Click Home

21st  Century Workforce Readiness

Lesson One:  Becoming a 21st Century Learner and Earner

http://lone-eagles.com/workforce-lesson1.html

Return to the 21st Century Workforce Readiness Home Page

http://lone-eagles.com/workforce.html

Required Submissions Checklist:

        ____ Create a Jing video capture and share the link via the class listserv.

        ____ Email your instructor on what worked, and what didn’t and your candid feedback on this lesson. 

Less is More

In our immediate world of accelerating change, education and elearning are rapidly changing, as is the very nature of our economy, and our workforce.

Less is more in our age of information overload. Attention spans are shortening, the oral communications medium of instruction video is on the rise and reading is diminishing. The use of web pages is on the decline, the uses of videos and apps are on the rise.  Repeated from lesson one: See the top graphic at the link below, but don’t feel obligated to read the article “The Web Is Dead”: www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

College costs are up 600% since 1980, and in question is how much college loan debt makes sense.

Social media marketing, mobile commerce, mobile learning, and accelerating change means the need for just-in-time searching and learning solutions will be increasingly in demand. Your mobile device is likely to be your conduit to what you need to know - in the near future.

The very nature of education is changing.

Industrial age education was to prepare workers for lifelong careers, often as factory workers. College degrees held the promise of one career for life, perhaps as an educator in K12 or higher ed.  Today, by the age of 35 one can expect to have already held a dozen different jobs. We can be expected to be changing jobs every few years – typically moving into jobs that didn’t exist a few years before.

High Points:

You are likely to be reading on a smart phone on a daily basis what you didn’t know you needed to know, via feeds from the smartest sources you and your friends in your “personal learning network” can find.

Educators are no longer the “Sage on the Stage” but must serve as the “Guide on the Side.” Mastery learning and facilitating peer mentoring are made possible by a combination of new online tools, quality resources created by others, and pedagogies (ala Khanacademy.com) Consider yourself as an info-broker challenged to identify and deliver the very best existing rich media instruction, from diverse global sources, to your students, with emphasis on teaching them to find their own such learning resources, as self-directed learners, while building effective collaboration skills with others.

The 21^st Century Workforce Readiness Imperative:

Everyone Both Learner and Teacher, Both Consumer and Producer,
All the Time.

Students, starting in primary school, must learn entrepreneurship, such that entrepreneurship will be a lifelong option. This requires self-directed learning skills, effective online collaboration skills, and managing their digital identity and reputation in a mature manner. Teaching creativity and the innovation process is juxtaposed to current trends focusing on standards and teaching to the test.  A long list of  youth  entrepreneurship  sites is at http://lone-eagles.com/entrelinks2008.htm  Take a quick look,  noting you could spend hours exploring.

Educational institutions are slow to change, but students with digital devices are just the opposite; able and committed to keep each other up to the same instant of progress.

While exploring the lesson one for Alaskan Native HS dropouts at http://lone-eagles.com/workforce101.htm - note the lesson is intentionally short, and geared to stimulate interest via key links and concepts. The very first link in lesson one is an audio podcast explaining the goal of lesson one. The second link is a Jing video capture that walks you through the lesson with explanations and visual highlights.  At the very end of the lesson is a single link to "advanced skill-building." This is the hands-on skillbuilding activity and there is one for each lesson, and there are advanced optional resource links to explore.  TO THE DEGREE YOU HAVE TIME AND INTEREST - explore the links in this lesson one for drop outs, AFTER exploring the links in this lesson. Let your instructor know if you are overwhelmed and/or frustration. NOTE: Limit your time exploring links to 1-2 minutes - with the intent to just get a general idea of the type and quality of resources presented in this lesson.  When their interest has been achieved, youth can often review and absorb far more content than adults, as something to simply be aware of.

Note the course homepage http://lone-eagles.com/workforce101.htm  has links to the course Wiki, Ning social network, and more.

Required Reading:

The Free Ebook below is a quality treatment of how one can leverage all these trends to self-educate. This free Ebook below is a shorter version of the $10 book at Amazon.com :  DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education

Download the Free Edupunks Guide and read pages 1-22 for this lesson.

Consider this a review of the literature from the private sector regarding open source and commercial Elearning innovations. Social media as “personal learning networks!”

Free download of Edupunk's guide, sponsored by the Gates Foundation is at this link  http://www.scribd.com/doc/60954896/EdupunksGuide

See also: http://diyubook.com/  Note how Anya is using social media to promote herself!  Note also that the Gates Foundation funded her in this free ebook effort which relates to the Khan Academy video mastery learning video instruction themes. (You viewed this video in the Welcome to this class.)

OPTIONAL:

Explore: Ning Tutorials on How to Create a Successful Social Network

Ning has sophisticated video tutorials on best practices for creating a social media site:  http://creators.ning.com

Video instruction is the next wave of Elearning, see how Ning is using short instructional videos: http://creators.ning.com/video

Teacher-specific best practices are introduced at the following link:

http://creators.ning.com/inspiration/index.php

Click on best practices at the page above.

Lesson Feedback: 

You're invited to privately email your instructor:

       1. What areas, if any, did you have trouble with during this
            lesson?

       2. What questions remain now that you've finished this lesson?

       3. Approximately how much time did you devote to this lesson?

                       4. What improvements would you like to suggest?