Design for Learning
Photo from IDEO
Is the way we educate keeping pace with the changing needs of the marketplace? Are we creating graduates with the right skills for the 21st century? There are some good signs in the work we’ve been doing with the industrial design programme and industry here at IT Sligo and in other initiatives around problem-based learning. In a recent article from Metropolis magazine, IDEO summarises ten tips based on their Design for Learning efforts for the 21st century classroom.
I particularly like the call to stop calling creativity, collaboration, communication, empathy, and adaptability ‘soft skills,’ as if they were a bonus as opposed to a necessity. I’ve argued before that creativity can be taught, and certainly when it comes to ideas, the ability to come up with ideas is nothing without the ability to communicate them, or work together to commercialise them.
How do we begin to measure and evaluate process as well as outcome?
Read IDEO’s Ten Tips For Creating a 21st–Century Classroom Experience
April 26th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
I would really like to talk to you about these ideas sometime! See you in a few weeks at the Open Coffee.
But I’d love to talk to you about ideas for working with young people sometime.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Feel free to stop by anytime. We’ve used a few methods to incorporate kids’ inputs and I had a bit of experience doing the same at Crayola in the States.