What am I? (and does it matter?)

Context 

 There is some evidence of a paradigm change in education delivery, driven by social, economic and technological changes taking place in the world outside education. The role and purpose of traditional forms of education “in a world defined by change, and by increasing complexity, fluidity and uncertainty” has been questioned (Bull & Gilbert, 2012). Most of the current educational structures were designed to develop the knowledge and skills valued in the 20th century and there is a need to ensure that education provision now supports students entering the 21st century workplace.

Content 

Introduction

One of the facets of 21st century education is a new orientation to knowledge. In a ‘knowledge age’ education environment, the lecturer’s role is not to support students to passively acquire and reproduce existing knowledge. Instead we should support them to interact with knowledge: to ‘do things with it’ (Bull & Gilbert, 2012). Students should understand, critique, manipulate, create and transform knowledge, and this is supported by the scaffolding of their intellectual curiosity, their problem-solving and their decision making (Bull & Gilbert, 2012).

The changes in technology and in the way children are being taught in schools, means that students arrive at university with social technology skills, and some knowledge technology skills, which can be built on. They have a different view of education and of knowledge. They can access high quality knowledge resources as fast as, or faster than the academic staff, and rather than relying on them for knowledge transfer they want academic staff to help them make sense of the knowledge they are finding, and in order to do that, they need to be able to maximise the impact of learning technologies.

Students arriving at university will have different levels of digital cultural capital. Digital cultural capital is the time students have invested in improving their technology knowledge and competencies through both formal and informal learning (Seale, 2012). Although students may have significant digital skills, especially with mobile technology, they may not have the digital literacies required for academic study. 

The 21st Century Academic

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References and Reading

Bull, A. & Gilbert, J. (2012) Swimming out of our depth? Leading learning in 21st century schools. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research

Seale, J. (2012) When digital capital is not enough: reconsidering the digital lives of disabled university students. Learning, Media and Technology. 38(3), 256-269