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| Announcer: | Welcome to the November learning pod cast series with Alan November. This pod cast is entitled "Global Work Ethic." For more information visit our website at www.novemberlearning.com. Here's Alan. |
| Alan November: |
When I come back from my consulting overseas, especially from Asia, I have to ask if we are producing children in this country who are globally competitive. And I have to tell you the answer is no. We're going to need to define what it means to have a global work ethic. Because of the unintended consequence of the Internet being overbuilt we can now move information video, voice, any format at all anywhere around the world essentially for free. I think almost everyone appreciates that what this has led to is this phenomenal capacity for outsourcing, not only jobs that answer the phones for travel agents and airlines, but very high paying jobs such as mechanical engineering, architecture, computer science. So for the first time in history our current generation of educators is faced with a dilemma that many students, we don't know who, but many students will actually lose their careers, and they will probably lose their careers many times. So the essential skill is really to define what it means to be a lifelong learner. As I travel I see three skills that are absolutely essential and unfortunately we don't really teach them in our schools. Number one is to have phenomenal capacity to deal with overwhelming amounts of information so that you can access it, you can organize it, you can produce it, you can make meaning out of it, you can add value to it, and you can publish it. There's a whole set of skills there around information processing. Another essential skill is global communication. If our children are indeed going to work with people all over the world, they absolutely will have to understand social protocols, different points of view, skills of teamwork and collaboration. Unfortunately, even though we have the Internet connected to almost every classroom, it's typically only used as an information tool rather than a global communication tool. In fact that's where the real power comes in is collaborating around the world. As important as collaboration is, it's just a good kick in the pants for motivation. Students love to work with people, especially if they're all around the world. The third skill is very difficult to obtain. It's to provide students with a culture of learning that leads them to be self directed, including being self motivated, self assessing, and interdependent knowing when to put teams of people together. Unfortunately, the Victorian industrial model of education, the one that we often are adding technology to, is based on the dependency model where students are actually taught how to be taught rather than be taught how to learn. So this cultural shift of really providing students with self-discipline is probably a very long-term opportunity for us, maybe ten years. Now, it's essential to have the technology, there's no question. We have to have the Internet in every classroom, we ultimately have to have every student with a computer, and we have to make sure that every family is the center of learning. You simply can't define learning as something that takes place in school. We really have to understand a child in the context of their community. Unfortunately, the equity issue, perhaps the most complicated of all, is that if we don't make these changes and teach students fundamentally different skills than we're teaching them today, it's quite possible that unwittingly, unconsciously our schools will actually be condemning students not to succeed. Just to give you some background data and some statistics on what's happening to kids - in 1990 32% of all young adults ages 18 to 29 came back to live with their parents at least once after leaving and in 2000 60% came back. In 2006 it looks like it's going to be 65% and, in fact, demographers have named this generation now graduating our high schools and universities and they are called the Boomerangs because we send them out and they come back. Then we try again and again. So, three skills we've got to take a look at: information literacy, dealing with massive amounts of information and everything about publishing as well. We also need incredibly good global communication skills. Thirdly we need to really examine a culture that now creates a dependent relationship upon the learner, not the organization, to organize work. We're going to gradually need to shift more and more control to the learner so that we are really teaching a sense of discipline. If we add these three skills up, along with content, which we still have to do, then I think we'll be in a much better position to have our students be globally competitive. [music] |
| Announcer: |
That concludes today's podcast. We hope you enjoyed it. Visit us at www.novemberlearning.com and look for a link to Alan's blog in the left pane. There you can share your ideas and stories with us. We look forward to hearing from you. [music] |
Transcription by CastingWords