The Future of Learning

Tom Vander Ark:

KnowledgeWorks, led for a decade by Chad Wick, a former bank CEO passionate about connecting urban kids to the idea economy, developed a 2020 forecast that outlines five learning priorities:

1. Students need the ability to sort, verify, synthesize, and use information to make judgments and take action. These skills have always been important but now that we're all drinking from a fire hose of information they are essential.

2. Students need a working knowledge of market economics and personal finance--most students still leave high school without them. Students will be navigating an increasingly dynamic economy in which technologies will improve and change at exponential rates and market opportunities will be big but competitive. Students need the ability to sell--themselves and an idea. They need to experience and give candid performance feedback and gain appreciation for a quality work product.

Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, an independent research institute, told Tom Friedman, "Fortunately, this is the best time ever for innovation," said Carlson, for three reasons: "First, although competition is increasingly intense, our global economy opens up huge new market opportunities. Second, most technologies--since they are increasingly based on ideas and bits and not on atoms and muscle--are improving at rapid, exponential rates. And third, these two forces--huge, competitive markets and rapid technological change--are opening up one major new opportunity after another."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 9, 2011 3:44 AM
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