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

I was most certainly NOT raised on MTV because when I was a kid MTV actually had music! Things have changed. I can say, however, that I was an original Nintendo kid. I had the original Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt with the toy gun and funny looking dog that would come up from the bushes when you didn’t hit a duck. I was introduced to computers in 1996 when America Online 2.0 was out. E-mail was foreign to me and none of my friends had it, so I had no reason to e-mail anyone. Times have surely changed.

I have to agree with Howard Rheingold’s view about Digital Natives. “And don't swallow the myth of the digital native. Just because your teens Facebook, IM, and Youtube, don't assume they know the rhetoric of blogging, collective knowledge gathering techniques of taggers and social bookmarkers, collaborative norms of wiki work, how to tune and feed a Twitter network, the art of multimedia argumentation - and, by far most importantly, online crap detection.” (Rheingold, 2009) Sure, they know how to do these things, however putting it into a context of learning is something that needs to be taught to them. Educators will always be needed to put knowledge into context for the student to process. Attention, participation, cooperation, critical consumption, network awareness as Mr. Rheingold states is needed to not to be used individually but work together for a student to properly adapt in the world.

The college I attended for my Bachelors degree has a Lifelong Learning program. Once a student has graduated, he or she is allowed to come back, free of charge, and take any class and as many classes within their program of graduation, for the life of graduate. How can you say “no” to that! We don’t stop learning because we graduate, if anything, we only learn 10% of what we use in school and the rest in the real world. The Jeffrey Gitomer sums it up when he states, “In order for me to have gained the mastery that I’ve had I could only have done it by remaining a student.” (Gitomer, 2008) We will be learning for the rest of our lives, and if we choose to stop learning we stop growing. So how can we teach this to our students? The answer may lie in the Classroom 2.0 theory, if properly handled.


External Sources:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=38313#ixzz0REYrbyO8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh6yd6wfCgU