21st Century Competencies, Skills, Whatever

In the New World, they have decided that the 21st century (10% of which has already passed us by) requires the development of three main clusters of skills:

1. making use of data/information/knowledge;
2. making decisions concerning individual and social life; and
3. creating useful outputs by synthesis and/or collaboration.

In Atlantis, they have decided to describe these clusters as:

1. civic literacy/global awareness/cross-cultural skills;
2. critical and inventive thinking; and
3. information and communication skills.

For some reason, these skillsets are being touted as the new educational must-haves, as if they are something like Athena sprung fully-formed from the head of Zeus. Come off it, educators. You dropped the ball and now you are renaming the game. These skills have always been needed. You could find them in the marketplaces of Atlantis centuries ago, in the agoras of Greece long gone, in lost and legendary cities as well as places like the souks of Cairo and Byzantium Istanbul. Wherever humans have come together in civis or polis, there too have these skills been needed.

They are NOT tools unique to the 21st century, no matter how catchy the propaganda sounds. They are the Apollonian sense-making instruments that oppose the Bacchaean and Dionysian chaos and primal instincts of our passions and desires. They stand, have always stood, between us and the Dread Anarch.

Although these tools have lost in the past, they need to hold the line if we are not to enter darker times. To understand why they are more needed now than ever before, and thus why people are labelling them '21st Century' when they were as relevant at the dawn of civilisation, we need to note just two things: 1) there are now more people than ever before in the history of humanity; and 2) there is now more available data than ever before in that same history.

This means that 1) getting people to work together and solve problems and plan for the future is more important than ever before; and 2) making sense of the data-stream, like being forced to drink the ocean, is the new magic. And there has only ever been one coherent myth which attempted to resolve the difficulties while preserving the world of men.

I speak, of course, of the myths of the Norsemen. In those myths, Odin Allfather made it his quest, for which he suffered on the World-Tree and gave up his eye, to find the overarching wisdom that would save creation from Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods.

With Thought and Memory as his aides, he still lost. But he found the right solution: ameliorating the destruction while planting the seeds for rebirth. Meanwhile, his son Thor was busy trying to drink the ocean by brute force, and failing.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The Core of Education

Over the last few years, I've been exposed to many education debates. These debates have been about whether 'holistic education' is a viable educational concept, what an education ought to consist of, how educational results should be interpreted, how educational reform should be carried out and what its objectives should be, and many other related matters.

I've mentioned a lot of these matters on this blog. Some of them have exercised me more than others, and some have infuriated me or amused me more than others. But I think that there are still some basic questions that all educators should think about before they debate the more specific issues.

For me, the basic questions are: "Who do we educate?", "To what end(s)?", "With what curriculum?" Questions that are also very important but not so basic are: "In what way?", "Developing what skills?", "How do we evaluate success?" and "Where are the material resources?"

We educate students. This means we need to know what the range of human ability is, and how such ability is developed. Lots of new disciplines have developed in the 1990s and 2000s. We now know more about how the brain works, and how flexible it is in achieving goals, for example. We know it adapts dynamically in many ways.

The ends of education are almost always rooted in usefulness to society. In a fishing village, catching fish for survival and trade is a main objective. For our society, we should think carefully about what ends serve it best. We can't just say, 'Everything!'

The curriculum must be carefully constructed. You can teach skills like chewing, but without food, this skill is a lot less useful. It follows that skills are less important than context, ability and content — because of the adaptability of the brain. Learning to read, for example, is different for many people; there is no one specific technique. What's important is that there is something to read, and that there is a lot of it. Preferably, what there is to read will be useful in attaining other objectives.

Once we know who we're educating, why we are doing it, and along what lines, then only should we think about whether we can evaluate success. Logically, given sufficient education, students should be able, at some point, to continue their own education on whatever foundations have been built. They should also be able to do the equivalent of catching fish in a fishing village context.

As for material resources, it's surprising how much you can do with limited resources. Isaac Newton's work on light, gravity and calculus (among many other things) did not have the benefit of the more than 300 years of technology accumulated since his time; yet, we still study a lot of it.

