What does it look like to prepare students to navigate the digital world? This is a question I often tackle in both in my own moments of brainstorming and searching for new resources to share, as well as in conversations with fellow educators.
Finding the right resources for teaching students the basics of copyright— including its limitations such as fair use—is essential. We want to make sure students are prepared to work and create in digital and traditional spaces, too. Both the ISTE Standards and the American Association of School Librarians Standards for the 21st Century Learner address the issues of preparing students to navigate and create in a digital world. Although we know this is important, tackling the idea of copyright and fair use can sure feel intimidating.
According to experts, university libraries are changing—with the exception of one important role
Universities are seeking ways to innovate and keep up with the changing expectations of students and faculty, and university libraries are no different.
Academic libraries are good at adapting as they try to meet students and faculty who learn differently and who have varying expectations for what their university library is.
As physical space, available funding, and student needs change, university libraries will have to adapt to meet different needs and campus roles.
By 2020, around 65 per cent of university graduates will work in jobs that don’t yet exist. Automation, driven by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, is also destroying repetitive, low-skill jobs, and changing the nature of most others.
Yet, as with all “creative destruction”, for every 20 jobs that will be lost from 2018-27, about 13 will be created, according to a 2016 research paper by Wilcocks and Laity. In India, the promised rich economic dividend that the country is demographically poised to reap depends deeply upon the quality of the future workforce. Therefore, the task of future-proofing the skills of our workforce assumes that much more import.
As a follow-up to our 9 Characteristics of 21st Century Learning we developed in 2009, we have developed an updated framework, The Inside-Out Learning Model.
The goal of the model is simple enough–not pure academic proficiency, but instead authentic self-knowledge, diverse local and global interdependence, adaptive critical thinking, and adaptive media literacy.
By design this model emphasizes the role of play, diverse digital and physical media, and a designed interdependence between communities and schools.
Part of a technology coach’s role these days is to convince teachers that their job description has changed. The industrial model of education is well past its expiration date, and the generation of students born today are going to graduate into a world that will look completely different than our own. In order to train 20th century teachers to reach the conceptual understandings required for 21st century education, school leaders and tech coaches need to focus on describing what this could be.
63 Things Every Student Should Know In A Digital World by Terry Heick
ed note: this has been updated from a previous post
But in an increasingly connected and digital world, the things a student needs to know are indeed changing—fundamental human needs sometimes drastically redressed for an alien modern world. Just as salt allowed for the keeping of meats, the advent of antibiotics made deadly viruses and diseases simply inconvenient, and electricity completely altered when and where we slept and work and played, technology is again changing the kind of “stuff” a student needs to know.
Veronica Arellano Douglas writes: "I’m not really here for discussions about “fake news,” but I’m all for critical information literacy, including critical news literacy, and so are a group of librarians at Washtenaw Community College’s Bailey Library. Meghan Rose, Martha Stuit, and Amy Lee presented a poster recently at the Michigan Academic Library Association’s annual conference on their recent efforts to overhaul a News Literacy Libguide and use it as a springboard for instruction."
The librarians at Washtenaw Community College are awesome! Their presentation can easily be adapted for secondary school students, and everything is shared via Google Drive. I shamelessly admit to coveting those buttons!
This event explores a pressing challenge for higher education institutions across the world: advancing digital literacy among students and faculty. As technology use is proliferating and becoming more ubiquitous in people’s daily lives, colleges and universities have become more adept at integrating it into every facet of campus life to enhance course design, course materials, and interactions between learners and educators. However, simply knowing how to use the tools does not solve the challenge. Education professionals must be able to tie the use of digital tools to progressive pedagogies and deeper learning outcomes to equip students with 21st century skills that help them flourish in college life and in their careers. Identifying and implementing effective frameworks is paramount, and a number of organizations and institutions are leading the way. Hear from an international panel of experts on their perspectives on digital literacy, the biggest challenges associated with advancing it, and recommendations for developing successful digital literacy initiatives.
