Dr. Tony Wagner, co-director of Harvard's Change Leadership Group talks about the 7 skills 21st century learners must develop and master in order to survive and thrive in the new economy.
Although Governments, administrators, school boards, Principals and Teachers are moving in the right direction, the general consensus in educational circles online is that many, if not most teachers do not master the technological tools or possess 21st century skills themselves thus making it difficult for them to provide timely and accurate information to their students.
Given the rigidity of the structures current educational models as well as the current trend of standardized testing, teachers often lack the resources, time and technical support they need to implement 21st century tools, learning and evaluation techniques in their classrooms or schools.
It may take a decade for formal institutions to embrace the new reality and implement the necessary changes to educational environments. We believe it is urgent to usher in a new paradigm. All the tools we need are already freely available, but we need to learn to work together in order to truly create a new educational model.
While it is important and relevant to conduct exhaustive studies on the new educational models it is equally important to quickly start testing new methods and gaining experience now.
In order to create new models, we must first ask ourselves : What school for?
Millions of people use social networks every day. According to a study conducted by Joanna Brenner of the Pew Internet and American Life Project in November 2012, 69% of online adults, on average, use social networks. If we consider only people who are between 18-29 that number soars to 98%.
40% of cellphone users visit social networks on their phone and 28% of them use it daily.
Source : Pew Internet and American Life Project
Google Plus
As of December 2012, G+ has 500 million registered users of which 235 million are active on a monthly basis.Source : Wikipedia
Facebook has over one billion active users and more than half of them use Facebook from their mobile device.Source : Wikipedia
YouTube
Over 800 million unique users visit Youtube each month. 72 hours of video are uploaded every minute. YouTube is localized in 43 countries and features videos across 60 languages. More than 50% of videos are commented on each day.
Source YouTube Press Statistics
There has never been a time in history in which networking, online collaboration and learning has been so accessible and universal.
Our educational model aims to use existing (free) network infrastructures to connect with people where they congregate and socialize and create a self-regulating open-source learning laboratory where we can begin to learn, experiment with and master the 21st century skills we need to thrive and contribute to the greater good.
There has never been a time in history in which networking, online collaboration and learning has been so accessible and universal.
Our educational model aims to use existing (free) network infrastructures to connect with people where they congregate and socialize and create a self-regulating open-source learning laboratory where we can begin to learn, experiment with and master the 21st century skills we need to thrive and contribute to the greater good.
