The technologies and mechanisms of digitalisation are changing both quickly and unpredictably. To train people to be ready for digitalisation, we can’t teach it as if it were a stable subject. Instead we have to teach people how to detect, make sense of, and adapt to, continual and unpredictable change. At a minimum, this entails learning four sets of skills that we could call problem-finding, epistemological sophistication, equifinal thinking, and computational thinking. Teaching these skills will probably require letting go of our obsession with stable, legible ways of approaching teaching.
mmm hard to capture concisely — its clearer at the level of comparative teaching plan or case study. but! for instance, you can teach history of, say, singapore's independence (a) using a single perspective synthetic account of the events leading up to 1965, or (b) contrasting several synthetic accounts from different perspectives (e.g., Malaysian gov, Singapore gov, disagreeing members of Singapore political leadership, etc), or (c) presenting an array of primary materials representing a wide range of perspectives and interests (e.g., political leadership in Malaysia and Singapore, popular views in the press among Chinese in Singapore and Malays in Singapore, views from variously aligned international interests such as Indonesia, the UK, and the US).
(a) is more legible than (b) which is more legible than (c) — but (c) also teaches, for e.g., epistemological sophistication via historiography (even if those labels are never used).
Yes, It's important to teach future generations not so much about how the world is, but to prepare them to be able to change the world for the better. Critical thinking and problem solving skills are key in that.
Do you want to share any specific strategies the teachers used? Having a concrete example would be great!
mmm hard to capture concisely — its clearer at the level of comparative teaching plan or case study. but! for instance, you can teach history of, say, singapore's independence (a) using a single perspective synthetic account of the events leading up to 1965, or (b) contrasting several synthetic accounts from different perspectives (e.g., Malaysian gov, Singapore gov, disagreeing members of Singapore political leadership, etc), or (c) presenting an array of primary materials representing a wide range of perspectives and interests (e.g., political leadership in Malaysia and Singapore, popular views in the press among Chinese in Singapore and Malays in Singapore, views from variously aligned international interests such as Indonesia, the UK, and the US).
(a) is more legible than (b) which is more legible than (c) — but (c) also teaches, for e.g., epistemological sophistication via historiography (even if those labels are never used).
Yes, It's important to teach future generations not so much about how the world is, but to prepare them to be able to change the world for the better. Critical thinking and problem solving skills are key in that.
and for survival, the ability to see that things are changing — otherwise, the possibly apocryphal boiled frog syndrome awaits?