Skills for the 21st century
Trend in past centuries
Agricultural Age – 18th Century
Industrial Age – 19th Century
Information Age – 20th Century
Conceptual Age – 21st Century
Education systems are designed during the Industrial age and it produced workers for factories. Core subjects covered under schools during this century are
- English – Reading, Writing and Language arts
- Mathematics
- Science
- Geography
- History
- Government and Civics
We are still following these traditional education systems. It is not sufficient to make few changes to fit for 21st century, rather it requires a complete transformation in order to equip human capital for the 21st century.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills was formed in 2002 by U.S. Department of Education with fortune companies such as Apple, Cisco, Dell, Microsoft, SAP, etc that advocates for 21st century readiness for every student. P21 advocates to promote understanding of academic content at much higher levels by weaving 21st century interdisciplinary themes into core subjects such as Global Awareness, Financial,Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy, Health Literacy and Environmental Literacy
Apart from core subjects and 3 Rs (Relating, Representing and Reasoning), following skills(4Cs) are mandatory for students of 21st Century
- Creativity and Innovation
- Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
- Communication
- Collaboration
- Information, Media and Technology Literacy
- Life Skills
- Flexibility and Adaptability
- Initiative and Self Direction
- Social and cross cultural Skills
- Productivity and Accountability
- Leadership and Responsibility
For more information on tools and resource provided by P21 refer here
Computer Science Video Lectures
Collection of video lecture links related to computer science subjects
BSD Unix ( History, File system, Internals, etc)
Harvard University (CS50 – Introduction to computer science)
Center for IT Research in the interest of society
Others
Harvard University ( Justice Series: What is the right thing to do?- Michael Sandel)
Six Thinking Hats by Edward D Bono – Father of Lateral Thinking
“Our software for thinking, which we inherited from the Greek Gang of Three – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – is about truth, logic, argument and analysis. It’s excellent, in the same way that the rear left wheel of a car is excellent, but it misses out on creativity, design and perception. Ninety per cent of errors of thinking are errors of perception, not logic.”
stated by Edward D. Bono, father of lateral thinking. He has written more than 20 books on this subject and some of the best sellers are six thinking hats, lateral thinking, thinking course, etc. He also teaches people how to think effectively to achieve results.
His lecture on six thinking hats which starts with introduction to thinking , thinking as skill, difference between IQ and thinking, etc
Six thinking hats is very popular thinking tool used in large companies for conducting meetings, make organizational decisions, etc. Under this tool, there are six colored hats. Color of each hat represents on what the thinker should focus on
White Hat -> Information
Red Hat -> Emotions
Black Hat -> Negatives
Yellow Hat -> Advantage
Green Hat -> Alternatives
Blue Hat -> Control of the thinking process
State of education
Half of what a student learns in Ist year is outdated by the time they finish the degree. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist and to use technologies that are yet to be invented. But we are still using the traditional way of teaching which was formalized during Industrial revolution period. Traditional teaching is based on learn once and use it through out the career, so it was more focussed on adding more information to your brain so that you can use that information during your work.
Most of the technology which are most popular today such as web2.0 and social networking sites like wordpress, twitter, linkedin, youtube, facebook did not exist 10 years back. Learning one technology and how to use that particular technology is not sufficient to cope up with the technology changes which is prevalent in this era. Students should go at least one level below to understand how the technology is developed and how it can be improved and one level above to understand how the technologies are currently used and how it can be utilized better.
In order to do this, critical thinking or logical thinking is not sufficient. Better way of doing things/Creativity does not happen by using logical thinking, rather it happens by doing parallel thinking or lateral thinking. Thinking procedures should be part of the syllabus and more time should be spent on thinking/analyzing on the subject rather than taking notes from lecturers.
Lecturers should ask to themselves “Are we teaching creativity and challenging students to think?” while designing the course materials and planning the lectures.
Steve Jobs Inspirational Stanford Commencement Address
Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer, talks about pursue your dreams with his three stories.
Stay Hungry – Stay Foolish
Nobel Lecture by Muhammad Yunus
Nobel lecture by Muhammed Yunus during the Nobel Prize Ceremony. His vision of social business and plans are unique which every body must listen…
http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=88
Interview with Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the micro-credit movement.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2243%3C/A%3E
Free Educational resources
Another site with lot of online video courses (Free!) is http://freevideolectures.com
It contains subjects varying from science to philosophy…
The below ppt from slideshare contains links to many open education resources on engineering and other education streams.
Materials for self paced training
Web programming video lectures and notes from Indiana university
Java Application Development video lectures by New Jersey Institute of Technology
Comparing Java Web Frameworks video lecture
Web security – video lecture by google
Future of web – video lecture by oxford university
HTML video lectures from tubetorial
PHP video tutorials from killerphp.com
AJAX video tutorials from killerajax.com
Web programming lecture notes from university of washington
XML , XSLT, DTD, CSS video tutorials from Berkeley university
Must read for engineering college lecturers
Video Lectures from top notch universities in the world
Indian Institute of Technology – IIT (Core Science, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, Electronics, Computer Science)
More lecture notes and videos of IIT are available in http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/
Indiana University (Computer Science)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT (Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Electrical, Chemical, Biological, Aeronatical, Civil, Environmental, Mechanical, Material, Nuclear)
Berkeley University (Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, Maths, Philosophy, Law, Political Science, Statistics)
Stanford University (Computer Science, Mechanical, Physics, Maths)
University of Washington (Computer Science)
United Nations University (Software, Economics)
University of Idaho (Maths)
University of Massachusetts (Biology, Chemistry, Psychology, History, Maths)
University of NostreDam (Operating systems, MultiMedia systems)
Prabakaran Thirumalai