"Fifty Shades Darker" is a movie known for its strong sexual content but there is an insight educators and parents can learn from it. Read on to find out.
Each spring in their Skills for Tomorrow class, the fifth grade engages in an exercise in empathy. Following the model of NPR’s StoryCorps project, students pair up and share significant life stories and experiences. Then, with the help of an iPad and a choice of apps, students retell their partner’s story using images, video, and words.
As they work on this project, students leverage technology as a tool for creation, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking – four skills commonly known as “The 4C’s.”
The digital content they consume, who they meet online and how much time they spend onscreen – all these factors will greatly influence children’s development.
In this chapter included in the book Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Dempsey and Malpas consider the future of the academic library in the context of a diversifying higher education system. The academic library is not fixed. It is changing as it adapts to the changing research and learning behaviors of its home institution, which are the principal drivers of the library service.
Dempsey and Malpas explore ways in which libraries are responding to the transition from a collections-based model to a more diffuse services-based model. This is in parallel with the evolving influence of the network on student, teacher and researcher practices and with the shift from print to digital. They describe diversification of the higher education system, around poles of research, liberal education and career preparation. Academic libraries similarly will diverge, with different service bundles depending on the type of educational institution they serve.
This means that the model of excellence for libraries also will need to be plural, based on strategic fit to the needs of the institution they serve and not on collection size or gate count.
The world is morphing into a place that no one can foresee. How can we prepare students to live and work in that place?
Not long ago, people could learn job skills and use them indefinitely, but now jobs and skill sets are becoming obsolete at an alarming rate. This means that students, and later adults, need to expect and thrive on challenges and know how to turn failures into stepping stones to a brighter future.
When I was a beginning researcher I wanted to see how children coped with setbacks, so I gave 5th graders simple problems followed by hard problems—ones they couldn’t solve. Some hated the hard ones, some tolerated them, but, to my surprise, some relished them. One unforgettable child rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and declared, “I love a challenge!” Another said, “I was hoping this would be informative.” They didn’t think they were failing, they thought they were learning. Although this was years ago, they were already 21st century kids.
Preparing a child for the world that doesn’t yet exist is not an easy task for any teacher. Step back and look at that picture from a broad perspective. What are the critical 21st-century skills every learner needs to survive and succeed in our world? What abilities and traits will serve them in a time that’s changing and developing so rapidly?
They want to be challenged and inspired in their learning.
Today’s student typically arrives at university equipped with a smartphone, a tablet, and an intimate knowledge of digital devices. University staff can be forgiven for feeling naïve alongside these tech-savvy “digital natives” - but is this perception of students’ skills based on reality?
In March, the House of Lords told us what has long been obvious: that we need to pay far more attention to the internet by coordinating our efforts towards improving children’s “digital literacy”.
It turns out that decontextualised knowledge, stuffed into children’s heads, regurgitated on demand and then forgotten just isn’t that useful in the grand scheme of things. Sure, back in the days of empire it was handy to have identically dressed clerks all over the world who could perform mental arithmetic and communicate in clear written English. The British East India company that ran the Indian sub-continent under corporate rule couldn’t have happened without it. One might say the same today with global corporations like Google, etc or the now stalled globalisation project.
You know the drill. Our job as innovative educators is to prepare students for success in the 21st century, but what does that really mean? The 21st Century Learning Design rubric provides a great lens to help you see if you are ensuring students are developing the skills they’ll need for success when they move on to college and careers.
Information and communication technology has revolutionised virtually every aspect of our life and work. Students unable to navigate through a complex digital landscape will no longer be able to participate fully in the economic, social and cultural life around them.
Learning to change your teaching practice in today’s digital-first world is a bit like learning a foreign language, to hear ed-tech vet Ann McMullan tell it. “You don’t speak it fluently on the first day. But you pick up one word, two words, three words, and the more you engage and the more you use it, the more natural it begins to feel.”
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