What students should learn today for tomorrow? - 2

In yesterday's post, I listed the curriculum for preparing our children for future.

For the skills that to be considered important, (useful starting today and likely be essential in the future) see Tony Karrer's post on Needed Skills for New Media. [Copy below without permission]

* Work Integration — the ability to leverage social media and personal learning as part of problem solving
* Meta-Learning — the ability to look at your own work and learning processes to continuously identify improvement opportunities
* Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
* Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix content as part of work and learning
* Scanning — the ability to quickly scan from a wide variety of sources, to focus on salient details in order to maintain a broad picture and also to focus as needed to salient details.
* Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
* Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
* Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
* Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of information and conversation across multiple modalities
* Networking Building — the ability to build a network of people who can help with a wide variety of needs
* Network Access - the ability to quickly access your network for a variety of different kinds of needs in different ways using different tools
* Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
* Knowledge Work - the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information as part of work processes that captures personal value, builds network, and collects appropriate feedback

As I have noted before, future jobs available in developed countries will be of three types: hospitality, creative and problem solving.

Hospitality (ie personal services including beauty salon, restaurants, healthcare, legal matters etc) is unlikely to be outsourced to cheap-labour countries. BUT, cheap-labour can be in-sourced!

Creativity is about finding markets, products or new ways of doing things. These are for the most entrepreneurial type of people. High risk with high returns. (Recent examples: Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, youTube, eBay, flickr,... sorry, I am not familiar with success outside IT area. I am sure there are many too.)

Problem solving is about fixing problems. These problems are unforeseen and many may not have a procedure to deal with. Some are caused by accidents or natural activities, and others are result of intentional attacks.

We should prepare our children to handle these situation by including the following skills as essential in their education.

So these are additional to Tony's list:

1. Creativity and innovation spirits


2. Sense of curiosity. Current education system seems to be very good at killing this. We should reverse this effect and encourage curiosity.


3. Balance of Risk and Reward assessment, again based on evidence and scientific principles


4. Resilience