21st Century Skills: not just about ICT

Many educators who I talk to seem to be of the opinion that the only way the world is changing is that more ‘technology’ is being used. And that is usually conceived of as a passing fad, a bad thing, or something which will be forced upon them.

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However, I believe that the use of ICTs is actually just a subset of a wider change that is happening at the beginning of the 21st century. Knowledge, or at least our conception of it, or at least the conception of it by people that have influence, is changing. It is no longer something that resides in the heads of the great and the good, but something that is distributive. Knowledge, to use a metaphor, is not the nodes on the network, but the connections between those nodes. Wisdom comes through having a meta-view of the network and understanding how the nodes can and do interact.

A podcast to follow up on: Podcast 39 – The Vocabulary of 21st Century Learning by Wes Fryer