A few years back, I posted some thoughts on an ideal education. Since then, I've thought a lot more, but not deviated significantly from those ideas. (Well, actually there is one deviation: I no longer think that all educational outcomes necessarily imply the presence of an education that is designed to produce those specific outcomes. It's a bit like thinking about intelligent beings, realising that 'intelligent' is a self-bestowed term, and that it doesn't necessarily indicate an intelligent designer. Haha.)

The bottom-line has to be increased functionality. We teach reading because we converted spoken language to symbols millennia ago, and the main method of effective persistent communication between humans relies on decoding those symbols. It's dysfunctional to be illiterate or sub-literate in this human context. But teaching something like chemistry is a lot less generally applicable, although it may be a lot more powerful for those who will be using it for something specific.

What we need, therefore, is reading material that will challenge the student's ability to decode symbols and derive meaning in as lossless a way as possible. Finnegan's Wake might be too extreme, but a fairly high standard of competence in at least one language should be developed.

The next stage is the ability to compose using these symbols, in such a way that effective communication is achieved. This is attained when a majority of people reading your stuff can understand it or at least decode it enough to see what you intend to communicate. The closer they get to your intended message, the better you are. After that, of course, you can write for elegance and beauty and stuff like that; it's just like building a house — walls and roof first, other stuff later.

Looking back at 2007 and the young people I taught in that bygone era, I realise that they were already good. What on earth were we teaching them, then? If the bottom-line was increased functionality, did we give them that? Or were the examinations just a way to rubber-stamp existing proficiency? Questions, questions...

Seven (?) Survival Skills

Yes, I'm still on Tony Wagner. It strikes me that while people in North America wake up and smell the coffee (or are woken up by the smell of coffee), an instinct kicks in to start a process known as list-making. In the past, three points sufficed to define a plane; nowadays, you need at least seven to define a theory.

Wagner's seven points for the survival of the West are:

• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Collaboration across networks and leading by influence
• Agility and adaptability
• Initiative and entrepreneuralism
• Effective oral and written communication
• Accessing and analysing information
• Curiosity and imagination

As usual, it is a hodge-podge of adjectives, nouns and verbs. But more than that, they are very useful points in a generic sense. Unfortunately, I am quite certain that these same points won't help close the global achievement gap for a very simple reason: these are the very same talents which the human race has ALWAYS needed. If a school doesn't help to teach these things, it's a bad school, simple as that.

Michael Fullan, in 2001, came up with his own list for leaders. He has five points, which may look pretty similar to you:

• Moral purpose
• Understanding change
• Relationship building
• Knowledge creation and sharing
• Coherence making

The lists overlap, but this one at least has fewer words. Again, it's pretty much something that leaders of the past ten millennia have probably needed. With Ecclesiastes, you would have to agree that there is nothing new under the sun.

Whether it's seven, or five, or (horrors, in this age of complexity) three, the essentials remain the same. You've got to find out what to do, why you should do it, and just do it. You can't do it alone; you need to be good with other people. The world has changed enormously, but the world hasn't changed much in some ways.

The Write Stuff

There's a problem with craftsmanship and complexity; there's a problem with the 3 Cs — comprehension, composition and computation; there's a problem with consideration and cogitation. That's 7 Cs altogether, and not a single ocean.

The thing is this: you can get simple hacks to teach how to write sentences. You can get simple hacks to teach how to string them together in some order. And you can get these simple hacks to be English teachers, and everyone will be satisfied if only simple constructs are to be expressed. I mean, "See Spot run!" is pretty easy, and if you want to make Spot go through some adventures too, that's fine.

But the thing is that if you're going to craft a rock, there is large margin for error; if you want to make a sundial, there's a whole lot less; and if you want to assemble a clock, there's preferably as little error as humanly possible. The same applies to the writing of complex essays.

And that's where things have begun to go wrong. A simple essay with the only restriction that you write about the topic given can be hacked out of raw stone (so to speak) in about 20 minutes or less. A literary essay can be designed, sourced and hacked out in about a day or so. But an essay which discusses epistemology and requires more than passing acquaintance with several fields of knowledge, an understanding of various ways of knowing, and a personal engagement with the material that shines out from the murkiness — ha, this is not so easy, especially if the word limit is brutally tight.

If you want to teach people to write these things, you can't be just an ordinary hack. The apprenticeship model for clockmakers is a lot more rigorous than the apprenticeship model for brickmakers. For both, composition of the raw material and comprehension of what it can do (and how it should do it) are essential. But the former requires a lot more computation, a lot more exactitude, and a lot more craft than the latter. You need to be able to handle complexity with tighter tolerances.

