Above and Beyond the 4Cs: 21st century skills for Southeast Asia

The new century brought new ways of thinking and doing things especially for the academia wherein many changes take some time. We are now in an imaginable period when technology is not scarce, technology is not difficult to handle, applications and programs are user-centered, technology is affordable, internet is far richer with reliable information and internet connectivity is available.

In many parts of the world including here in southeast Asia, public and private schools are rethinking of how to address this situation in the light of their roles as formators of the future leaders and professionals of the region. The major task is to revisit and redesign the curriculum. Education leaders were in agreement of the need for 4Cs in the 21st century curriculum– communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.  Here is a very nice and simple explanation of the 4Cs.

The Above and Beyond videoAbove and Beyond video was created by P21 and FableVision to cite a story and example of the 4Cs, namely, communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.

The short video is a very good introduction for rethinking the curriculum in the 21st century. But how much of these skills are we looking at? What are the capabilities were looking at for each C? Is communication for example, a technical skill or a soft skill? If we talk of public speaking, communication is a hard skill and in managing a team communication is an organizational skill as well.

While the 4C is a very good baseline guide, we still need to work more. Back in 2011, in a presentation I did, I listed general skills needed by our future graduates. My list is not Cs but it captured relevant skills and literacy needed by our times.

This is from my 2011 presentation Preparing our students in the global setting

Five years later, I am updating this list to include the ideas of colleagues in the region and I made my own summarization. This is what I propose as the 21st century skills and competencies needed in the ASEAN region, beyond the 4Cs.

1. Thinking and inquiry – this is to include inferencing, reflection, financial literacy and enterprising mindset.
2. ASEAN Communication – the need to be prolific in the mother tongue and to be acquainted with the other ASEAN languages and dialects; to build interpersonal and intrapersonal skills sensitive of the ASEAN context; having a fervent intercultural skills.
3. Innovative ASEAN aptitude – this characteristic encompasses aspects, namely, being collaborative, possessing strong cultural awareness and respect for others, and valuing diversity.
4. Problem-solving – this is to develop a mindset that includes crisis skills, conflict management, being adaptive to different situations and to always advocate for peace in the nation, in the region and in the world.
5. Leadership – molding sound ASEAN persona, being a role model, ethical and being an inspiration to others.
6. Self-regulation – this is to include independence, agency, being a good ASEAN and digital citizen.
7. Environment-consciousness – promoting care and respect for the environment; to advocate sustainable development and conflict resolution and to always aim for peace in the region.
8. Information and digital competency – ICT will become an integral part of building all the seven skills above. It is not a simple matter of introducing ICT or having digital literacy. It is bringing the literacy to a competency level that will exhibit the use of different ICT resources matching the context situations; pulling, classifying, differentiating, synthesizing information; understanding and making sound meanings of different kinds of digital media and platforms.

I hope this list could be helpful to school leaders in the southeast Asian region.

 

 

 

Bloom’s Taxonomy just got better

Any educator or teacher would know Bloom’s Taxonomy. If you are a teacher and you do not know it, here it is..

Back in 1956 Benjamin Bloom posited that there are three educational domains, namely, cognitive, affective and kinesthetic. Cognitive deals with acquiring and processing facts and knowledge. Affective addresses emotional balance, appreciation and affirmation of the understanding of facts and knowledge. Kinesthetic is all about acquiring new knowledge through psychomotor ways.

In the past, learning is not a common term used but education or educational would be. Information has only become a convenient term that goes with learning during the mid-2000 to 2010 when Web 2.0 really became a mental model for many learning situations.

Now given these three domains, most students in the past were also classified as either very cognitive, affective or kinesthetic in dealing with new truths, facts and knowledge. So curricula were designed to cater to each of the three.

Bloom advanced his discussions on cognitive method of gaining knowledge through what he proposed as the Bloom’s Taxonomy. This taxonomy has been the basis of most instructional designs.

