There has been a lot of "buzz" around the notion of 21st century skills as important for directing modern teaching and learning. I would say, however, that many of these proposed skills will continue to miss the mark in tems of preparing learners for success in the modern 'gig' economy, because we are on the cusp of the age of genuine AI. This will be another form of sentient thinking that will increasingly perform most of the foundational skills relating to analytical thinking and problem-solving for us, and much better than we are ever going to be able to do. Current AI is not "genuine" (we have only psuedo-AI at this point in time) and thus does not reflect this ability. However genuine AI is coming and because of this educational planners and leaders need to be thinking about how to design educational learning that is geared more-and-more toward pure social skills and what might be called "awareness" skills - skills that raise our awareness of, and connection with, all forms of sentient existence.
Education has always been an agent for social change, and I suspect that the need to forward plan how to support 21st century learners to develop these sorts of "awareness" skills will become more obvious over the coming decade. I am very interested in how others see this situation though, and what direction they think education should be going in, as we seek to move learning forward within a modern, complex and uncertain world. So please, what are your thoughts on this matter?
Dear colleague, this is a very interesting and relevant question! I have been thinking about this in a bit different context, and would argue that the fourth industrial revolution requires a new type of professionalism in which particular competencies turn out to be important. See attachment for the argument. There you can also find references to our empirical work on particular moral competencies that new professionals might need.
Hope to continue the discussion, vincent
Even if AI makes great leaps, the value of human critical thinking and information skills will remain. We can't wait for AI to do our thinking for us. AI is a tool. We must be the masters of that tool.
Thanks William, and that is precisely what I am calling for, but perhaps not in the same way you view this as needing to occur. To myself, its a bit like the way we view human collaboration presently in education - a shift into working together with others to enhance overall learning. How will we do that with another type of sentience, and how do we prepare students to even think in that direction is one of the things I am suggesting we need to be considering now.
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