If you want to learn how to make something, look at the craftsmanship of the person who is going to teach you. If you want a person to teach something, you should ask them to show that they can do it first. In a school system, if a person gets to university and qualifies in a subject, that normally means they can make bricks and even houses. But it doesn't mean they can build windmills and television sets and clocks.

If making the simplest brick house is tough, making the simplest working mechanical clock is tougher. And if you get brickmakers to make both, the first will be functional and the second will be crap.

Presentation Skills (Part III): Structured Instruments

A presentation is a structured instrument. Most of us cannot just enter the room, dazzle everyone, and take their loot. Some of us can, but that doesn't make it a presentation.

Essentially, a presentation has perhaps three common components. First, there is some sort of visual device: in the old days, there were chalkboards, flipcharts, and physical models; now, there are those ubiquitous PowerPoint and Keynote slideshows. Second, there may be handouts and other physical takeaways so that those with a slower intellectual digestive system can get their fibre. Third, there is the lecture, exposition or other form of oral presentation.

The key is that all three should be nearly orthogonal: the three components should not overlap except where they reinforce key points in different ways. They should all tell the same story, but the forte of each mode is not the same. The visual device shows something that can best be shown visually; the handout gives details that would otherwise bog the presentation down (and stuff that may need a longer cognitive process, like some kinds of numbers); the exposition provides a narrative that inducts the audience and conducts them through the domain under examination.

Within this combined triadic process, the presenter must say what the topic is, why it is important to the audience, and what to do about it. This can be further enlarged in some cases to be a section on definitions, a section on concepts and principles, a section on the situation and how it is to be improved, a section on actions to be taken, and a simple summary conclusion. In an argumentative presentation, the slant is more prescriptive — perhaps 'actions to be taken' becomes 'why you should do something rather than something else'. But in general, this tends to be an effective narrative flow.

As your grasp of presentation technique develops, you'll realise that it's a bit like music. With control over the basics, you will find exceptions to most rules. The one rule that is most unlikely to be broken is that presentation is a form of communication. The presenter intends to communicate something, most of all, and everything else follows that. All the points I've given are actually guidelines for the clueless; some who read this will already know that they can do other things and still perform outrageously well.

That too is in the nature of human communication. That is why our neocortex is such a complicated mass of neurons.

Presentation Skills (Part II): Content Rules

Actually, no. 'Content rules' here is descriptive, not declarative, with 'rules' as a noun and 'content' as an adjective. Wait, did that confuse you? Well, that's sometimes the sort of thing which appears in the content presented on a slide.

As a rule, content isn't the point of a presentation's slides. Rather, the slides are meant to target key points, while the presenter presents the content. See, for example, this 20-minute lecture. It's a great talk on its own, but watch Schwartz's slides and listen to him. The content is almost entirely in his captivating and well-structured speech, while the slides are minimalist.

No flashy animations or 'power points' there! The slides serve to provide hooks that help the audience focus better on the speech itself, and do not duplicate the speech. In fact, they are almost incidental to Schwartz's talk.

This style is similar to that of other well-known speakers. Consider Steve Jobs in what used to be his annual Apple presentations. While his slides were beautifully designed works of graphic art and sometimes animation, the real content was in the explication and elaboration found in his speech. The slides don't carry the presenter; the presenter carries the slides.

Simple rule of presentation #1: If the slides carry more than 5% of the presentation, it's probably a bad one. Probably you shouldn't have more than 20 words on a slide, and not more than 1 slide every 2-5 minutes; just watch the information level. Also, if the presenter is reading stuff to you, he's a bad presenter, and those are bad slides.

Simple rule of presentation #2: Simple slides are the best. If the slides are overdesigned, they're bad slides. Don't go for impressive slides and a bad speaker; train to be a good speaker and use simple slides if you must impress. Slides are aids, not a presentation on their own. Government bodies tend to be hopeless here, because the lazy shortcut many of them use is to put all the content on the slides, then print the slides out and use them as handouts. Moronic. Why not have handouts and slides separately? Laziness.

