As I have shared in my previous post on the generation gaps in learning, I would continue to explore the Net Generation and Education here.
Below is an extract from Youtube about the Net Generation video:
Thanks to the ubiquity of technology in their lives, the Net Generation is poised to transform the form and functions of school, work, and democracy and for the better.
With its comprehensive examination of the Net Generation, and based on a 4.5 million dollar study, Grown Up Digital offers valuable insight and concrete takeaways for leaders across all social institutions who are finding it necessary and advantageous adapt to this changing social fabric.
In this clip, Tapscott explains why the current educational system has failed to engage the Net Generation and prepare them for the new digital economy.
How to help young people to become better learners?
In this Building Learning Power:
Building learning power is about helping young people to become better learners, both in school and out.
It is about creating a culture in classrooms – and in the school more widely – that systematically cultivates habits and attitudes that enable young people to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently and creatively.
Students who are more confident of their own learning ability learn faster and learn better. They concentrate more, think harder and find learning more enjoyable. They do better in their tests and external examinations. And they are easier and more satisfying to teach.
Building Learning Power prepares youngsters better for an uncertain future. Today’s schools need to be educating not just for exam results but for lifelong learning. To thrive in the 21st century, it is not enough to leave school with a clutch of examination certificates. Pupils/students need to have learnt how to be tenacious and resourceful, imaginative and logical, self disciplined and self-aware, collaborative and inquisitive.
BLP schools have been pioneering ways of taking this ambition really seriously
Three core beliefs
Building learning power is based on three fundamental beliefs
- BLP believes that the core purpose of education is to prepare young people for life after school; helping them to build up the mental, emotional, social and strategic resources to enjoy challenge and cope well with uncertainty and complexity
- BLP believes that this purpose for education is valuable for all young people and involves helping them to discover the things that they would really love to be great at, and strengthening their will and skill to pursue them.
- This confidence, capability and passion can be developed since real-world intelligence is something that people can be helped to build up.
These three core beliefs are particularly relevant in societies that are full of change, complexity, risk, opportunity and individual opportunity for making your own way in life.
This all sounds interesting and challenging as we are now living in a world with supercomplexity, as I shared here. How to keep our youths interested in learning and education have been an important area of research, and various strategies have been proposed, including the use of games, and gamification in education, or the use of project based learning and problem based learning to drive the learning process.
What is our purpose of education?
I have share the purpose of education here. We are preparing our youths to engage with the world. In this Education for Global Competence: Preparing our Youth to Engage the World, global competence is the capacity and disposition to understand and act on issues of global significance.
How to become better at educating for global competence? This involves rethinking practices and recognising that there are no simple recipe for success.
One way of gaining more experiences into open education and learning practice is to participate and engage in open courses such as The Change11 and the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge CCK12 MOOC. These are free massive online courses where you may learn and experience the learning of how to learn.