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| This is the logo for the Shanghai TechFest and I love it. We can dress them up like us — but they are not us. |
Yesterday, I taught a workshop on blogging to middle and high school teachers at to Pudong campus of the Shanghai American School. Jeff Utecht, who has been attending all of my workshops (poor guy), commented that only a very small part of the workshop was actually about blogging. Most of it was about Web 2.0, the spirit of an information experience that is about sharing, conversation, and infinitely connectable content. There is magic there. It’s wonderful. Blah blah blah blah blah!
We’re starting to talk about School 2.0 — classrooms, schools, and an education system that is characterized more by its conversations than what gets taught and what gets learned — where, how you learn it is more important than what you learn. It’s wonderful. Blah blah blah blah blah!
It’s all magical!
It’s all smoke and mirrors!
What I’m waiting for is the conversation about Student 2.0 and Graduate 2.0. What should the 21st century graduate/citizen know, know how to do, want to do, want to be? What should be their dream and their path to get there.
We can’t invent this next great generation in our own image. It’s cracked and crusty. We must figure out how to invent them out of our imagination. Invent or cultivate something new.
Blah blah blah blah blah?
Image Citation:
TechFest 2007 Logo. Perf. David Gran. Digital Image. 2007.
We cannot invent Student 2.0, only the stakeholders can do so. We are not the stakeholders – Generation ? are they….now I feel old….
One of our English teachers asked her 10th graders to view Karl Fisch’s video 2020 and then the class brainstormed future developments, and then the skills they might need to meet those.
Their list is posted on our Vision committee’s blog here:
http://trends.edublogs.org/2006/12/01/what-10th-graders-will-need-to-succeed/
and their list of future events is here:
http://trends.edublogs.org/2006/12/01/whs-10th-grade-future-predictions/
Interestingly, their predictions were a little dire, but their list of skills needed was pretty positive and included a lot of “right-brained” types of skills.
Fully agree that the tipping point does not include ‘us’ ‘inventing’ ‘them’ on any level. While School 2.0 ‘is’ something that can be conceptually created by ‘us’ in the spirit of evolving the entire premise of learning and collaboration, it would be pretentious — at best — to say that our premise oughta be the creation of ‘student 2.0’ or even ‘citizen 2.0’ at the end of the day.
The validation point for school in the past was the creation of a very clear type of outcome: the student, the worker, the citizen
If anything, the conversation must shift from what we intentionally create to what we give promise to.
Now, as to the skills that should be in the hands of each and every graduate, call it what you will but I seek programs that foster an ability to see patterns when things seemingly do not connect. Statistics? Analysis? Future-think? Gestalt?
I’m comfortable with whatever semantic spin we offer it, but pattern-sensing seems to me to be a fairly valuable skill set to have in the days, months, years to come.
What could be more important still?
Knowing where to find resources to help one makes sense of patterns forming…and knowing how to make ‘tangible’ what needs to come next.
I am currently on a committee that is trying to set up a conference to discuss the future of Computing as a subject in schools. (That is Computing as opposed to computer literacy or information literacy.) One of the issues I was keen to explore in this conference is what are today’s pupils like? What are their needs? What do they currently do with technology and what use do they have for a Computing qualification?
We were just talking about it this morning… and I read this blog entry this afternoon. I love the logo and the quote, “We can’t invent this next great generation in our own image.” Brilliant!
I think I’ll need to direct the rest of the committee to this entry. 🙂
The last line of that post implies a little more power as creators than we probably have. It’s more of a conversation, between generations. …and isn’t cultivation, in a sense, like a conversation between the farmer and the elements?