As a teacher, trainer and instructional designer, I have used Bloom’s taxonomy as a rule of thumb in designing and matching activities with the learners and the content or skills to be learned.

As mentioned earlier, it was the decade of 2000-2010 that gave heralds to the Web 2.0. It is a web framework that is very much accepted by many industries. It believed in the power of technology to expand the way of doing all kinds of business through the web. Tim O’Reilly was the architect of this Web 2.0. The intention was to bring the internet, or rather the web, into a more user and netcitizen-oriented model. The impact of this model rolled from commerce to different fields and made a strong impact to education. The new century now saw how technology has organically pushed knowledge construction and thereby educators saw that this situation warrants an addition to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning.

Tim O’ Reilly. For many years now, I have been the shadow evangelist of O’Reilly’s contribution to the knowledge construction, do-it-yourself (DIY) learning model. His Web 2.0 was a persuasive, game changer and people-oriented framework.

In this light that educators in the recent decade made different modifications on the model to include one cognitive level, “Creation“. This addition may have spontaneously occurred at the same time that O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 was accepted and applied in many web exchange platforms.

There are two sites I am sharing as reference to the revised Bloom’s model. First from ExpertBeacon and the second by Donald Clark (2015).

Regardless whether if it is the 1956 or the 2000 version, learning experiences must be designed to aim at elevating the learning circumstances, enrich the experiences and develop critical thinking skills such as analyzing, decomposing, reconciling or synthesizing and creating– creating in the sense of being able to design something useful,  construct a solution or even innovate. This is the essence of creation in the new model.

So while the oldies will be familiar already and some young or new teachers are still acquainting themselves on Bloom’s Taxonomy, here is a very good way of explaining it, the  Bloom’s Taxonomy according to Seinfeld. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Short video as a powerful tool

Youtube has been around since 2005 and since then it has generated different kind of interests and communities. Youtube has been the company that made us realize the power of animated or moving pictures in a short length. If the plan is carried on properly, the shorter the video, the more powerful is its message and more meanings are generated. This is pretty much at the end of the storytelling sphere where you have on the other end the film format that extends to two hours or more to convey a story and a message.

In the digital age quality is not measured by length but how the content is expressed. In this segment I will showcase different short videos that were produced by former students and try to make a point that a short video is just as powerful too.

The following examples are from the project I did with Lennarth Bernhardsson, a Digital Media instructor from University West Sweden back in 2011. We wanted to uncover what makes “a great learning experience” and the students express their answers by creating a two-minute video or less.

 Learning is not only confined in the classroom setting, on the contrary it’s the experience you gain that makes your learning worthwhile. It’s true that you can never learn without guidance, but guidance being itself is only there to aid you in your learning experience. Our group believes that people learn best if they discover something and this something sparks their interest, the interest they gain will keep them motivated to learn and through enough practice will give them the skill they need to succeed. The video was directed by John Eric Uy.

 

Failing a class doesn’t always mean the end of the world. This video shows how one can turn little setbacks into learning experiences.

Next Time by Igoy Dimaano, Iya Del Rio, Kevin Caballas, Mark Moraga, Nicole See-Diet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

 This was done as a part of a video and editing course at University West. We were to express a “Great Learning Experience” through the use of mostly only Creative Commons Material.- Linus Forsell

The three videos exhibited 21st century student outputs. It shows and demonstrates students today have a medium of their own blended with their own creativity.

Thank you Youtube for this wonderful digital invention. Everyone can create a story or tell a message and broadcast it in a platform that is accessed by the whole world. As most institutions recognize the power of video, even the Ministry of Education of Singapore has made it as a very meaningful tool to tell their citizens and to tell the world the importance of the teaching profession. Here are two videos they have made to tell that teaching is an important business and profession in the development of a nation.

The video Mrs. Chong was uploaded in 2012 in Youtube and the Why video was only uploaded this 2016.

Each of these videos of the Ministry of Education of Singapore is three minutes. But each is filled with insightful questions, narrative and reflections to tell. This is the power of the short video.