aha! A perfect space for an art show.
I created an assignment for my integrating new digital media into the curriculum course as a way of getting students to use social/participatory media to share, communicate, create, organize, collaborate, and network focusing on a specific project/problem: creating, organizing, advertising,and managing, a showing of art that they themselves create (see assignment for details).
But there’s a catch: once I introduce this lesson to the class, they are not permitted to talk about it in the classroom physically. They must use social media tools to support the planning, communication, coordination, and co-production of the show.
Sound like fun?
The is art show is part project part celebration, and part teachable moment. Photography and poetry provide ways for us to see things differently, with fresh eyes and an enlightened awareness. Teachers play an important part in helping others see the world through new and different lens’ to take advantage of the creative energy we share [see flow]. Community projects like an artshow require the use of many important participatory skills. Such project-based learning permits a classroom to act and learn through experience, placing ownership of the learning in the participants hands. Event planning, organization and communication will take place outside of the formal class environment using social media [Twitter/Facebook/Blogs].
This art show is a pro-social initiative designed to connect learning, schools, students, teachers, administrators, family, community, peers, and friends with and through digital media. In addition, utilizing digital, participatory media allows us to connect our learning and experience with others interested in participating in similar initiatives.
Wanna rock this party? Your thoughts and comments are encouraged.
Recently I was reflecting on the skills we want our kids to possess as they enter adulthood and participate actively as g/local citizens. Here are two major skill sets defined by Henry Jenkins, et al., and Tony Wagner:
Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
As I look over these lists, I noticed one important skill was missing: empathy.
Empathy can be defined as “a sense of shared experience, including emotional and physical feelings, with someone or something other than oneself.” This is an important skill to posses as it permits us to work toward understanding perspectives and points of view different from our own. Empathy is an important social and emotional skill that requires us to practice listening, another important skill that can be easily overlooked as well. Empathy is also a function of cognitive maturity; that is, the ability to take another’s point of view requires a certain degree of cognitive complexity. In this sense, perhaps empathy falls under discernment wherein we learn how to detect feelings, ideas, sensations with our senses.
In look back over distance education literature, Holmberg (1996) noted what he called “the empathy approach.” Through empathy Holmberg suggests that “feelings of personal relations between student and teacher promote motivation, study pleasure and effectiveness” (Holmberg, 1996, p. 489). Such relations Holmberg insists involve a personal style of presentation by the teacher that engages students emotionally, asking them to share their personal reactions, views and experiences. Similarly, in Daniel Goleman‘s (1995) work on emotional intelligence, empathy is defined as a critical facet of social awareness and a key component to an overall feeling of success in life.
In light of such examinations, I feel that we should consider including empathy in our list of 21st century skills as a distinct category. Goleman’s (1995) research suggests that empathy is positively related to intrinsic motivation and effective problem-solving. The need for empathy is increasingly important in the workplace where teamwork and social competencies are a critical factor in success. Similarly, globalization, and the challenges associated with intercultural relationships, make empathy a important managerial competence.
References:
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
Holmberg, B. (1996). On the potential of distance education in the Age of Information Technology. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2(6): 484-491.
Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, Robison, A. J., & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Retrieved from http://digitallearning.macfound.org/atf/cf/%7B7E45C7E0-A3E0-4B89-AC9C-E807E1B0AE4E%7D/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF
Wagner, T. (2009). The global achievement gap : why even our best schools don’t teach the new survival skills our children need–and what we can do about it. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Thinking and acting like a designer involves more than the ability to teach students to work with graphing calculators. It requires an awareness of one’s belief systems, an awareness of the classroom culture, the social norms and subject matter norms. It involves an awareness of how instructional sequences impact learning and an awareness of the instructional tasks necessary that can lead to the transfer of knowledge and understanding on the part of students. It requires an understanding of assessment and the various ways one can assess student learning. Finally, it requires an understanding of the ways in which people learn.
This thing that we call a call a college education is about to implode. And it will happen in our lifetime. I have heard this over the past decade within the halls of academia, in journal articles, editorials, and blog posts. But now I am hearing it from the students themselves. They see that to succeed in life and develop the requisite knowledge and skills to support a nimble civilization , they do not require university professors. And I could not agree with them more.
The is art show is part project part celebration, and part teachable moment. Photography and poetry provide ways for us to see things differently, with fresh eyes and an enlightened awareness. Teachers play an important part in helping others see the world through new and different lens’ to take advantage of the creative energy we share [see 
Recently I was reflecting on the skills we want our kids to possess as they enter adulthood and participate actively as 
