Teaching for the Future

Learning as defined by Rodgers et.al. (2006) is "a life-long process of coping with change". I accept this definition as a fact and find it the ultimate objective that prescribed the kind of skills today's students need to get equipped with for future job market. Bie.org (2012) specifies those as: ICT literacy, critical thinking and problem solving, creative thinking, communication, collaboration, cross-cultural, leadership, social, self and task management, ethics civic responsibility and accountability skills. A thoughtful examination of the list can easily lead to concluding the necessity of such skills to remain agile while dealing with uncertainty caused by constant change.

In order to teach for the future, nothing would help as much as simulating scenarios in and/or outside today's classrooms that triggers the need to employ the above skills. Lombardi (2007) called this "Authentic Learning", which includes, but not limited to: project/task based learning, role-playing, simulations, and virtual communities of practice. Such learning to be effective, it needs to capitalize on best practices of teaching profession, while enhancing lessons pedagogies by mainly utilizing communication methods that appeals most to the students.

While facilitating the Digital Narratives assignment, I recall the level of resistance I had to deal with. The students, whom are supposed to be "Digital Natives" as per Marc Prensky's (2001) terms, were not excited about the requirement to learn new technologies (Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, and GarageBand). Moreover, they found the format of the assignment very new compaired to anything they've done before where they had to identify real-world scenario of Enterprise Application deployment and develop a case study around it. This Authentic Learning opportunity also required the students to develop a media to summarize the main outlines of their findings from the site visits and share it with their peers for formative evaluation and discussion.

This experience helped me in understanding Siemens (2006) rational for criticizing Prensky's conclusions about the new generation of learners. Although my students enjoyed the Digital Narrative assignments for its authenticity and relevance in developing many of the skills they'll need in their future jobs, they haven't demonstrated many of the attributes of digital natives, the way Prensky has described them, throughout the journey. They were worried and required a lot of support to get started with the assignment for its unique nature compared to their previous experiences. Moreover, they required workshops to learn the tools, which is not an expected requirement from Digital Natives. Such workshops wouldn't be required if the technology is one that students normally use in their daily communication.

A holistic view of the three articles lead me to conclude that in order to increase the effectiveness of teaching and learning, we need to create more and more authentic learning opportunities for our students, while using the communication technology models and tools they daily use in their own communications to further engage them in the learning dialogue. A clear distinction should be always in the teachers' minds among the communication technologies and simulations technologies employed to create those authentic learning experiences for the very big difference in the way students react to them. The former will make the student comfortable and bring them much closer to the teacher, the peers and the content. On the other hand, the latter can throw them totally outside their comfort zone, if not planned well!