Connecting learners in a global world: why is this important?

The 21st century will be a very different life experience for the current generation of children and young adults. Those born since 1980 will face global competition on a scale unimagined by previous generations.

In the decades ahead, the approximately 30 million people in India who have at least 20 years of their career ahead of them will have to compete with over a billion more people than their parents.

While not all of those people will be educated to the level of British citizens, there is a Red Army saying: ‘Quantity has a quality all its own’. China and India already have over 200 million primary and secondary school children, each, and they are investing to educate more.
Indian children will witness extraordinarily fast innovations in energy, clean-tech, green products, information technology, medicine, nano-tech, robotics and a host of new technologies not yet imagined. In 2009, more science is being conducted in more places around the world than ever before; those innovations may come from anywhere.

Today’s students will also experience incredibly rapid shifts in global economics as countries that make the right investments in education, entrepreneurship and advanced research create new products that spawn new companies that dominate global industries and that destroy old industries and old business models. Newspapers are dead; Western auto companies are on life support; China has become manufacturer to the world; India has created an IT centre of higher wage jobs.

Students in the 21st century must become more connected learners or they risk being uncompetitive adults in the work world, for two reasons: 1) knowledge is generated globally and unless students recognize that and are adept at accessing that knowledge they will fall behind; and 2) more countries will become potential customers, suppliers or competitors and students without a grasp of global history, culture, religion, languages and behavioral norms will be losers in the global economy.

Since the 1950s, Western countries led by the United States have dominated knowledge creation. The great universities of Europe and America along with the major industrial companies of the European Union and US produced the lion’s share of the world’s new knowledge and resulting new industries.

That hegemony has been broken in the past few decades as universities and companies in China, India, Korea, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia have been expanding their research and begun respecting intellectual property rights. Arguably some of the best scientific research being done today is conducted in universities and in laboratories in Asia or India.

This generation of children and young adults must be more global in their thinking and more aware of and comfortable with other cultures. Using the Internet – video, voice and text – to bring the world into OUR classrooms is imperative for children to become globally aware.

Connecting school children early in life with children in China, India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brazil and Russia will aid them in their understanding of the world, sharpen their language skills and serve them well as they enter the intense global competition for high-value, high-wage careers.

This is a big challenge which we are facing , as the professions of the future are unknown we need to develop these skills of collaboration among the students thus they learn more about different cultures and are ready to face the world wherever they may be doing business or in any profession. 

Continued from the previous Blog………… 

The Synthesizing Mind:

I began to think about the Synthesizing Mind when the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann made an off handed remark.  He opined that in the twenty-first century, the most important mind will be the synthesizing mind. A great example of a synthesizer is Charles Darwin. He travelled for five years aboard the Beagle, and collected a huge amount of information about the flora and fauna of the world. He did his own experiments and observations of the world, corresponded with everybody who was a naturalist, and then twenty years later put forth one of the great intellectual syntheses “On the Origin of the Species.”

The Synthesizing Mind realizes that nowadays, we are all inundated with information. If you looked up the word “evolution” on your search engine, you could spend the rest of your life just reading secondary sources. Many of them are of questionable value and you need criteria for deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Additionally, to synthesize for yourself, you have to put information together in ways which cohere, which make sense for you. And if you are involved in communication, as every teacher, parent, and professional is, the synthesis has to be transmittable to other people.

 I thought that psychology would have something to say about synthesizing because it is so important, but my research revealed that in fact psychology doesn’t have much to say. Some of you are thinking: “well, isn’t synthesizing what teachers have always done?” But let me introduce Monsieur Jourdain from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière.  M. Jourdain got very excited in middle age because he found out that he was speaking prose all his life without realizing it. I think we have been in the business of synthesizing, but we haven’t been aware of how important it is and how we might help other people to become better synthesizers.

 How one might be more reflective about synthesizing? The answer is: looking for the current best synthesis, deciding what our ultimate synthesis should look like, picking a method, deciding what are we going to look at, listen to and why, examining what are we going to ignore and why, and importantly, how are we going to record information, using equations, mind maps, stories, formulas, taxonomies, or whatever.Again, the kind of things that most of us do already, but we aren’t really reflective about it, we don’t spend much time explicitly transmitting that lore to people who are less experienced in synthesizing. Life is short, syntheses are due, term papers are due, lectures are due, but you want to finish the proto-synthesis some time beforehand, so that you can get informed reactions. Not only from people who know a lot but also from people who don’t know so much.

The Creative Mind:

 The Creative Mind is embodied by Einstein in the Sciences and by Virginia Woolf in the Arts. People who are creative are those who come up with new things which eventually get accepted. If an idea or product is too easily accepted, it is not creative; if it is never accepted, it is just a false example. And acceptance can happen quickly or it can take a long time.

I believe that you cannot be creative unless you have mastered at least one discipline, art or craft. And cognitive science teaches us that on the average, it takes about ten years to master a craft. So, Mozart was writing great music when he was fifteen and sixteen, but that is because he started when he was four or five. Same story, with the prodigious Picasso. Creativity is always called “thinking outside the box.”  But I order my quintet of minds in the way that I do because you can’t think outside of the box unless you have a box.

  I thought that creativity was mostly an issue of how good your mental computers were. But  studies  of others have convinced me of two other things. First, personality and temperament are at least as important as cognitive powers. People who are judged creative take chances, take risks, are not afraid to fall down, and pick themselves up, they say “what can I learn from this?” and they go on.

The other day I was giving a talk and the first question asked was “How do we make people creative”? And I answered that “It’s much easier to prevent it than to make it”. You prevent it by saying that there is only one right answer and by punishing the student if she offers the wrong answer. That never fosters creativity.

Second: People think of creativity as a property of the individual and therefore they say “I am creative”, but that doesn’t work. The only way that creativity can be judged is, if over the long run, the creators works change how other people think and behave. That is the only criterion for creativity. Therefore, the bad news is that you could die without knowing that you are creative, but the good news is that you will never know for sure that you are not creative. Because maybe after you die, people will make a big fuss about you and then, post-mortem, you will be creative. That’s what happened to Emily Dickinson and Vincent van Gogh.  We call that the judgment of the field.

To be continued………….