Emerging Technologies Consulting

Via Chris Dawson, I read this Guardian article about the revamping of British primary education to include 21st century communication skills, such as using Twitter and Wikipedia.  Chris’s post includes a quite funny cartoon about the revamped curriculum.  It’s well worth stopping by just for that, as well as Chris’s analysis of the proposed curriculum changes.

I’m all for teaching “21st century skills,” whatever those are.  But I shy away from teaching specific tools.  I think the thing to do is to figure out what the underlying concepts and skills are and teach those with whatever tool makes sense.  Ten years from now, we might not be teaching about using Twitter, but we probably will be teaching about how to find and evaluate information via the Internet in a variety of ways.  One might use Twitter and Wikis and IM to teach collaboration and communication skills.  How do you communicate with your colleague about a project when they’re far away?  Or we might think about fun ways to teach content using these tools.  One criticism of the curriculum is that it’s sacrificing the teaching of certain historical periods.  How could you use blogs, wikis, and podcasts to teach that content instead of teaching blogs, wikis, and podcasts in and of themselves?  For one thing, it’s easier to learn these tools when there’s a specific application for using them and for another, the content might stick better if students are creating their own materials based on the content.  As Chris says, it’s quite possible that this is exactly the way schools will implement these tools, within a good context, but it’s hard to tell from the article.  And that leaves the curriculum open to criticism from folks who feel like things are getting constantly dumbed down.  I’d argue that it’s actually more challenging intellectually to create a podcast about a WWII battle (imagine having to created a fake newscast from the front) than it is to just read about it and listen to a lecture on the facts.  This doesn’t have to be a dumbing down if it’s done well–and therein lies the real challenge.