Teachers Without Borders's List: 21st Century Learners

• Evoke emerged from discussions with universities in Africa who increasingly wanted to find avenues to encourage their students to engage in local communities and develop innovative solutions to local development challenges. The universities were searching for ways to engage students in real world problems and to develop capacities for creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial action that many believe will be the engine for job creation now and in the future.

• Evoke  therefore is designed to empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start solving urgent social problems like hunger, poverty, disease, conflict, climate change, sustainable energy, health care, education, and human rights.; to collaborate with others globally; and to develop real world ideas to address these challenges.

  Players will be challenged to complete a series of ten missions and ten quests -- one per week, over the course of the ten-week game.   The "text book" for this course is an online graphic novel written by Emmy-award nominated producer Kiyash Monsef. 

• The game's creative director, alternate reality pioneer 

  Jane McGonigal

  , is debuting the game at this week's

  TED conference

   in Long Beach, California.  As she describes the game, "An evoke is an urgent call to innovation.  When we evoke, we look for creative solutions. We use whatever resources we have. We get as many people involved as possible. We take risks. We come up with ideas that have never been tried before. That's what we're asking players to do in this online game. To learn how to tackle the world's toughest problems with creativity, courage, resourcefulness and collaboration."

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• It had been commissioned in the heady early days of the Blair government to recommend ways to make progress in the "creative and cultural development of young people" both in and out of school.

  The review was led by Sir Ken Robinson and included leading scientists, business leaders, and key figures from the arts world.

• it was about encouraging pupils to be innovative and to develop the ability to problem-solve in all areas of the curriculum, from maths to technology.

  It argued that such skills were essential to individuals, employers and the whole economy.
• All Our Futures
• Determined to show it was tough in standards, Labour's drive was focused on the Numeracy and Literacy Hours.

• the whole tenor of the report was that creativity and culture are not some sort of bolt-on activities, but are skills that should be developed throughout all aspects of teaching and learning, in science as much as in the arts.

  In some ways the report was ahead of its time.

  It called for a reduction in the burden of assessment and said the national curriculum should be reduced to take up no more than 80% of the timetable.

• there is still a long way to go before creativity is seen as fundamental to teaching and learning in schools.

  The current fierce debate about the national tests, or Sats, at age 11 hinges on whether they contribute to a narrowing of the curriculum, with many teachers and schools feeling they dominate the final years of primary school.
• the accountability criteria that determine success or failure for schools and teachers are overwhelmingly based on formal tests, particularly covering English and maths, not on indicators that reflect pupils' creativity.

• a report published this week by the new charity Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE) highlights research suggesting that a focus on creativity in schools need not be at the expense of achievement in the basics.

  Indeed, it claims the very opposite: that creativity boost exam results and attendance.

  The report looks at the record of a programme called Creative Partnerships.
• According to research from the independent National Foundation for Educational Research, which covered 13,000 young people, pupils who have taken part in Creative Partnerships' programmes have often outperformed others who have not been involved.

• The results of this study suggest that Creative Partnerships is contributing to improved levels of attainment."

  In particular, it found that "Young people who have attended Creative Partnerships activities made, on average, the equivalent of 2.5 grades better progress in GCSE than similar young people in other schools."
• the NFER evidence which suggests Creative Partnerships programmes have been associated with an "educationally significant reduction in absence rates in primary schools".

• It found "improvements in literacy, particularly writing, and speaking were significant in the majority of schools visited".

  Educational research is rarely definitive as there are always so many other variables involved in pupil attainment.

  But the evidence so far seems to back the view that putting a real emphasis on creative and cultural education in schools has broad benefits.

