Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

Living Online

21st Century Skills, cloud_computing

I have several blog entries swirling around my head, but since Will Richardson’s post Is My Head (And My Life) In the Clouds was the first one I read this morning (link via Twitter), I’ll start there.  The possibility of living online is something I’ve been thinking and writing about since 2006.  My first post was prompted by this article from TechCrunch.  As I mentioned there, I had just gotten a nice desktop MacPro and was finding it somewhat annoying to try to juggle between two computers.  I was experimetning with syncing but never certain the right things were being synced in the right direction.  Moving everything online just made sense.  Now, nearly two years later, I often joke that I hope Google doesn’t turn out to be the anti-Christ because I have sold my soul to them.  I use gmail to pull in my email from other accounts.  I did learn the importance of having one account that doesn’t forward since you need a way for Google to email your password when your old brain just can’t seem to get it right and you’re in a hotel room with your 3×5 password cards in your desk drawer at home.  I use Google calendar and have at least one client that can share their calendars with me.  And I find Google docs to be a lifesaver when I’m writing on the road.  You can probably name the rest: LibraryThing keeps track of my books; Diigo stores my favorites and allows me to share with a group; Netvibes organizes all my reading material.  I still like Keynote for creating presentations but more and more of them are ending up at my wikispaces account.  Finally, I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr as a place to pull it all together.

Plus, we are saved from problems like the one I encountered this weekend.  I got a call from a woman who was using Mail 3.0 on her new Macintosh and found that she couldn’t always send emails.  It was a random event: she would send one email but then the very next one wouldn’t go.  Later, when she tried again, it would send just fine.  It didn’t take very much digging to discover that this is a known problem, but evidently one without a ready solution.  I recommended that, if she wished to continue to use a mail client, she download Thunderbird since it appeared to be problem-free.  But I found myself saying that I wasn’t familiar with Mail since I do all my stuff online.  So, in answer to Will’s question, a whole lot of my life is in the clouds.  I worry a bit about trusting my data to someone else, but agree with his comment, “The potential reward of easy collaboration and sharing at this point at least outweigh the risk of losing files.”  And, when I hear stories like this one where a user is held captive by a non-functioning software program, I’m convinced I’m headed in the right direction.

Some Good News!

21st Century Skills, Education, politics

Just got an email from Hilary Goldman, Director of Government Affairs for ISTE, announcing that The Preparing Teachers for Digital Age Learners has been included in the Higher Education Act Reauthorization bill that will be voted on by Congress and signed by the President in the next few weeks.  Thanks to everyone who contacted legislators about this!  Now, maybe I’ll be able to actually provide an interactive white board to my pre-service teachers!

Vacationing With A To Do List

21st Century Skills, Education, technology, ,

After a long month of travel and training, I am home for the whole week.  It is a bit of a vacation..or, actually, a staycation, since I’m not leaving home except to go berry and peach picking and meet with the church secretary to help her with a website.  But, despite telling everyone I was going on vacation, the first thing I did on Monday morning was write a to do list.  Hmm…certainly doesn’t look like a traditional vacation, does it?  And, I probably could afford to take the whole week off.  Turn off the computer, crumple up the list, and just vegetate.  But the fact is, I don’t want to.  For one thing, I would be absolutely bored by Wednesday.  For another, I would have trouble relaxing completely knowing that I have two presentations on August 14th and a course to teach come August 27th.  Instead, it’s easier and less stressful for me to find a spot along the work/play continuum that falls closer to play with still a bit of work.  (As opposed to where I’ve been sitting…very close to the work end…for the past month.)

The problem with the continuum idea, though, is that it still gets at a division between work and play.  But, a lot of what I do for work blends pretty seamlessy into what I do for play.  Even as I surf the web locating materials to share with my pre-service teachers, I am earning points for PMOG, the online game I play.  And, frankly, I find it a lot of fun crafting presentations about teaching and learning in the 21st century.  It is a rare day that I don’t do something that someone would classify as “work,” yet I don’t feel like a workaholic who needs some counseling.  Instead, I feel blessed to have found something I love to do enough to want to do it all the time.

Before you shake your head at my blindness to my own situation, I should point out that I do plenty of stuff offline as well.  Today is “squash bread” day at my house; I’m filling up the freezer with loaves of homemade bread.  Loaves 6 and 7 just came out of the oven, and I’m planning for at least two more but maybe four before the end of the day.  I’ll also be curling up with my current book–Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry–and if yesterday is any indication, I’ll probably end up taking a nap as well.   Then, there’s the bathroom painting project:  we’ve stripped all the wallpaper and are now waiting for primer to dry before we put on the first coat.  Finally, I’ll be freezing and drying blueberries and canning peaches on Thursday and Friday.

