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. 

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.