Simple rule of presentation #3: If there more than five parts or points per section, that's forgettable. Literally so, since the human mind seldom processes more than 6-8 items without forgetting. Are you hoping the audience will forget what you have to say? This is a cunning tool I've seen some people use, since they know it's mostly smoke they're churning out.

Simple rule of presentation #4: Strong structure is memorable. This is the hardest rule to obey. A strong structure with great key examples embedded makes a speech memorable. Anything else is probably bad.

Presentation Skills (Part I): What Are You Presenting?

I've seen literally hundreds of presentations in my life, even if you confine it to that ubiquitous slideshow kind normally masquerading under the misnomer 'PowerPoint' (having neither power nor point, that is). What I've noticed is that quite often, the presenter doesn't know his presentation equipment, his slides, his intention, or his strengths and weaknesses in presentation. Sometimes, more than one of these areas of unknowledge shows; sometimes, the person is completely clueless.

That's not to say I haven't been there myself. The thing is that you have to actually think about the purpose, the intent, the structure and content of the presentation. You must know what it's for, how you intend it to come out, how the parts are connected, and what the parts are in the first place. And after all that, you must know if you can do it yourself, or if some other form is more suited to you as a presenter.

I've seen egregious examples of bad presentations before. One was by Mustache, who while intelligent and a generally nice, wise, tactful person, was really badly served by whoever did his PowerPoint slides for him. It wasn't helped that he tends to drift towards monotonous unless really excited, which isn't often. One was by Yak, who is likewise intelligent but tends to meddle with his trousers and drift off into odd tangents before losing the thread completely and forgetting what's coming up next.

The point is that presentations derive their power from effectiveness. You need to know what you're trying to do and make sure the odds are stacked in your favour so that it's likely you will accomplish it. In the next few posts, I'll elaborate on this — hopefully in time for it to be of use to a whole bunch of people I know who are about to make major presentations.

Morning Devotions — Secrets Revealed

Recently, two things happened which led to the writing of this particular post. The first thing was that one of my former students pointed out an ancient post on another blog which mentioned that I used to deliver morning meditations without reference to notes, thus leading the blogger to believe that I was either particularly religious or some sort of cyborg. The second thing was that about a month ago, I found an envelope containing those notes, and promptly threw them all away.

Here then is the secret history of my morning meditations.

To begin with, I've always found it difficult to do justice to any part of the Bible without recourse to a shelf of books. In preparing for a half-hour sermon, I normally refer to a stack of books that comes up to my waist. In preparing for morning devotionals, I need slightly less than that, but this is because a lot of it has stuck in my curious and slightly eccentric neural network. I never delivered a 'canned' devotion; every single one was an original. How did I do it? Here is an outline.

I spent time in prayer. The most important thing to me about speaking in public on questions of faith and practice is that the message is universal and slightly less than totally focussed. Why? Because if it were totally focussed, it would probably hit only one or two people, and morning devotions and such are meant to reach as many people as they can (and make their day better, hopefully). The problem with universality is that I'm not God. So I've always believed it is best to ask for help.

I would then write out the reading for the day, the thoughts that were related to it, and the logic that linked them all. I cut and erased till the 'script' fit a ten-minute maximum. And then I looked through once for mistakes. I always slept well. When I woke up, I would read through the notes (always written on a small piece of paper from a notepad or a 3 x 5 inch index card) once. I would read them again about ten minutes before delivery. And then, I delivered. And it was never quite the same as what I wrote out the night before.

This was the same routine I followed for chemistry lessons, TOK lessons, and any lesson except those for which I had no preparation for whatsoever. (Last year's batch of Year 4 students from a certain class will remember the unprepared one on graphic novels, Shakespeare, Homer and the three dimensions of literature. It wasn't that bad, right, guys?) The routine for the long lectures was of course different; I never had a written script since all the notes I needed were on-screen.

But the colleague who helped me cart the last material vestiges of my previous life away immediately understood why I was also throwing my devotional notes away. It wasn't to conceal the truth about the myth of my 'no notes' ability, or out of bitterness, or out of a desire to perpetuate the myth. It was because I realised (as I should have, earlier) that such notes are instants captured on paper. You can never deliver the same message twice. In fact, I never even once delivered the message as it was written out in my notes.

Which is probably why people never saw me referring to any notes during all my years of morning devotions. Well, that's the true story. And no, I am not an unusually pious human, nor a cyborg.