"It's the death of education, but the dawn of learning"

From Scott McLeod, via David Warlick:

"They will be doing work that calls on:
artistic abilities
abilities of synthesis
understanding [of] context
working in teams
the ability to be multidisciplinary, multilingual, multicultural..."

"So the coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they're going to need to know for the rest of their lives, the coin of the realm will be:

do you know how to find information?
do you know how to validate it?
do you know how to synthesize it?
do you know how to leverage it
do you know how to communicate it?
do you know how to collaborate with it?
do you know how to problem solve with it?

That's the new 21st century set of literacies, and it looks a lot different than the model that most of us were raised on."



And, predictably, I most noted the portion where the woman talks about student-centered learning, and "doing school" moves to the periphery - where school as a place is just one of the many places where students can engage in learning. Libraries and museums were mentioned, as was the community and home (and online!). This notion fundamentally challenges the idea of segregating youth in neatly labeled buildings for 8 hours a day, and creates the opportunity for more authentic learning experiences. "Just-in-time" learning will trump the traditional model of "just-in-case" learning.

My question is: we've been talking about this new and necessary way of educational thinking for quite a while now... what needs to be done to make the vision take hold? What could we do in our communities to take charge and create change? If this really is "the dawn of learning," what we need is a compass that points east and a map that will get us there.