i spent the past week at the SITE Conference in San Diego and had a great time and learned much. however, one of the featured speakers was Chris Dede of Harvard speaking about Teaching and Assessing 21st Century Skills and this was one of the sessions i most wanted to see. the room was large and a lot of people were in attendance eager to learn the latest and greatest. Dede operationally defined 21st Century Skills with a few examples, but not once did he simply define these skills. from my experience, when you bring these skills up each educator thinks of something slightly different as it’s a nebulous topic. not only that, but these schools i am currently studying are having great difficulty in measuring these skills. it’s just not something that can be done easily. in fact, no school we studied has figured it out. and this gets back to Chris Dede’s lecture on the topic. i had hope that he would come through with a promising new development or practice. unfortunately, after describing a current project he’s working on he then proceeded to explain that the real audience for his product is not educators; rather, the real audience is the Educational Testing Service (ETS). so the future of 21st Century Skill assessment is via ETS and schools paying a fee per student to learn whether they are teaching the correct 21st Century Skills or not? hmmm. i certainly didn’t expect a free system to emerge, but i was hopeful that a more simple site-based solution could be described or suggested (and it didn’t have to be THAT simple either). ah well, this still leaves me room to figure it all out . . . then again, perhaps Dede is on the right track??? if there was a simple solution to 21st Century Skills assessment then we’d know about it by now, eh? /sigh.
Apr 06