Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills

I just received this news from the ALT-Members list

“In response to the urgent and crucial need for assessment reform to advance educational transformation, Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco have set up a structure and a series of actions to address this need. We are currently identifying a team of international experts that will lead this effort and, with this call to action, invite other interested partners from government ministries, assessment organizations, universities and educational research institutions, foundations, and businesses to join in achieving the challenging goals of this Project.”

More details at Transforming Education: Assessing and Teaching 21st Century Skills (Microsoft) http://www.latwf.org/docs/Transformative_Assessment–A_Call_to_Action_and_Action.pdf

This is a subject that has interested me for some time but has become more important as I prepare with colleagues for a new module called Emerging Technologies that will be delivered to 450 students in Salford Business School in September 2009.  For me the key issue is about our graduates becoming people who can apply and develop their skills in ever-changing social and technological contexts.  That means we will be supporting them to make effective (and fun) use of Twitter, blogs, youtube, etc. but also encouraging to reflect on what they did and why - what worked and didn’t - how things might have been different.  That way, they can start to develop the meta-skills that will help them be effective users and decision-makers in changing sociotechnical contexts.

The Microsoft Report  stresses skills like creativity and innovation but also wants measurability: these may not always be compatible.  I am hoping that our students can learn a lot more than we can assess, and so how can we keep their engagement?  Perhaps by marketing the idea that these skills are important, but also by trying to make the learning activities include some fun, inside and outside the ‘classroom’.