Drivers of Change

I found the drivers for change to be an interesting read, not so much for the specific drivers and skills that were identified but more because of the examples of those skills highlighted throughout the text. While it is easy to see why Extreme Longevity, Rise of Smart Machines and Systems, Computational World, New Media Ecology, Superstructured Organizations, and a Globally Connected World are all clearly driving change, it was the smaller ideas like adaptive algorithms to deal with cognitive load and the interconnected overlaps of needed skills like new-media literacy and its effect on cognitive load management (Davies, Fidler & Gorbis, 2011) that really made me perk up a little. We head about the big ideas over and over and over again and are constantly being bombarded with how much the world is going to change in these ways that feel either so irrelevant because they are so specific or so abstract because they are so globally expansive that it is difficult to understand the impact of these drivers. Seeing how almost every single skill can be categorized within multiple areas of change drivers helped me think through different ways to approach these skills.

Our school systems need to consider and truly engage in quality design, novel and adaptive thinking, new media literacy, and cognitive load management most. We continually say that we are doing these things, but I would argue that we don't really consider how these ideas play off of each other often to the detriment of students because we don't truly consider them as valuable skills or invest enough time, energy, and effort in training our teachers about them. While many teachers teach about content through multimedia and have started to utilize more of these tools in their classrooms, we haven't talked hardly at all in my experience about the cognitive load that comes with so many new formats, tools, information, and expectations. There are tools that we could use to balance workloads for our students and teach them how to do the same, but we do not often use them. We could be focusing on design principals with our students across multiple media formats, but often we we wait for them to take a design class or an art class to do that while simultaneously calling art an elective. We talk about innovation and critical thinking, but we often ask students to solve problems we already know the answer to in ways that we already know work and often criticize kids for wanting to do it differently; we assess in easy to grade ways because we don't truly value creativity in expression or novel thought in many cases.

Those skills are the ones that I think could have the biggest impact if we were truly approaching education from a perspective that these drivers for change actually change the game. Unfortunately, I think we typically say that they are going to while intentionally not changing our systems because change is hard.

Works Cited:

Davies, A., Fidler, D., Gorbis, M. (2011). Future work skills 2020 - Institute for the future. Institute For The Future . Retrieved May 17, 2022, from https://www.iftf.org/uploads/media/SR-1382A_UPRI_future_work_skills_sm.pdf