Where, when, how?

Yesterday I sat through an all staff meeting at my school and like many others got a glimpse of the future of curriculum planning and development. Our curriculum coordinator has done an admirable job of integrating the current thinking into a plan that includes the hiring of our school's first 21st century literacy coordinator. There were also elements of the 21st century revision of Bloom's taxonomy and a presentation of how our future curriculum mapping system might look.

Now, this is mostly moot for me as I am moving to a new school in August but I thought about it critically (some might say skeptically) and saw what is going to be a huge project that will be very current and I think difficult to implement. What got me thinking was that in the curriculum mapping/tracking system, there was a field to input the relevant 21st century skills that are supposedly being developed/assessed in that particular unit. The mapping function will allow tracking these skills from K-12 in all subject areas. Brilliant right? Hmmm.....

I tied this in with a discussion from a colleague in Manila who thinks kids are suffering from what I am going to call "Blogoverload". The requirements to blog are in many courses, as teachers jump to integrate the current trends. Related to this is the "Bloguniverse" I now live in and as an early citizen, have noticed that many blog posts are simply links to and comments about other people's blog posts. It is a good thing we are in a paperless age but that doesn't stop me from thinking that terabytes of storage, and gigabytes of bandwidth are the minimum requirements to support millions of school children who be-clogging the internet.

I am not trying to be negative, and some of you in the know may point out that I don't know what I am talking about but my point really is that there is some organization required here. There are definite progressions in terms of general and subject specific skills that we as educators are all aware of. For example "inquiry" in a science investigation looks different in grade 6 than in grade 11 and there are a number of developmental steps along the way. I am a firm believer that an effective curriculum in the current sense uses content as a vehicle to negotiate a skills continuum super highway. Is this type of guidance needed for all of this 21st century skill integration in our currently developing schools?

In a post entitled Kinder can do powerpoints too! , Silvia Tolisano links to a presentation regarding even young students doing interactive presentations. "Great" I say but as I stick to my guns about my position on "effective learning", I see a bigger picture of a mish mash of 21st century skills being incorporated in an inconsistent manner. Schools, slow down, think. Develop a skill set, categorize and create progressions, incorporate consistently in course development. I think this is harder than it sounds, the progressions in specific subjects (math, reading) are clear cut. Not so with ICT which has the added difficulty of always changing and also rapidly doing so.