Talking 21st Century Skills Blues

by Shelly Blake-Plock

category: Education and Technology

Published July 07, 2009 @ 11:01AM PT

“There could be people who helped others on a time scale of years. Something called teachers.” – fr. ‘Synthetic Serendipity’ by Vernor Vinge

In a 1965 issue of Advances in Computers, British scientist I. J. Good wrote:

“Let an ultra intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”

Good’s work would usher in the concept of ‘technological singularity’ and all of the hopes and fears that some day human intelligence would be left in the dust. It is not surprising that a couple years after this article appeared, Good would be advising Stanley Kubrick on the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Advance to 1999 and Ray Kurzweil’s The Age Of Spiritual Machines and the prediction that by 2019, a regular old $1,000 computer would carry the processing capacity of the human brain. And beyond 2019? Well, let’s just say that there are going to be quite a few mathematicians looking for work.

Now, Kurzweil is a great thinker. And the exponential shift he and others have described is something very real. But all this talk of technological singularity gives a lot of folks the willies. There’s something about HAL that’s all too familiar. So, how do we allow technology to advance and at the same time keep a balanced view of what intelligence is all about to begin with?

That’s where teachers come in.

I spent the morning today with a group of education professors, alumni services folks, and teachers-in-training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. They are taking part in my self-described social media bootcamp. That’s just fancy talk for learning how to use the resources Web 2.0 has to offer. But it’s more than just learning to use tools. Like any tool, the apps available for social media now reflect something about how we view ourselves. And how we qualify intelligence.

First, it helps to define what I mean by intelligence. For better or worse, I’m one of those folks who totally bought into Howard Gardner’s view back in ed school. The theory of multiple intelligences made sense to me. And it’s not because I like theories; it's because it made sense to me within the context of my own life. I’ll give the example of one of my sons. Here’s a boy both dyslexic and dysgraphic, struggling through reading and math class in first grade, who at the same time was tackling music theory courses at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. A boy who still at age eight has trouble subtracting numbers, but give him a trumpet and he can harmonize by ear to Miles Davis recordings.

So my first admonition towards the singularity camp has to do with having limited its definition of intelligence to that which can be computed. Now, does that admonition in any way limit technological advances? No, rather – I hope – it contextualizes them within the framework of a broader intellectual ecology. The singularity may well be happening, but we should take perhaps a more nuanced view of what that means.

The second thing we need to do is to consider the definition of ‘singularity’ itself. An early voice in the orthography of the word was Vernor Vinge, the technologist and author who in the early ‘90s predicted that the end of what he called the ‘human era’ would soon follow whatever outcome manifested through the exponential rise of superhuman computer intelligence.

He prophesied the constant creation of the networked global computer environment, and I sort of visualize this constant creation-and-taking of information almost like an techno-intellectual beehive. It’s a situation where serendipity is obscured by the sheer numbers, and vice-versa. Yet whichever is occurring, there’s always a buzz.

Which brings us to the age of social and participatory media and what I hope I was doing in that classroom today.

Whereas, in certain company, the singularity often still bears the connotation residue of HAL and the like, the present result of this exponential curve has actually shaped up as something quite different.

The practical and accessible manifestation of the singularity can be seen in the user reviews of guitar amps and walking shoes on Harmony Central and Zappos. It’s in the work of the hackers and activist Twitterers sharing face time with well-meaning yet wholly uninformed everyday Twitterers on the #IranElection Twitterfall. It’s in the folks joining together in a Naxx raid on WoW who otherwise might never meet – and who are essentially to each other simply the characters they represent in the game. It's in our Facebook comments and our Tweets both mundane and sublime. In other words – at least in the way I read it – part of the way that the singularity expresses itself is in the ‘regularness’ of life in the Digital Age; the thing that makes it so compelling is the regularness, the day-to-day-ness, the humanness.

In other words: it’s not something to be scared of. Rather, as the machine of the Internet grows and becomes fully capable of handling semantic information – the very information we supply it with via our comments and Tweets – we will become more, not less, aware of who we are.

Because in the singularity of a semantic technological age, we will bear out Merleau-Ponty’s quip that (to adapt and paraphrase for the 21st century) “We Tweet, and what we Tweet tells us who we are.”

What does all of this mean for the classroom?

For starters it means that we need to prepare ourselves as teachers to prepare students to live in their future and not in our past.

There has been a lot of talk in the education and ed tech community recently about ‘21st Century Skills’. Proponents for and against have failed, in my opinion, to really center on the reality of the situation our kids and teachers are in. Instead of trying to identify the factors that will influence the education of real students in this Digital Age, they have reacted for and against some pretty mushy-minded ed speak concerning whether or not ‘critical thinking’ is a 21st Century Skill.

I’ve had it with this feeble approach towards preparing our minds to prepare our children for the future. And so, on my blog a ways back, I wrote out what I specifically see as unique 21st Century Skills.

• Critical Media Network Skills: the ability in a networked environment to recognize when you are being taken advantage of via special interests and the ability to argue within the dominant paradigm of a global network with acuity and accuracy based upon the application of historical, philosophical, creative, and intellectual skills grounded in the history of human thought and applied to the spontaneity and immediate global impact of 21st century networked communications.

• Participatory and Networked Information and Communication Skills: the ability to take part in one’s global society on equal footing with any other human via the immediacy and power of digital networks. Long-term, this may mean sharing any variety of networked consciousnesses.

• Collaborative Social Meta-Thinking: the ability to learn from and give back to both local community-based and global-based digital social networks. This may extend in future environments to nanotechnology merging with on-demand personalized virtual reality.

• Creative Network Confidence and Digital Community Stewardship: the ability to use the global network for both the purposes of creative problem solving and for the benefit of peaceful co-existence between peoples, animals, ecologies, and environments.

• Digital Cunning: students will learn that merely ‘using technology’ does not mean that you are either educated in or are a contributing member to the global network. Drawing on a strong Liberal Arts background merged with Digital Age critical thinking skills, students will be able to distinguish between participatory media and authoritarian media even when the latter cloaks itself as the former.

• Awareness of Digital History and Digital Divide: the ability to understand historical analog modalities and to recognize the value of pre-digital and non-digital media as well as the temporary nature of specific technologies within historical evolution; the ability to understand and through social action compensate for and help to eliminate digital distinctions based on economics, politics, geography, and race.

These are the skills students will need in order to navigate life and work in the dawn of the great singularity.

And let it be known, I fundamentally disagree that we should teach these skills as auxiliary to the content we want students to learn. Rather, social and participatory media should be so integrated into the pedagogy of teaching content that it becomes as second-nature, obvious, casual, and useful as chalk and ballpoint pens.

To review: the singularity is coming. We live, as Fisch and McLeod put it, in exponential times. And we do a disservice to our students and our future if we pretend that we can use 19th century methodologies to facilitate 21st century learning.

That’s where teachers come in.

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sources

I.J. Good ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’ Advances in Computers, Vol 6. Academic Press Inc. (New York: 1965).

Photo by Brain Blogger cc 2.0.