Brainstorms and Lightning Bolts:
Thinking skills for the 21st centuryAbstract:
January 1, 2001 has come and gone and it's a new world. Sixty percent of the jobs available now require skills held by only 20% of today's workers. It is incumbent on our schools that every student leaves with the requisite skills needed to thrive in this new world.
What will it mean to be "educated" in the next century? Unless we have some answers to this question it is impossible to develop a curriculum and pedagogical framework that will be meaningful to the lives of today's students.
We live in a world where information is doubling every two years, and where the time lag between the discovery and application of new information is dropping to zero. We live in a world where highly-skilled workers are in high demand for highly-paid jobs. At the same time, workers with low levels of skill are seeing their jobs disappear, and are finding that the jobs that remain pay very little. The role of technology in transforming business is increasing. A few years ago there were no job categories for "Webmasters" or "Java Programmers." Now they are in high demand. Much of the employment growth in the coming years will be in jobs that have yet to be invented. How can we prepare for a world filled with such uncertainty?
The future is not going to be an extrapolation of the world in which we grew up. Every one of us must acquire a new set of skills to thrive in the coming years.
This workshop addresses this topic by exploring the following issues:
- What emergent trends are likely to shape the educational needs of the workforce in the 21st century?
- What skills are going to be needed to address these needs?
- What strategies and tools can be used to help in the acquisition of these skills.
From an educational perspective, these skills build on many of recent developments in pedagogy and are connected in concrete ways to the curriculum we must put in place if our students are to take their place among the high-skilled workforce of the future. This presentation also explores a few of the many computer-based tools that support the development of these skills across the curriculum.
Some of the topics covered in this day-long workshop include:
- A glimpse of emergent trends shaping the future
- The need for technological fluency
- Communication skills for a global economyInformation mining and refining
- Context building and meaning making
- Creativity tools
- Concept mapping
- General systems theory
This highly interactive workshop gets participants involved right away, and provides concrete exploration of tools that can be used by anyone to help themselves and others address the challenges of the coming years.
Presentation type... workshop Audience................ all Duration................. half-day to day-long workshop Handouts................ no Dr. Thornburg will gladly tailor any presentation to your specific needs.