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• What is interesting is that there is also no real agreement as to what should be measured or even whether it can be measured in order to quantify success in this regard. Institutions--whether K-12 or higher education--that have adopted technology for instruction often have little or no systematic methodology in place for instructional technology use or how its success can or should be measured
• What is interesting is that there is also no real agreement as to what should be measured or even whether it can be measured in order to quantify success in this regard. Institutions--whether K-12 or higher education--that have adopted technology for instruction often have little or no systematic methodology in place for instructional technology use or how its success can or should be measured.
• What is interesting is that there is also no real agreement as to what should be measured or even whether it can be measured in order to quantify success in this regard. Institutions--whether K-12 or higher education--that have adopted technology for instruction often have little or no systematic methodology in place for instructional technology use or how its success can or should be measured.
• What is interesting is that there is also no real agreement as to what should be measured or even whether it can be measured in order to quantify success in this regard. Institutions--whether K-12 or higher education--that have adopted technology for instruction often have little or no systematic methodology in place for instructional technology use or how its success can or should be measured
• In other words, much of the reason we are not discovering in any meaningful way of measuring whether technology truly improves the learning experience for students or helps them attain the learning outcomes more efficiently is that the knowledge of the technology itself is smattered and that little is consistently taught to those who are currently teaching.
• Additionally, misconceptions exist around the direct role of technology in the learning process, and, often, the technology is regarded as the teacher rather than a tool used by teachers and students to support the dynamic process of learning.
• A short answer: The more we remain fixated with standardized assessments, the less likely we will be to truly measure the kind of learning that is currently taking place in technology-supported learning environments.

• Conversely, teachers who continue to use older standards for measurement because they do not use new technology are still working with students who do use technology elsewhere or who have been affected by new technology in their thinking and perceptions.

   

  As a result, those students may seem to be failing entire courses of study while they really may be demonstrating many skills that are not being valued by a grade percentage.
• While we do still require teachers to know their disciplines and to be knowledgeable in their specific content areas, we do not require teachers to be content-driven but to be (teaching and learning) process-driven.
• Focus on how rather than what.
• Focus on why rather than when
• Focus on future trends rather than current practices.

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• The fact is that my peers had done what no English teacher had been able to do -- inspire me to read and write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in the school literary journal. On one occasion, a poem of mine I read aloud in class (one of the few occasions I actually attended a class that year) produced a spontaneous ovation from my classmates.

• He pushed the association to examine the issue two years ago after seeing a newspaper ad for $500 laptops and realizing that, in a few years, it will be cheaper to give each student a computer than continually provide up-to-date textbooks.
• it's about "creating stimulating school environments" in the digital age.
• "Many students feel that when they come into school they have to `power down' to fit into an environment that offers fewer options for learning than are available in the life they live outside of the school. This can erode students' perceptions of the relevance of education as they experience it in many schools today."
• Indeed, today's report notes that teachers, too, need support and training.

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• The phrase "21st-century skills" gets 232,000 hits on Google. Problem is, not everyone is sure what the phrase means.
• The Web site of the Tucson-based Partnership for 21st Century Skills says the skills include creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and collaboration.
• But many teachers say it is just good teaching with a jazzy name. "The subject of 21st-century or, rather, current-century skills has been around ever since Socrates," said John M. Clement, a science teacher in Houston. Researchers are struggling to find ways to determine which schools are teaching it well and which are not, while educators wonder whether it will be just one more fad.
• Elena Silva
• The best learning happens, the report asserts, when students learn basic content and processes, such as the rules and procedures of arithmetic, at the same time that they learn how to think and solve problems.
• "The common idea that we can teach thinking without a solid foundation of knowledge must be abandoned. So must the idea that we can teach knowledge without engaging students in thinking. Knowledge and thinking must be intimately joined," says Lauren Resnick, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a leading expert on cognitive science.
• But I see little guidance for classroom teachers in 21st-century skills materials. How are millions of students still struggling to acquire 19th-century skills in reading, writing and math supposed to learn this stuff?
• In a knowledge economy, the reasoning goes, the ability to articulate and solve problems, to generate original ideas, and to work collaboratively across cultural boundaries is growing exponentially in importance. The challenge for schools is to find ways to shift from traditional rote learning and teach these skills, while still doing due diligence to the three R's. The good news about 21st-century skills, advocates say, is that they can be integrated into core subjects. …"
• "…Whether or not the trendy label of "21st-century skills" lasts, says Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at the Education Sector in Washington, what's important is the evolving research on how people learn. Teachers were long taught to cover content first and wait for children to get older before having them apply it, she says, but now research shows that "people learn best by learning content at the same time they are acquiring [and applying] new skills."

