Are We Learning Skills that Matter?

The Educational Leadership article, Rigor Redefined, by Tony Wagner, published in October of 2008, refers to the issue of whether schools are teaching students the skills they will need for their future careers and to be good citizens. Tony Wagner set out on a mission to find what a variety of businesses look for in their employees. Teamwork, engaging in good discussions, asking good questions, and mastering “the seven survival skills” were the most common answers. Then, Tony Wagner went and observed schools to see if they are teaching these skills and he found the results were that they were not.

I think most of what we learn is still important and definitely needed. Sure, there are some skills that schools are not teaching what they should, but we are still learning. The first of the seven survival skills is critical thinking and problem solving, which involves asking good questions. We practice that often because many of the papers we write in English are about questioning what we think. Another skill is collaboration and leadership, which involve technology, conference calls, web casts, and net meetings. My school has taught us nothing about those, except for blogs and Google gadgets. Initiative and entrepreneurialism, and effective oral & written communication are two more skills. At the beginning of each year in elementary school, we had to make a goal for ourselves to reach by the end of the year, and throughout all of my school years, we have worked on our communicating skills; we did verbal and written presentations. Through intense note taking, we also worked on another skill of accessing & analyzing information.

What Happened to People Being Most Intelligent?

The video, Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us, by Michael Wesch, shows the effect of digital text and the web. One of the points the video made was that digital text is more flexible, moveable, and “hyper,” meaning that digital text can link or jump anywhere at the click of a button. Part of the presentation of the video even created a fast hyper vibe. He states that when one types, links, tags, or posts, one is teaching the machine. Another point the author makes is that the web is no longer just linking information, but goes on to say its linking people by sharing, trading, and collaborating. His last significant point identifies that society needs to rethink some things like legal issues, ethics, personal relationships, because of digital advancements.

The title of the video, Web 2.0… The Machine is Us/ing Us, insinuates, or infers that the so-called “machine” is just as smart or smarter than us (people). I think that because people were the ones who created the computer, it cannot be smarter than them. This reminds me of the debate I often hear about whether calculators are smarter than people. Computers are dependent on the user because without them, they are just as smart as the person who programmed them.

I think this video is similar to our prior Google blog. They both strongly suggest the idea that the more linking, sharing, trading, and collaborating between people, the better. But if that’s the case, then why do we have cyber bullying, or unethical events of social networking that have come about because of digital advances.