21st Century Learning Skills in Action

Most educators wouldn't get the slight "geek joke" in the title of this blog. Most of you probably know by now that I am currently in a software position and am responsible for our training programs. I have used the experiences in those training programs extensively for my coursework. Anyway, many of the best software reference books are from the "In Action" series. (Java In Action, EJB In Action, GWT In Action etc) These books generally attempt to teach in-depth knowledge through a series of exercises ultimately working toward a large scaled project. This course served the "In Action" purpose for me.
I was supposed to incorporate 21st century learning skills into my training courses. I assumed this would be relatively easy since I teach adults about web-centric technologies. Ultimately I found the modification of my training to be rather difficult and I had some real struggles to fully implement those skills into the curriculum.
One of the greatest discoveries I made concerned me rather than my students or my syllabus. I had always thought myself very web-fluent. I have very little trouble doing internet searches and generally handle technology very well in terms of discovery and presentation. However as I delved deeper into the course material and tried a few of the exercises I found that I was not a particularly adept searcher, I had merely found ways to work around my shortcomings. I also discovered that I had developed serious crutches for the tools and technologies that I was familiar with but when attempting to expand beyond my comfort zone I was fairly inept. It was quite a challenge for me to incorporate logical, structured web-searching into my curriculum as well as message board seeding and skimming because as it turned out, I wasn't too good at it myself.
I believe going forward I will pay a great deal more attention to the skills that I generally take for granted. I understand now that web fluency is a complicated and ever-changing skill that requires attention and effort to excel. I will also make a much more concerted effort to include the rudimentary information and communication skills into my curriculum that are so necessary for today's employees and managers. For example, the various modifications I made to my curriculum to incorporate more collaborative effort and presentations from the students proved to be very challenging because at times my foundational teaching simply was not sufficient to prepare the students for the tasks I was assigning. Simply asking students to "group up" and work on a project is inadequate. It turns out that without guidance these collaborative exercises more often than not produce additional tension and frustration when they are not properly prepared and presented.
One large part of my updated courses included formal APA citation for the students work. I admit that even now, after all these courses, I do struggle with the APA format and it's quirks and exceptions. From a professional standpoint, I would very much like to 'master' APA formatting so I could do a better job of teaching my students how to write and reference their work. Of course numerous resources exist for this goal so essentially the key requirement is for me dive in and simply master the material. As an English teacher, I admit this should have been done long ago and it is not without some chagrin that I admit this deficiency. However I am committed to improving and doing a better job not only with my own work, but with my ability to teach my students.