So I ask you, are there really 21st Century skills or are they really just the same skills we’ve had for hundreds of years reapplied and put on a diet of steroids/HGH/high-fructose corn syrup?

Jonathan Medina’s Brain Rules is a great read I just finished and the biggest message I got out of it was… What in the name of Gorton’s fish sticks makes you think millions of years of evolution can be easily defeated by a few years of YouTube and Flickr?

Medina doesn’t necessarily tackle the issue head on as I suggest, but I think he would agree. Think about it, Medina urges many times, the human race began millions of years ago on the Serengeti when humanity was no more than a dream. It grew out of an evolutionary path that was threatened by everything between disease, elements, natural disasters and predatory animals. Humanity was on the plains of the Earth far, far, far longer than written history, let alone the Information Age or the Facebook Age.

Yet we proclaim, our kids are different! Digital natives! Digital imbeciles! Don’t trust anyone born after 1980! No, trust them, the brains are wired differently and they work like super fast! Mark Bauerlein! Ian Jukes! Facebook! Bebo! OMGGGGGGG!

Except… Regardless of whether or not you believe in Evolution, 30 years isn’t a lot of years out of 4 billion or 6000 years.

For instance… On the idea that multitasking is growing with kids writing essays, doing Facebook, instant messaging, blogging, Skyping, eating sandwiches and listening to music…

Now getting back to the topic on hand… Has the nature of learning really changed in the digital age or has education just become ossified? If I’m not getting my signals crossed (reading Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind right now), Medina would probably lie more on the side of the latter. The way humans learn really hasn’t changed. But what has happened is that the classroom has become severely inefficient in its delivery of the learning experience. Bored brains don’t learn well. Sleep and low stress is important. Vision (EDIT: vision as in visual, not as in dreams) and exploration help learning big time. Or so argues Medina.

On my playing field, I think it’s quite obvious that the nature of learning hasn’t changed.

I recently lamented to an education colleague over some drinks after the iSummit, “Facebook changes its look, without changing its fundamental software, and a lot of users complain and can’t transfer their skills. I mean, one gajillion strong against new Facebook?”

“Yeah, but that’s not just limited to technology… It’s a problem in all education… It’s hard to get skills to transfer,” the teacher retorted.

It was something I had never really thought about since I’ve never really had any trouble transferring my random skills to random problems. In fact, I like a good challenge, whether it’s figuring out how to cook my chicken or finding a way to fix a printer. But, as Brian always likes to point out, I’m weird. And that’s probably true.

But how do we teach that? How do we change our institutions so I’m less of an anomaly, much less a novelty? Is it to reshape what has been taught around the ‘new skills’ of the 21st Century? Learning wikis, blogs, and computers. Or is it to reshape the pursuit of education so the students can not only cope with 21st Century tools, but also the off chance of getting sucked into a vortex and ending up in the 18th Century or half a universe away?

There are probably many ways we can change education as an institution. Jeff Utecht recently twitted this video, and it’s an interesting vision. I don’t particularly agree with parts of it (especially technology being like oxygen), but the idea and motivation behind the Science Leadership Academy is one of the more convincing ones I’ve seen, especially at the high school level. I know I’ve written a lot of questions and not a lot of answers, so to speak, but I really wonder. What can we do?

Back to the books for me…!