21st-Century Learning

There are many ways to gather data/information. If you’re a science teacher, you’ll be right across it. If you teach kindergarten, your students still gather information. It’s more of a teacher-directed process than a Year 10 student’s approach, but it is still called gathering.

Before we continue, let’s dive into some 21st-century learning. We’re living in the Information Age. Like the Agricultural and Industrial Ages, this period of our history is characterised by substantial societal changes.

Those changes, which are still occurring, require more smarts from us. As end users, our mental filters have to work overtime.

21st-Century Necessary Skill Number One

Critical Thinking

Via our phones, the world is in our pockets. We have access to more data than at any other time in history. If you were thinking, ‘Hey, this is all about gathering again,’ you’d be on the money.

All that information is stored in a device with more computing power than the spacecraft that took people to the moon and back.

It’s all organised for us, right? Do you have folders on your phone? The phone probably set them up for you. Or, you might have. If you did, welcome to organising, folks. How are your internet bookmarks arranged? Chronologically? Alphabetically? It’s organised, even if there’s no actual structure to it. If you understand it, then it’s organised.

You made choices about how your bookmarks are listed.

On a basic level, you used critical thinking. The choices you made were based on a rationale. You might not have articulated it to yourself. It might have been arbitrary. ‘Do I need to keep this?’ (see the pic above)