Week 2 - Blog Posting #4 -21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning

I would add a skill to the list of 21st Century Skills.  That is Lateral Thinking.  Lateral Thinking was defined by Edward de Bono   who originated the idea in 1967. Basically it is a series of techniques for problem solving where many different ideas can be evaluated, and discarded if they don't work.  I have seen my students many times try a quick web search to find some information but if they don't find it right away, they give up.  We need to teach them how to brainstorm and be original. In terms of Lifelong Learning this will be normal in the next decades.  Our current school system of finishing college at age 23 was predicated on a short life expectancy.  You went to school, got a job, stayed at that job, retired and then kicked. These days, whole industries will rise and fall in the course of the next 20 years alone.  Our students will have to be constantly training and learning just to keep up.  They do learn a great deal of course from their Personal Learning Networks.

I think everyone has a PLN and always had.  It starts with out parents, branches out into close friends and continues with mentors.  The web now allows the branches to be much farther and much faster, but I think the principle is still the same as it has always been. As Vicky Davis says about her students using PLNs "A PLN becomes a student's virtual locker, and its content changes based on the student's current course work. When I assign them a term paper, the students comb the Web to sign up for information that will feed into their personalized Web page to construct a PLN for that topic. When they get a new project, they assemble another page (Davis, 2009)."

What I find facinating about Personal Learning Networks is how they can be customized to a person's needs.  You can have different pages for different areas of study.  They are updated constantly.  Of course this constant flow of information still needs to be evaluated, which is an essential skill for the 21st century learner.  The tools of a student are ever changing, customizable and powerful in the hands of a skilled user.