21st century skills as experienced in knowledge-creating organizations
Why knowledge building (Scardamalia)
The Need for Knowledge
- Societal advance: Not just about how much resources but the capacity to create new knowledge
- Students need to go beyond learning available knowledge but be able to create new knowledge (innovate)
- Mandates of different countries – Enhancing innovation
Knowledge building as a 21st century model to enhance innovation and creativity – to learn what there is and also to create new knowledge…
Scardamalia has interpreted 21st century skills using the knowledge-building perspective. Consider if you are developing such skills for yourself and your students.
| 21st century skills | Experience in knowledge-creating organizations |
|---|---|
| Creativity and Innovation | Work on unsolved problems; generate theories and models, take risks, etc; pursue promising ideas and plans |
| Communication | Knowledge building/progressive discourse aimed at advancing the state of the field; discourse to achieve a more inclusive, higher order analysis; open community knowledge spaces encourage peer-to-peer and extended interactions |
| Collaboration/teamwork | Collective or shared intelligence emerges from collaboration and competition of many individuals and aims to enhance the social pool of existing knowledge. Team members aim to achieve a focus and threshold for productive interaction and work with networked ICT. Advances in community knowledge are prized, over-and-above individual success, while enabling each participant to contribute to that success |
| Information literacy / research | Going beyond given information; constructive use of and contribution to knowledge resources to identify and expand the social pool of improvable ideas, with research integral to efforts to advance knowledge resources and information |
| Critical thinking, problem solving and decision-making | High-level thinking skills exercised in the course of authentic knowledge work; the bar for accomplishments is continually raised through self initiated problem finding and attunement to promising ideas; participants are engaged in complex problems and systems thinking |
| Citizenship—local and global | Citizens feel part of a knowledge-creating civilization and aim to contribute to a global enterprise; team members value diverse perspectives, build shared, interconnected knowledge spanning formal and informal settings, exercise leadership, and support inclusive rights |
| ICT literacy | ICT integrated into the daily workings of the organization; shared community spaces built and continually improved by participants, with connection to organizations and resources worldwide |
| Life and career skills | Engagement in continuous, “lifelong” and “life-wide” learning opportunities; self-identification as a knowledge creator, regardless of life circumstance or context |
| Learning to learn / metacognition | Students and workers are able to take charge at the highest, executive levels; assessment is integral to the operation of the organization, requiring social as well as individual metacognition |
| Personal and social responsibility—incl. cultural competence | Team members build on and improve the knowledge assets of the community as a whole, with appreciation of cultural dynamics that will allow the ideas to be used and improved to serve and benefit a multicultural, multilingual, changing society |