Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

Ben Franklin

21st Century Skills

I was poking around the web and found Bartleby’s amazing collection of The Harvard Classics.  The cornerstone of the collection is Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.  The introductory note linked below outlines Franklin’s many accomplishments from printer to writer to farmer to researcher.  He demonstrated lots of 21st century skills!  But he did it in the 18th century.  (So maybe he demonstrated 19th century skills but because he did it a generation before, that made him visionary?)  What are some of these skills?   The ability to reinvent himself as he moved through his life.  A sense of creativity and whimsy. Perhaps, the most fundamental was his ability to efficiently and effectively utilize the research and communication tools available to him at the time.

Introductory Note. Benjamin Franklin. 1909-14. His Autobiography. The Harvard Classics

Dropping Acid and Rolling in the Mud

21st Century Skills, Media, music

So, I can’t get that image from my mind.  I listened to most of Tom Brokaw’s book about the sixties and he conveyed the sense of the world changing, of new freedom and power for people who hadn’t had them before.  Is that what the snow day video is all about: young people asserting new freedom and power, this time through a technology that allows them to bypass the “usual channels.”  I would argue this might be a healthier version of dropping acid and rolling in the mud.

Saturday is get organized and clean something day at my house so I’m going to make this short.  I finished the outline for my 21st Century Assessment presentation.   I’m going to start with the whole snow day thing.  Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of it, but it just seems to hint at what we really mean when we talk about 21st century skills.  This is more than manipulating the technology: there’s a creativity there, enhanced by access to the tech.  In the outline, I embedded one of the video responses that is a suggested reading list for the woman.  It’s very funny: again, it’s about the creativity rather than the technology.

As we worked in the office this morning, we listened to Alan Parsons Project.  Started with Eye in the Sky and then moved to Tales of Mystery and Imagination, which is based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.  One of my favorites.  And it occurred to me that Parsons’ take on Poe represents a great example of what I would think of as a 21st century assessment.  He interpreted the stories both lyrically and musically, demonstrating his understanding of the stories but also using them to build his own knowledge.

21st Century Assessments

21st Century Skills, thinking out loud

I am doing a presentation on this topic at EdTech 2008. I’ve spent a lot of time considering 21st century skills but haven’t ever formally organized on the topic. So here’s some stream of conscious thinking: sort of what popped into my mind first.

Defining The Subject

I got it wrong (as usual). I was thinking I would be talking about how to integrate 21st century assessments in the classroom. Alternatives to writing another report, which we learned in Frontline’s Growing Up Online, is probably plagiarized. But, at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website, it’s more about how to assess 21st century skills. They tend to point towards tests. But I’m wondering if the two ways of coming at assessment could work together: the way to assess 21st century skills is by incorporating 21st century assessments.

So, what’s a 21st century assessments? (Don’t you like how I managed to justify talking about what I wanted to talk about?) Here’s Tuttle’s (2007) suggestion:

Effective 21st century assessment reaches beyond traditional testing to look at the broader accomplishments of learners. Assembling an e-portfolio, or electronic portfolio, is an excellent method for assessing students’ progress toward school, state, or national academic standards, as well as 21st century skills. An electronic portfolio is a purposefully limited collection of student selected work over time that documents progress toward meeting the standards. Work may be collected over a semester, a year, or even several years, passing from one grade level and teacher to the next. E-portfolios reflect more in-depth, more comprehensive, and better thought-out evidence of student learning than on-demand tests. For instance, a student’s three-hour state benchmark essay offers the feedback of a 5/6 score, while an e-portfolio allows students to document the many aspects of their essay writing improvement over the course of a year.

Excellent: eportfolios cover a whole host of the 21st century skills. Of course, portfolios were available in the 20th century, too; my high school collected student work over the course of middle school and high school. But it was haphazard to say the least, boxes of folders that had to be divided each year, with no way to get them to kids who left over the summer, etc. Digital is definitely better, pushing this into the 21st century category. Plus, if we’re incorporating the ICT skills, our kids should be creating digital artifacts that will fit nicely into those portfolios. (Although I’d like to put in a plug for having kids make “real” things out of shoe boxes or cereal cartons at least every now and then. I still remember fondly the model of the train from The Great Train Robbery that I made in 9th grade. Then, I could create the digital tour of my train to post to my portfolio. Aaah…now, I think I’m getting the hang of developing 21st century assessments.)

So, we’ve covered the core content, ICT, as well as things like self-reflection and taking ownership. Maybe even creativity and communication.

