We are currently living in a highly complex world and it is going to be challenging for our next generations, in terms of teaching, learning practices and student learning experiences. To keep uptodate with pedagogical practices and digital technology, our kids have to accumulate current knowledge, develop multiple skills and grow over the advanced digital world. Growing in a digital world means students involve in various skill development practices through digital enhancement practices. This article will analyse the possibilities and methods to amalgamate skills set that we need our kids to develop and practice over the period of time.
Soft skills: The educational institutions are focusing on getting our students ready to graduate with their explicit skills polished. Equality of skills developed through various institutions are questioned as always. Is there a gap between institutions and educators in providing the services for students? What methods are there within the educational institutions to make this consistent? While our students do their elementary and higher education, how are they going to develop the skills such as innovative and creative thinking, effective communication practices, team management, problem solving skills, ethical practices and self confidence? I found that the following actions are always useful to make those happen.
Discussion forums: The educator supervised discussion forums create a space for students to interact freely and share knowledge on specific topics. But the practical issue of such forums involves the confidence levels of students asking questions or sharing resources when their knowledge base is questioned. The varying levels of student approaches to such discussion forums depend on the educator -student relationship, cognitive and emotional balances of students, cognitive and knowledge variants, family or social backgrounds. These issues should be addressed differently in order to enhance the student potential, so that all the traits and variants are properly nurtured, and maximized. I have seen a lot of students who will be active in peer groups, but they are less likely to interact with their educators comfortably in their relational zone which becomes unclear for educators to predict and cure.
Hard skills
Participation in creating content using all the possible digital and media platforms that can be sharable and open to everyone. Students will be involved in creating knowledge, and they will be our next digital dexterities. The virtual spaces will need to be modified to suit the student perceptions and growth mindsets. The free content creation platforms such as Open educational media should be explored by students to motivate themselves and to to seek the possibilities of the current content and future contents in the current educational systems. This will help them to think more deeply and identify the gaps through research practices. The curriculum and educational programs should give them the chances of attending more future focused workshops and social media platforms where knowledge is created and shared, so that they can think of a reconstructed pedagogy that are flexible, diverse and that can be modified as required.
Literacy &Numeracy skills
Research skills
The 21st century career world requires its learners to perceive and practice conducting effective research. They need to assess, analyse, and evaluate information that are delivered in different formats. The information explosion and inability to follow appropriate guidelines to practice research skills hinder current learners to offer their academic performance to a higher level which may negatively impact their career goals. So adequate nurturing of research skills is required from their early stages of their academic life. Therefore, academic libraries and school libraries play a vital role in transforming future focused learning and knowledge creation, through enhancing information literacy skills. In the following paragraphs, I’m taking myself to a tour of what my experiences and learning on how I learnt and practiced information literacy skills.
What would be the experiences of students who always relied on textbooks in the past for their learning? This was me, and this being my first challenge when I started my higher courses in a another country, and I am glad that I was lucky enough to experience the pleasure of locating and analysing resources for my studies. I had no idea what it meant when the lectures mentioned Course readings or resources required for your course. I also went with the flow- read materials given through the online study platform- even that was extremely different. Online? I never learnt anything online, I always saw students in the past like bookworms- underlining points, jotting down teacher notes and eager to follow study guides if their parents can afford it. V-guide and Labour India were a couple of popular guides other than textbooks that I could remember at this point- all printed materials.
Anyway, I continued to read most of the course readings that was linked by the course examiners for my post graduate teaching course and worried about the ones I missed due to the lack of time, thinking that I haven’t learnt the course properly (To us, keeping everything in mind, or learning by-heart- was considered as proper study. Later I realised that we don’t have to remember everything that is covered in the topic, but to evaluate and analyse the current and relevant topics are important than anything when considering learning and also knowledge and application of our understanding in different life context is more vital than learning -by-heart!!!.
When I was exposed to assignments, I was confused about the different terminology such as databases, journal articles, dois, referencing, and other knowledge bases. Even though I had experienced writing assignments and projects, the new way of referring to online resources such as articles were new to me. It took years for me to understand what it really meant, the pleasure of learning and understanding cultural differences!!!
Rendered On Pedagogist 