So, what’s the point of this little window on my world?  If the World Congress on the Future of Work is to be believed, I represent the future of work.  Unlike my father, who worked 46 years for the same company before retiring, or even my older sister, who has been with her firm for nearly 30 years, I’m a freelancer who has had 6 or 7 different jobs and now run my own business.  In their summary (pdf) of the 2005 World Congress, these are the relevant paragraphs:

In the “old world” of work we went to a corporate office because that’s where our file were, that’s where the company resources (including support staff) were, and that’s where we would meet with colleagues, bosses, suppliers, and even customers. Now, of course, we can do that work anywhere, anytime, and we meet all those fellow workers wherever it’s most convenient. And all too often we blur the boundaries between our professional and our personal lives. We have a tendency to take our laptops, cell phones, PDA’s, and other “tools of the trade” with us just about everywhere we go (including the beach, the golf course, the living room, and the car) because we can – not always because we “have to.”

Many knowledge workers also mix and match their “work day” and their personal time, to the extent that they run personal errands mid-day and make up for it by working late at night. That’s a real benefit of the information economy, but a major complication as well.

That describes me perfectly.  And, learning how to navigate that world is going to be an important skill for us and for our students:

We believe that learning how to choose, and how to set limits on when and where they “work,” will be one of the biggest tasks facing knowledge workers over next few years as they finally begin to take charge of their work, and their lives.

These are not skills I got at school, where someone else usually determined the timetable for completing work, and there was a clear distinction between work time and play time.  I had to learn the hard way that there is a limit to how much work I can do after I spent one really long summer doing workshops every day and prepping for them at night.  By the end of August, I was exhausted, and it certainly wasn’t fun any more.  Now, I know how to block out preparation time on my calendar, and I have a much better sense of how long it takes me to do different tasks.  As we consider the skills that our students will need in the future, perhaps we need to concentrate on the literacy of work, giving students the opportunity to take charge of their own work and, thus, their own lives.

A Microcosmic View of the Macrocosmic Debate

21st Century Skills, Education, leadership, technology, ,

Since I blogged about 21st century skills myself yesterday, I was interested in Scott McLeod’s post on the same topic.  Scott’s post is, of course, interesting in itself as he quotes a variety of reports that show a lack of student-centered instruction in today’s classrooms.  But, for me, the more interesting part of the post are the comments, which show the wide ranging nature of the debate about school reform and the appropriate use of technology in school.  I would encourage you to head over there and get involved yourself.  Here are a few of the topics that lead to the big questions about schooling in the 21st century:

  • Are 21st century skills and tools incompatible with the current system of schooling including the focus on content-based standards and the organization of students in stand-alone classrooms?
  • Do we need to teach kids technology skills at all?
  • How does school need to change to take advantage of the new social networking types of tools such as Twitter or blogs?
  • And then the big question, and I’ll borrow from Neil Postman here: What is the “end” of education?

I’m not going to suggest that I have the answers, and I would be wary of anyone who claims they do.  I am going to use these as a guide for my own thinking and writing in the next few weeks.  But, for now, it’s Sunday morning and my garden is calling.

Aren’t These Really Leadership Skills?

21st Century Skills, Education, leadership, , , ,

Tim over at Assorted Stuff pointed me to Google’s blog post that recommends that students major in learning.  Here’s the short list of skills for which they look in new employees:

  • analytical reasoning
  • communication skills
  • a willingness to experiment
  • team players
  • passion and leadership

As I read the post, I thought about the keynote I’m doing next week in Franklin County.  I’m including a section about 21st century skills.  For awhile now, I’ve been doing a crosswalk between Tom Friedman’s list of skills and the 21st century skills:

skills

It’s easy to see where Google fits right in and I’ll certainly be adding them to my presentation. (Thanks, Tim, for your very timely post.)  By the way, for those who haven’t read Friedman, CQ + PQ > IQ stands for Curiosity Quotient and Passion Quotient which are greater than Intelligence Quotient.

But, I’ve also been taking this a step further.  Google includes “leadership” as one of its skills and I would suggest that all the skills are leadership skills.   Reading the lists reminds me of my favorite leadership writer, Warren Bennis.  I use Bennis for my email signature:  “People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.”  When I started playing with Tumblr again this week, I started by posting more Bennis quotes.

On Becoming a Leader is his classic work. He lists the following characteristics of leaders:

  • Passion
  • Daring
  • Distinctive Voice
  • Integrity
  • Curiosity
  • Adaptive Capacity (essentially the ability to learn)

Note the similarities, and this from someone writing in the 20th century.  Maybe the skills needed to survive in the 21st century are not so different from those needed in the past. I think the major difference now is that we are beginning to understand that these skills are needed by everyone, not just those who are heading to CEO land.  As Tim writes, “That list of factors would pretty much prepare students to work almost anywhere.”

All this thinking about leadership was reinforced for me as I sat at a stop light the other day. I happened to glance at the landscaping truck next to me.  It was advertising employment opportunities and underneath the phone number was the following statement: “We want leader not laborers.”