20th Century Skills

There are a few skills that were definitely 20th century expectations, too. Things like punctuality and personal responsibility. My K-12 career happened during the 20th century, and I often sat with mothers of middle schoolers scheming about how to help them develop more initiative, self direction, productivity and personal accountability, to use their 21st century names. In fact, if you looked at my grading system, some of it at least was an attempt to encourage these skills: I gave a homework grade. I gave a notebook grade. I took off points when you failed to meet a project deadline. If you looked at my plan book, some of it was an attempt to encourage these skills: built in check points for students to engage in self reflection about their work, explicit instruction in notetaking and organization, and, right at the end of my classroom time, using technology to communicate.

Leadership Skills

I am most intrigued by the Life and Career Skills. As I mentioned, a lot of them were 20th century expectations that seem to have taken on an urgency as we move into the 21st century. Others seem to be more about the kinds of skills kids develop when they participate in after school activities. Taken together, I think they represen a roadmap for leadership. And, the question in K-12 becomes the same question in graduate school: can we teach people to be leaders?

The Easy Ones

I think the 21st century skills we have at least started to figure out are the Information, Media and Technology skills. Why? Because they have 20th century counterparts. And they can be taught in isolation. The librarian, now the media specialist, has always taught information skills. Media literacy has often been a part of the language arts curriculum. Even technology. It overlaps a lot with information literacy; it’s about accessing information, so in my day the technology was the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.

And, it’s about using technology to organize knowledge and information. I think that’s the biggie here. We didn’t have so many choices for organizing our knowledge: write a report, make a poster, maybe do something creative like a song or poem. I can still do all those things but add the collaborative, network-based component as well as the access to materials and easy publishing for sharing that knowledge and we’re into the realm of the 21st century.

Students Call Officials’ Homes When School Isn’t Called Off For Snow – News- msnbc.com

21st Century Skills, Civil Discourse, Media, Media Literacy

Students Call Officials’ Homes When School Isn’t Called Off For Snow – News- msnbc.com

So, the MSNBC story and it gives some better detail.  The most important piece, probably, that wasn’t covered in the AP story was that this wasn’t the first phone call:

But recently, this role has resulted in dozens of phone calls to his home, many from students and some in the middle of the night. Other students have sent profane e-mails to the administration.

So, now we get a better view of the situation at least from the administrator’s wife.  Interesting media literacy lessons, here.  Check different stories.  Wait for a day before drawing too many conclusions.

Think Twice

21st Century Skills, adult learning, Civil Discourse, Media Literacy, New Media, Paradigm Shifts, technology, YouTube

From a colleague of mine as part of a discussion of protecting privacy:

Sorry, if you’re offended that I embedded it, but you need the effect before the story. Here’s the AP version. And, here’s Doug Feaver’s take on it at the Washington Post. Feaver reviews comments from readers on the story. He says, “I’m with the kid, but of course a recording of whatever message he left has not been made available so perhaps I would have a different view if it were.” That’s what I thought was interesting. The only person who can publish Kori’s message is the administrator’s wife. And, as long as we can’t hear Kori’s message, we really can’t judge for ourselves. Did she delete it? Or, is she just not adding fuel? Or was it a pretty reasonable message and she just overreacted? In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but like, Feaver, I wonder in whose favor the pendulum of public opinion would swing if we heard the original phone message.

Here were two of my favorite back and forth comments about the incident:

readerny said, “I don’t agree with the tirade by the woman who answered the call, BUT as an employer of young adults, I can say that there are some (not all) who are overempowered and think that they know the whole story, or more than you do, and should be running the show themselves…”

But Nicester wrote, “Overempowered kid” and “self-centered youth” – OK, that’s one perspective. Sounds a bit like “whippersnapper” or whatever the Greatest Generation was calling the Baby Boomers when they were dropping acid and rolling in the mud at Woodstock…”

I just feel sorry for this woman, sacrificed on the altar of the digital generation gap. And, like the story about Heath Ledger and the blogs, it’s a story about the future of “news” in the 21st century. What if the kid hadn’t had access to the Internet? He might have sent the tape to the television news, but they have may have demanded to have his recording. He gets to bypass all those gatekeepers and tell his side of the story in a way that kids have never been able to do.

In the end, I find her tirade to be funny rather than offensive. “Snot-nosed brats” was the worst of it. It is more important as a reminder that digital recording and distribution is almost transparent, and perhaps will finally lead to people living by the old adage, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” We have left behind the era of deniability.

I’m tagging this one 21st century skills because I wonder how this fits in? I’m also going to tag it adult learning 😉