What is a 21st Century Learner?

I have been reading with interest lately, a variety of definitions about "What is a 21st Century Learner?"

One blog that I like to visit on occasion is called Teach Paperless. In June, Shelly wrote an interesting mission statement and personal mission statement about 21st Century Skills that all teachers should check out. Along with their mission statement, the writer also included a great list of 21st Century Skills that students require to become lifelong learners ready to take on an ever changing world as future workers. Here's the list:

• Critical Media Network Skills: the ability in a networked environment to recognize when you are being taken advantage of via special interests and the ability to argue within the dominant paradigm of a global network with acuity and accuracy based upon the application of historical, philosophical, creative, and intellectual skills grounded in the history of human thought and applied to the spontaneity and immediate global impact of 21st century networked communications.

• Participatory and Networked Information and Communication Skills: the ability to take part in one’s global society on equal footing with any other human via the immediacy and power of digital networks. Long-term, this may mean sharing any variety of networked consciousnesses.

• Collaborative Social Meta-Thinking: the ability to learn from and give back to both local community-based and global-based digital social networks. This may extend in future environments to nanotechnology merging with on-demand personalized virtual reality.

• Creative Network Confidence and Digital Community Stewardship: the ability to use the global network for both the purposes of creative problem solving and for the benefit of peaceful co-existence between peoples, animals, ecologies, and environments.

• Digital Cunning: students will learn that merely ‘using technology’ does not mean that you are either educated in or are a contributing member to the global network. Drawing on a strong Liberal Arts background merged with Digital Age critical thinking skills, students will be able to distinguish between participatory media and authoritarian media even when the latter cloaks itself as the former.

• Awareness of Digital History and Digital Divide: the ability to understand historical analog modalities and to recognize the value of pre-digital and non-digital media as well as the temporary nature of specific technologies within historical evolution; the ability to understand and through social action compensate for and help to eliminate digital distinctions based on economics, politics, geography, and race.

Another blog that I like to read is David Warlick's. On August 24th, Warlick wrote about a definition for What is 21st Century Learning? I found his definition interesting because he juxtaposes it with what skills a pre-digital learner required (listening, watching and remembering) compared to what skills a 21st Century learner needs now. Here's his definition:

In the digital age, where information is abundant (overwhelming) and the future is always a BIG question, I think that learning expands out of listening, watching, and remembering to include:

• questioning your learning experience,
  
• engaging your information environment,
  
• proving (and disproving) what you find,
  
• Constructing (inventing) new learning and knowledge [added later]
  
• teaching others what you have learned
  
• being respected for the power of your learning, and
  
• being responsible for your learning and its outcomes

I also found Warlick's point about the term "engagement" interesting. Instead of making it the responsibility of the teacher to engage the students, he makes it the responsibility of the learner. "...attach the verb to the students. The students will engage with their information environment (textbook, whiteboard, Internet) to learn through questioning, experimentation, discovery, and construction)."

Since this is exactly what I'm trying to do this year while working within my new school structure, I think Warlick's post came at just the right time to help me to reflect and to reafirm what I'm trying to do in my classroom. More to come this weekend when I have the chance to reflect on the first 10 days of the school year under a new structure.

Tuesday Morning Keynote IT Summit - David Warlick - Redefining Literacy

My notes from the presentation:

David used Prezi.com to make his presentation. Definitely something I'm going to check out for making future presentations.

Backchannel at: http://davidwarlick.com/knitter

Teacher must be a master learner and practice these skills in front of its students. Share something you learned in the last 24 hours.

Handout of the presentation: http://davidwarlick.com/handouts

Second Life Office: http://davidwarlick.com/sl/

Second Life allows us to create a library without constraints.

David is a result of a "perfect education" who performed repetitive tasks, in straight rows. Preparing a workforce who would work in a career for 30 years and then retire.

The telephone has changed the way we do things. It is now an example of redundancy where technology has changed to not require it anymore. Print newspapers are migrating to the web because they are too expensive to print anymore.

We are spending too much time teaching children on how to use paper. It is important to teach them how to manipulate digital information.

Webcams & Skype are breaking down the walls and allowing people to participate even when they can't travel or afford to go to a workshop, conference or class.

Conclusion: We need to stop integrating technology to teach how to use tools, but we need to teach literacy to be able to process and understand information landscape of the future. We need to be able to ask questions and be skeptical of any information that is provided to us. We need to question where it comes from. We need to develop critical thinking skills.

We need to be "digital detectives" and backtrack to see where our information has come from. Collect digital clues to see the source of the website. example: http://martinluthrking.org/ is really published by a white supremacy group called Storm Front. We were brought up in a generation where teachers gave us information and we could trust it because they knew the source. Digital information is different because we don't always know the source.

Exposing what's True!

• find
• critically evaluate
• organize
• apply

How to understand numbers: Library of Links from Landmark tools on http://landmark-project.com/, click on raw data. Demonstration of how to understand numbers using spreadsheets like Excel.

Writing: audience is wider by the way that final product is presented. Video is very powerful and shared with the world on the web. To whom are we communicating?

Expressing ideas in different ways: schools who don't prepare students for their future are sweatshops preparing students for our pasts.

We must include ownership of information in our definition of literacy... respect of ownnership, accuracy and infrastructure.

Definition of Contemporary Literacy:

• exposing what's true
• employing the information
• expressing ideas compellingly
• using information ethically.
  

Sharing of a website: We're Not Afraid.com a website made by a student the day after the London bombing. Anyone could post photos.

For a great concept map of his presentation, see it in Warlick's Conference notes.