Excerpt from
Digitally Speaking.pbworks.com (two middle school teachers)
What
will our world look like in 2020?
- more diversified population
- higher tech and more evenly
distributed
- intellectual capacity more
distributed
- continuing issues with war,
famine and environmental issues
- Local economy will be more
urban, strong, high tech, more dense and cosmopolitan.
- greater competition from
around the world
- ease of travel between
countries, more mobile, “blurred country borders”
- live longer, more healthy,
work longer
- speaking and communicating
in a language other than English
- economy more service
industry related
- more well-rounded culture
- Technology is key to
society. Current training is not sufficient.
- We could lose our economic
edge.
What
will a world-class, globally-competitive graduate need to know and be able to
do?
- continue skill acquisition
(lifelong)
- ability to communicate,
strong interpersonal communications skills, reach out to diverse
populations
- critical thinking skills,
ability to validate information
- higher level thinkers,
ability to work as a team
- understand what the “global
economy” is and how it is going to impact students
- ability to bring disparate
subjects together to understand the system (knowledge integration)
- sound basic liberal arts
education (foundation)
- collaborate in a
multi-cultural environment; global teaming
- higher proficiency in a
specialized area, ability to adapt
- multi-cultural fluency
(language, culture, history and government)
- having the capacity to think
about other cultures and how they live
(Wake Education Partnership, "2008
Education Forum Results." E-mail to 'author'.28 Feb 2008.)
Translating Tomorrow
into Today’s Classroom:
Easily
the greatest struggle that educators face in today's day and age is properly
preparing students for a future that is poorly defined yet rapidly changing and
increasingly borderless. While most educators, parents and business
leaders know that something must change, we often struggle to imagine what
those changes might look like.
Thankfully,
leading thinkers on teaching and learning are beginning to tackle this question
in a very structured and systematic way. In a 2008 post on his blog, (http://tinyurl.com/2pus42) Will Richardson---widely
recognized as one of America's most progressive
educational thinkers---worked to define the kinds of skills that would be
necessary for students to succeed in an increasingly interconnected
world. He wrote:
Our kids’ futures will
require them to be:
- Networked–They’ll need an “outboard brain.”
- More collaborative–They are going to need to work
closely with people to co-create information.
- More globally aware–Those collaborators may be anywhere
in the world.
- Less dependent on paper–Right now, we are still paper
training our kids.
- More active–In just about every sense of the word.
Physically. Socially. Politically.
- Fluent in creating and consuming hypertext–Basic
reading and writing skills will not suffice.
- More connected–To their communities, to their
environments, to the world.
- Editors of information–Something we should have been
teaching them all along but is even more important now.