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• John Norton says we should be asking ourselves..."What skills and qualities of mind do we want our graduates to  have?" Related question: "How do we assess whether students are  acquiring these skills and qualities of mind?"

• The new assessments will  have to do the following:

    

  ** Be largely performance-based. We need to  know how students apply
  content knowledge to critical-thinking,  problem-solving, and
  analytical tasks throughout their education, so that we  can help them
  hone this ability and come to understand that successful  learning is
  as much about the process as it is about facts and  figures.

    

  ** Make students' thinking visible. The assessments should  reveal the
  kinds of conceptual strategies a student uses to solve a  problem.

    

  ** Generate data that can be acted upon. Teachers need to be  able to
  understand what the assessment reveals about students' thinking. And  
  school administrators, policymakers, and teachers need to be able to
  use  this assessment information to determine how to create better
  opportunities  for students.

    

  ** Build capacity in both teachers and students.  Assessments should
  provide frequent opportunity for feedback and revision,  so that both
  teachers and students learn from the process.

    

  ** Be part  of a comprehensive and well-aligned continuum. Assessment
  should be an  ongoing process that is well-aligned to the target
  concepts, or core ideas,  reflected in the standards.

    
• I do not think teachers have a choice anymore, in fact I would go so far to say we have a moral responsibility of making sure all children are able to master these skills in the safety net of our classrooms. Every student is already living in a Flat World and to prepare them for their world of work, not ours, we need to help them understand how to use the tools to be competitive and collaborative. Unlike us, they need to be skilled at using tools to collaborate across the planet to compete with global markets.
• Literacy in the 21st Century is not based on do you know it- rather, can you find it, analyze it, adapt it, and synthesize it? John Tao says as we move out of the information age into this new era of creativity an individual’s value will not be based on what he knows, but what he can create.
• In their future, our students will be working with teams in virtual spaces that they have never met, on goals that are abstract. They need to understand how to adapt and create.
• The goal of School 2.0 is not to do away with content, but to make sure the outcomes in that content are immersed in 21st Century skills.
• We also need to focus on pre-service learning in the development in 21st Century skills. Ken felt that it is appalling that colleges of education are not at the front of this 21st Century skills movement. Teacher preparation programs should be embedding 21st Century skills with their content courses, modeling 21st skills in their instruction and delivery, and helping preservice teachers use Web 2.0 tools to collaborate and build community so that they can get the support they need outside of the classroom once they are on their own. Teachers should share best practice first with each other and then beyond their own schools through virtual learning communities.

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• What does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge — broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider — the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others.
• So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.
• But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but in Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability — if less for Rousseau and still less for Thoreau, the most famous solitary of all, then certainly for Wordsworth, Melville, Whitman, and many others.
• The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever, it has become inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot's London, Joyce's Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people. The soul is forced back into itself — hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling's "authenticity,"
• But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd.
• What technologies of transportation exacerbated — we could live farther and farther apart — technologies of communication redressed — we could bring ourselves closer and closer together.
• Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with one another and marginalized people to find one another. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay teenager no longer has to feel like a freak. But as the Internet's dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago we were writing e-mail messages on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our cellphones, posting pictures on our Facebook pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone.
• My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude.
• our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.
• (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn't have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.
• We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
• And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The Internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world — that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
• But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model — and this should come as no surprise — is that of the networked or social mind.
• The MySpace page, with its shrieking typography and clamorous imagery, has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating one's sense of self
• Today's young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.
• Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts. But no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific or moral, can arise without solitude. "The saint and poet seek privacy," Emerson said, "to ends the most public and universal." We are back to the seer, seeking signposts for the future in splendid isolation.
• Solitude isn't easy, and isn't for everyone. It has undoubtedly never been the province of more than a few. "I believe," Thoreau said, "that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark." Teresa and Tiresias will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young people — and they still exist — who prefer to loaf and invite their soul, who step to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and social idea, will even the exceptions remain possible? Still, one is powerless to reverse the drift of the culture. One can only save oneself — and whatever else happens, one can still always do that. But it takes a willingness to be unpopular.
• But Thoreau understood that securing one's self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.

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