Beyond School

Ben Grey’s “21st Century Confusion” post asks a simple question that I’ve often toyed with too:

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills believes demonstrating originality, communicating, being open and responsive, acting on creative ideas, utilizing time efficiently, accessing information, etc. are all 21st Century Skills.  I’d retort that in reality, these skills have always been in existence and of the utmost importance.  They don’t need to have the 21st Century moniker on them to make them significant.

I’ve often wondered the same thing: “What’s all this talk of ’21st century literacy’? (Ben somewhat conflates “literacy” and “skills” in his post.)  Is there anything really new here?  My comment:

The only uniquely “21st century literacies” I can think of involve the web.

Students need to be able to evaluate information on screens upon which any sage, charlatan, or idiot can publish. That’s new (sort of. Books really are open to the same range of authors).

They need to learn “online identity management,” and I would argue that’s a new literacy. New because they’re publishing themselves, and that means reading/writing/speaking/filming/photo-ing (literacy), and 21st century because privacy has never been so porous as now. They need to know how to keep Big Brother, Big Employer, and Big Google from knowing too much.

They need to learn “social reading” online. By that attempt at a cute label I mean the ability to evaluate communication acts by strangers in social networks, emails, comment threads wherever, and the whole range of places people can attempt to connect to us individually now. They need to be able to “read” a phish, for example, and a fraudster, and yes, a p&rv.

Hm. What else. Co-writing might be new. “How to participate in collaborative writing communities.” Wikipedia, for example. I know I don’t know how to do that.

Could we even go so far as to say that social networking online is itself a “new literacy”? That networking is (or may be) an essential skill for adulthood in the 21st century?

Hm. Searching. That’s new, yes? How to effectively search for good, timely information online, and do so efficiently. I know I’m still not great at that.

I’ll stop there. Thanks for the prompt. I agree the “21st c.” buzz can be as tiresome as the “2.0.” But I think the Berners-Lee Revolution has created some unique changes, just as Gutenberg’s did. Can you see any I missed?

Picture this: enterprising students in cities in Texas, particularly, and other cities nationwide – along with counterparts in Romania, which just mandated a Creationism-only science curriculum (I kid you not), and maybe Turkey, for good measure – organize Smart Mobs to strike, peacefully and simultaneously, out of the blue to demand only 21st century science – yes, I mean evolution – be included in their biology and other science textbooks.

And they do it quickly, before Texas’ Creationist-dominated Board of Education votes next Spring to insert Creationism yet again into its science standards. (See this post.)

They happen at such places as the Texas capitol building, the lobbies of textbook publishers’ headquarters, science museums, the national capitol, and wherever else seems like a good idea.

And they simply follow the steps of this excellent video (h/t to the Personal Democracy Forum):

And, because they’re good, peaceful citizens showing the will and responsibility to act for the education they deserve, the students who organize these events (more than once, please) include this as a bullet on their college application, to show that they’re more original and more consequential than the herd that joins the schooly National Honor Society and such. And the admissions officers at the best colleges see that bullet, and place their applications in the acceptance pile.

And they live actively and powerfully ever after.

If Obama’s doing it, kids, maybe it’s something you should consider as worth your time to learn. It might just help your future more than a couple hundred extra points on your SAT.

(Add to TheIndyDebate map)

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a companion reflective class blog); the French Revolution Ant Farm Diaries, an historical fiction Writing-to-Learn unit in which student-created fictional characters interracted with their classmates’ characters in interlinked diary entries; King Lear Street Talk, a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, forcing the close line-by-line reading of 16th-century English necessary to adapt it to “Sopranos”-style modern English; and the 1001 Flat World Tales, a global creative writing workshop using the Six Traits of Effective Writing and a peer-reviewed Writing Workshop joining students from Hawaii, Colorado, and my classroom in Seoul.

The first three projects listed above were “local” collaborations, the fourth one global. I discuss in the webinar my thoughts on the relative merits of both approaches in the webinar. (I posted about those reflections most fully here.)

Thanks to Wikispaces for the opportunity to look back over two years of experiments in wiki pedagogy and introduce them all in one fell swoop.

If you want to read the “think-aloud” posts I wrote when designing these projects, check January to June or so of the Archives.

Here’s the event (it should start when I do, at almost 26:50, and finish a half hour later. The first 30 minutes are a tour of Wikispaces for beginners. The black blob on the screencast will disappear within a few seconds.):

Even if my recent “Politics Around the Web” posts have turned you off, I hope you noticed that they are a model of a very simple activity for any number of classes – current events, politics, science and math news, more – that want students to read and exhibit critical thinking about what they read. I say “simple” because all it takes is a Google News account, a Diigo account, and a blog.

This screencast shows you how it works, compliments of screencast-o-matic and Blip.tv:

I promised in an earlier post to give the link when Teachers Teaching Teachers posted its podcast with students weighing in on “How to Be Unschooly” in blogs, Twitter, and more. Consider it done. It is so worth a listen.

There’s something to say, too, about the back-story on this. Soojin, the Korean student who generated the tweet that triggered the podcast, was a student of mine – but from last year. As Soojin discusses in the podcast, my efforts to push him, as a member of my classroom, to turn on to connective writing didn’t work. A year later, he’s out there doing it independently – I see him on Twitter all the time, and read his blog – and out of nowhere, from Korea, Soojin is causing educators in New York to invite him to a podcast, and invite me as almost an afterthought. I love that.

I also loved finding the other student pioneers on that Skype call and chat – especially, and for reasons similar to the Soojin story, Lindsea. A Hawaii student, I “met” Lindsea last year through my classes’ collaboration on the first 1001 Flat World Tales with her class with teacher Chris Watson. Lindsea is now, like Soojin, a part of my network, and a student pioneer.

You’ll meet other pioneering students on the podcast as well:

• Hannah, a student at principal Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia (and an excellent writer and speaker I “pray” will contribute to Students 2.0 regularly, and pull Philadelphia into Project Global Cooling next year). Hannah’s been blogging intensely about environmental issues in her region, and mentioned she’s received little to no encouragement from comments. Can we remedy that?
• Ben, from the excellent New York City Students group blog – another fantastic model of real student blogging. (Ben, as I told you on the podcast, I invited you all to Students 2.0 when I was seeking recommendations from my network, and Diane Cordell pointed me to you. That offer is still open as an additional, less frequent, non-competitive megaphone for your group.)

And then, manning the chat channel with his usual good questions and helpful hands, was another Philadelphia student I’ve come to know over the past year: Tyrone Kidd. Tyrone, I’ve wanted to give a shout-out about how impressive you’ve been as another pioneer since you popped up on my radar (and in my Seoul Networked Learning class blog) a few months ago. I love your pioneering spirit.

All the students above are noteworthy for showing they can navigate these networks, and prudently and maturely learn along with us.

They’re also noteworthy for teaching us how to make blogs and social networking “unschooly” to them. But for that, you’ll need to listen to the TTT podcast. (And Paul Allison, it was nice to finally make contact, so many months after discovering your blog.)

Photo: Pioneer Aviator Bessie Coleman, First African American Pilot from PingNews on Flickr