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Another interesting read. I quite understand the need and growing need for the workforce to understand social medias and other forms of Web 2.0 tools and be able to use them well. Reading more about millennials, it is becoming more and more apparent they need to have strong " crap detectors," the ability to think critically and analyze huge volumes of information on the net, just to name a few.

I think this is one of the better collections of 21st century skills. I'm mostly concerned about the ones that don't involve technology. Like many of you, I worry about a future where people don't have basic problem-solving and communication skills. As far as technology skills are concerned, I'd like to see kids learn programming, with a focus on humanity, rather than commerce. I'm surprised how many teachers adopt "free" tools for young students, without having them explore the terms of service, and learn how their data and content will be used, sold, etc..

Thanks for this, Mary Ann. As much as I value the technology and what it can offer and do, the interpersonal and social skills seem more and more critical now. Seeing kids standing next to each other texting, or texting rather than calling or meeting makes me wonder if they will develop those skills to the level they are required now.

Mary Ann, thanks for posting this article on the 21st Century classroom! Just based on some of observations of current trends and ideas, here are some of my ideas regarding this. To me it seems likely that whatever happens to the classroom in the 21st Century - ideally it will have some of the following features : 1) Instructors who have good live people connections, knowledge of Web resources and tools, and the ability to quickly readjust curriculum on the fly. They will be able to access the very best resources at hand to engage students (live presenters, online resources, web tools, etc.) 2) Teaching and learning will take the form of ad-hoc groups organizing around various kinds of problem solving or common interest explorations. 3) While traditional degrees probably won't go away soon, much of our ongoing lifetime learning will take place in courses like this one - or the MOMA online art series. We will obtain numerous certificates and engage in a variety of online cohorts/communities of shared interests. 3) Communications will become increasingly global and courses will not be necessarily bound to individual institutions. We will draw from a growing/maturing resource base of online lectures, virtual worlds interactions, simulations-based learning experiences, and multimedia databases. 4) The teaching technologies that we'll be using will have the functionality and freeform interactivity as videogames. Consider the Kinect, for example, which allows for full body and voice interaction with other people as well as maturing forms of artificial intelligence, as seen in this extraordinary TED talk with game developer Peter Molyneux. 5) Finally, I don't believe education will be transacted completely online, or that physical locations where actual human beings gather together will go awa

Ann, your comment reminded me of this list of cognitive biases. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases Your point is so relevant. I always worry when I see teachers teaching kids the easy way to search and find things right away. It's scary to think how much we're capable of filtering out of our lives.

Jennifer, this goes to your point made in the other article you pointed us to - Crap Detection by Reingold. When you are learning something, your maturity level on the subject is minimal, so filtering what you are learning is difficult and we have a tendency once we have some information to not go further. When I teach, I am not only trying to impart information, but the analytical process for learning and absorbing the information.

I definitely meant to put that comment on the other article :)

All this accessibility to information is one of the greatest strength and weaknesses of online technology. You really can explore and be motivated by all the information available, but it can be overwhleming at times. There is a term "data mining" that refers to finding the information you need - mining through all that is available. If I think of the metaphor as someone looking for gold, you can often find "fool's gold", yet the difference here is how do you know what you have is real?

That is very sad and that is why, maybe, we are having such problems in this country. I think what hapened to this teacher is ghastly!

I have a friend who worked in high tech and made the transition to teaching because of her interest. In addition to what was echoed here, her major issue has to do with the administration component of the job. Over the past 15 years, the percentage of administrators to teachers has risen and there has been an increase in mandatory reports, meetings, etc. I am not a full-time classroom teacher, but have substituted and what is very markedly different than when I was in school is how much social issues impact the classroom. Parental availability is tight and students come to school without the basic. If you add on that teachers are now also social workers, one can see how a teacher becomes overloaded. In the video about the experiment in India with the computer, he prefaces the experiment with his observation that students that are in higher risk areas seem to benefit more from technology introduction, but in practice it is often the reverse, with computers going to more affluent schools.