Wednesday, February 3, 2010

New Skills- Linda Darling Hammond's List - Part 2

I wrote recently about New Skills- Linda Darling Hammond's List that will be needed in this new economy. Sally and I discussed how we can help our students and stakeholders to value and develop these skills. We will want to use some of these ideas to support the collaboration with students at Maris Stella HS in Singapore.

Then, over the weekend, I worked with Nils to explore the proposal that he and others at CTLT are developing for the New Media Competition. We struggled with an online submission interface that interfered with our work. I used the comment system that the competition organizers provided so that they would easily be able to see our public work without going elsewhere. But, I kept some of my own notes about the process in Diigo. I shared some of those with Nils in the form of a Diigo List.

Nils returned to work on Monday and consulted with Theron and produced a new way to organize feedback on proposals using a DML-Competition group with color-coded highlights in Diigo and then he tried Google Sidewiki. This morning, Theron commented that he wanted to be able to sort and filter for tags. I liked Theron's idea but I couldn't find any way to run the queries that Theron requested.

I looked at the tools in Diigo to learn which could potentially support the filtering and found that Diigo Groups have some of the right properties. Initially, I met some internal resistance because this seemed as if it were an unusual application of groups. But as I worked with the concept, it started to grow on me. So, I needed some relatively short names for one or more Diigo groups to prototype my interpretation. So, I searched for Darling Hammond's list and revised it for compact representation:

Design, evaluate & manage one's work
Frame, investigate & solve problems
Find, analyze & use information
Collaborate strategically
Communicate in many forms
Develop new products & ideas
(Darling Hammond, 2010)

As I worked on the list and the problem, I realized that it forms a reasonable representation of our (Sally, Nils, Theron, Steve, Lisa, ...) work, too. In this post alone, I describe how we "frame, investigate, & solve problems," "collaborate strategically," "communicate in many forms," and "develop new ideas." Perhaps one of the best ways for us to understand how to help our students and colleagues is to walk a mile in these shoes.

Linda Darling Hammond. 2010. The Flat World and Education, TC Press. 408 pgs.

1 comment:

Nils Peterson said...

Hey Steve. Darling Hammond's list, like the DML Competition criteria are a nice step from the more 20th century and academic Critical Thinking Rubric.

See my note also describing the experiment you mention here http://communitylearning.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/backu-dml-competition-mockup/