There’s strong agreement that any work and development around the use of educational technologies should focus on how a particular tool or application can address a particular learning and teaching need or issue, and/or how L&T can be enriched, extended, refocused through its use.

But what there’s little conversation around, or perhaps even agreement on, is what characterizes contemporary learning.

Yesterday I came across a post by Dave Warlick – What is 21st century learning? – that seeks to tackle the question with a focus on FORMAL learning.

In the pre-digital/industrial time, ‘a time of information scarcity, when our futures were fairly predictably, being educated was characterised by what you know’, he suggests it was characterised by listening, watching and remembering.

The post and continuing commentary begin to reflect on what ELSE characterises learning in a digital age.
Dave begins by suggesting the following:

• questioning your learning experience,
• engaging your information environment,
• proving (and disproving) what you find,
• constructing (inventing) new learning and knowledge [added later]
• teaching others what you have learned
• being respected for the power of your learning, and
• being responsible for your learning and its outcomes

to which the following points have been added to date via a range of comments:

• the need to evaluate, test, explore
• teamworking abilities
• awareness of global citizenship
• persistence and perseverance
• the ability to connect new material with prior knowledge

Technology can enable this but as one commenter -Danika Barker - says, ‘You can have the “techiest” classroom in the world and still teach 20th century style. On the flip side, I think you can have a very traditional classroom and embrace a 21st century teaching philosophy’.

What do you think of the list above? What would you add/delete?

[CC FlickR image: epredator]