Redefining the 21st Century Learner

Earlier today, I was asked to demonstrate my understanding of the term '21st Century Learner'. I was pleasantly surprised by the question and found myself mentally reviewing a few of the conversations I'd had with colleagues in recent days.

The term may have been adopted to spur educators to consider the relevance of learning experiences being offered to students; to embrace emerging tools in the classroom; and to inspire an evolution in our practice. Now that it's 2010, and we're well into the new millennium, my observations are that the term has failed to engage a majority of educators in critical reflection of their own teaching practice.

By the time I was finished critiquing the term, I was faced with a follow-up question: What term would you use in place of 21st Century Learner?

In considering a more apt term to represent today's school-aged learners, I put forth the term 'refugees'. I went on to explain that I see students every day, who have to unplug, disconnect, and go solo in a world whose terrain is foreign to the way they regularly interact. Rather than interact via mobile devices tethered by invisible signals, most of today's students have to wait for teacher permission to communicate, and even then, can only network with students in the same room. In many ways, it's like being forced to speak a unique language while being contained in a foreign land. What they wouldn't give, to have the freedom to return to their 'home country'!

How would you have responded?
Have you grown tired of the term 21st Century Learner?
Do terms like Digital Native and Digital Immigrant now strike you as failed attempts to categorize youth and their not-quite-so-techy parents and teachers?
Do you have an apt metaphor for today's learners in today's schools?
Do you see today's learners as 'Time Travelers', 'LOST passengers', 'bats without radar', or something different?

The audio version of this story is available as today's episode on The Clever Sheep Podcast.

Image Credit: Alex Mickla

What does Quorum Sensing have to do with Me?

I admit it, I'm hooked on learning. I get a rush when I discover something new, especially if it's something known to relatively few people. Today, I learned about Quorum Sensing, and a whole lot more, from the behavior of bacteria.

Bonnie Bassler's hyper-enthusiastic TED Talk from one year ago, is focused on bacteria and bio-chemistry, but if you pay attention, she weaves many lessons into her talk.



Prone to thinking metaphorically, I'm left wondering how our own networked learning might one day lead us to collectively shine our light, to brighten the paths of tomorrow's learners. Is it possible for the online ed-tech collective to enlighten our 'hosts'?

Learning in Conversation

I'm not sure if it's true everywhere, but in many of the school offices I visit, students are treated like second class citizens... or worse. It was on my mind late last week, so I've blurted out my opinions in today's podcast. If the content strikes a nerve with you, I hope you'll take the time to add your comments to the conversation.

Long Distance Guest Speaker Directory

Over the weekend, I was privy to an engaging discussion among a few key members of my personal learning network. To make sense of the conversation, read the screen capture from bottom to top:


Knowing that a number of free tools now make it possible for teachers to engage the services of guest speakers from just about anywhere in the world, I began to wonder:

"What might result if we were to collaborate in the creation of a database of long distance guest speakers?"

Do you know any people with unique areas of expertise who might be interested in sharing their knowledge with students? Adults with unique careers? Educators with specific areas of expertise? Young people with motivational ideas? Retirees with engaging stories to share? Who do you think would be ideally suited as long distance guest speakers in global classrooms?

Speakers might identify themselves as willing participants; or educators might recommend known speakers from past experience. The resulting database might then accessed by teachers from anywhere in the world.

Education Abandons Communication

I started thinking about how Twitter is very much a social networking tool for adults that is similar in some ways to MSN chat, and in other ways is like email. This thinking prompted me to a thought experiment comparing the adoption of tools used for communication:

(Creative Commons Licensed by Rodd Lucier)

While it's dangerous to generalize, I'm coming to a fearful discovery: "It's not that education fails to take advantage of technology; it's that education fails to take advantage of most forms of communication that cross time & space."

Common practice seems to be in the here and now, whether speaking to people who are present; or writing for people who are present. Although there are many exemplary learning experiences taking advantage of communications technologies, these exemplars are far less common than so-called 'traditional' learning experiences.

More detailed thinking on this topic is available on the Teacher 2.0 Podcast: Unharnessed Communications Technologies.

Smart Mobs and a More Cooperative Future

Thanks to Robin Good's nudge, I've taken some time to explore Howard Rheingold's inquiry about cooperation. Understanding that the most effective evolving web 2.0 tools relies on cooperative participation, "A New Story About the Way Humans Get Things Done" has many ramifications for education.

I agree with Howard Rheingold's contention that the dynamics of social/collective action can be multiplied by the use of communications technologies... like cell phones. His 2002 book: Smart Mobs, set the stage for the recently released TED Talk he gave three years ago. It's 18 minutes of information that is of great importance to those actively creating the future of education.



In a more complete screencast, Howard uses images and voice to teach about cooperative strategies. If you have the time, see how the work of "smart mobs" are creating the potential for a more collaborative and less competitive future. The Cooperation Commons seeks to model this work in sharing research and resources on this topic. Key quote: "The most important new technologies will not be hardware or software, but social practices."

Click To Play

Instant or Nothing

Educators need to realize that while young people today do not understand how to make effective use of all evolving technologies, the one thing young people really do understand is the effectiveness of 'instant communication'.

Attracted to e-tools that instantly link them with their peers, youth of today are embracing instant messaging via MSN; cell phones; text messaging; and visiting with friends 'in real time' on Facebook.

At the same time, teachers seem by and large to have embraced e-mail as their preferred form of electronic communication. Usually asynchronous, email is something young people seem to be shunning in favour of instant communication tools.

The next big thing may well be 'instant group communication'. With the exception of 'Blackberry' addicts, I think society at large has yet to latch onto this, but tools like Twitter for group texting, and Foonz for group cell phone calls, will soon be the norm rather than the cool cutting edge way to communicate... at least with young people!

Teachers, are you not tweating yet? Head on over to Twitter and get your free account. Maybe you can latch on to a technology before your students do! 'Follow' the actions of colleagues and friends and classrooms around the world. If you're short on network nodes, you can always find 'thecleversheep'!

Reading is Changing

No, the focus of this entry is not the 'Kindle', Yahoo's recently launched e-book reader. I firmly believe that if people have to bring something along for the ride, an actual book is a lot more convenient! No batteries, no worries about theft, no need to download anything... just bring it along.

I believe the skill of reading is changing none-the-less. I know in my personal life, much of my reading is done reading text from my computer screen (PDFs, Web content, blogs...). My children also spend much of their time reading online text (albeit much of that written by their friends and classmates). With the sheer volume of text to be reviewed in a given day, it is proving to be necessary to be a different type of reader, than we were taught to be in school. With the explosion in content sure to continue, we need to prepare young people to be learners who are able to scan for keywords and topic sentences; to be researchers who are efficient at extracting key ideas; to be documentarians who can track their hyper-learning; to be judges, able to critically consider the validity and relevance of content.

While tools like 'Google Notebook' are available to help develop these skills, I'm not convinced that a wide cross-section of today's teachers is currently able to demonstrate these skills... Let alone, qualified to teach them. Although it's a number of years old already, Alan November's story "Teaching Zach to Think" is still very relevant, as is the November Learning "Websites to Validate" activity.

On the topic of Reading and Change:
Thanks to Wes Fryer (and others) for promoting the free e-books available from the MacArthur Foundation. From Moving at the Speed of Creativity: "If you’re looking for some holiday reading related to digital learning, check out this great set of free ebooks from MIT Press Journals and the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning."