CONNECTING+TODAY+WITH+TOMORROW

Dear IB Class of 2008

Have you ever wondered about the kind of world in which you are likely to be working in a few years from now? Have you thought about what that might mean for your education and your experiences in school?

Here is my take on this. I speak not just as a teacher, but also as one who was the head of operations of a small bank before I became a teacher, and finally as a father of two former IB students, one of whom is now back in academic work after spending six years working in a field that had nothing directly to do with his majors in college. Observing their experiences has enriched me both as a teacher and as a parent.

The world in which you are likely to be working will be one where the concept of a job would have changed from being a long-term commitment to one organization, to a bundle of parallel short-term commitments to several organizations at the same time. If you are not working alone, you would be more likely to work in collaborative teams rather than in hierarchies. You will therefore be using modes of collaboration and communication that you are not currently accustomed to now as part of your school experience, although you could be. Your work will more likely be for clients rather than for employers.

The concept of a career, too, is changing. Imagine your working life as time spent in a house. Will you spend it in just one room, with a single life-long specialization? Or will you spend it in different rooms and spaces in the house, as cultural, political, economic and technological changes close some doors and windows of opportunities, and open others? To train for these different careers, you will need to develop the capacity to learn new ideas and concepts quickly. Therefore the most valuable things you can take away from this school is not just a stock of factual knowledge, which is very likely to become outdated by the time you start work, but the capacity to learn all the time, throughout your life, and the values and dispositions that support this capacity.

Give up the idea of higher education as something you will have to do just once in your lifetime. Look upon the university as a resource you will need to tap repeatedly to learn new disciplines, new languages, new habits of thinking, new concepts and theoretical frameworks. The days when people went to school just once in their lives are already ending. Besides, you will need to learn all the time at work in any case.

What are the skills on which clients and employers are increasingly placing great value? What will you be judged by and valued for? More than for your expert knowledge in a narrow field, you will be valued for your skills of communicating in more than one language, of being at home in more than one culture, and of bringing imagination and creativity, as well as critical thinking, to solving problems, and of being a helpful and productive member of a team. Contrary to the title of a popular TV series, Hayat Sınav Kesinlike Değildir! Life is definitely NOT an exam – certainly not in the sense of the ÖSS, or even the IB. Life is much too deep, rich and complex to say that it is a series of tests of performance, although that is how it might often appear to be. But life definitely is a continuous experience of learning, collaborating, communicating. If you want to draw the most enduring lessons from your school life, squeeze every opportunity you can to acquire these capacities from your lessons.

Here are two concrete suggestions that I have already passed on to some of my students.

1) Consider publishing your own “blog” (short for weblog). This is an electronic journal that others can read and comment on your writing. Blogs can be written for all kinds of reasons, but all bear the stamp of their authors’ personalities. My recommendation to you is to create your own blogs for your journals in TOK and CAS, as well as for your notes and reflections on your extended essay process. You can do this by creating categories (e.g., TOK, CAS and EE) in your blog to classify each journal entry. Your writings can be as free or formal as you wish them to be. You can also choose from a variety of “skins” for the appearance of your blog. The more technically sophisticated among you may even figure out a way of including interesting graphics in your blog banners. Through other means such as trackbacks, comments, and social bookmarking, you can join communities of like-minded people with similar interests, depending on how open and public you want your blog to be. You can also upload graphics and videos, as well as sound files (music, lectures, etc.) provided you respect copyright agreements. Technicallly, publishing a blog need be no more difficult than writing e-mail or surfing on the web. Most of you will find the technical aspects trivial.

Bear in mind that your blog can – if you wish - be a record of your intellectual development, which you might want others (like your future college admissions officers) to read. If that sounds scary, remember that you don’t have to do this. But most employers, clients and colleges increasingly want to see some evidence of what you have been up to throughout your educational career. A blog is a wonderful instrument for creating this body of evidence. Here is a good place to start blogging: [|http://www.wordpress.com] or http://www.blogger.com/start.

Here [|http://frazer.rice.edu/~erkan/blog/] is a blog of a Turkish doctoral student at Rice University.

And here http://gyanoprobha.typepad.com/ is my own PERSONAL blog.

2) Try creating a website called a Wiki. This enables a group of people, say in a class, to collaborate in all sorts of ways. Here are some of their uses: § Lessons summaries § Collaboration on notes § Individual projects § Spreading classroom learning beyond the classroom § For teachers to post their lesson plans, outlines, assignments, projects, etc. § Record of your contributions to the class.

I would now recommend http://www.wikispaces.com as a wiki host in preference to [|http://www.pbwiki.com], because it’s easier and has better features, but there are plenty of other options as well. Wikispaces is currently allowing educational wiki’s to be opened free with features that they normally provide for a fee of $5 a month. They also have a free version that is enough for most educational purposes.

For examples of my own wiki’s see [|http://busman.pbwiki.com] for my Business & Management course, and [|http://dialogicity.pbwiki.com] for my Grade 10 elective TOK course. They are far from perfect, and are still in the process of developing, but they are evidence of only a fraction of what can be done.

Finally, here http://www.solutionwatch.com/519/back-to-school-with-the-class-of-web-20-part-3/ is an article written by a nineteen year old student on  various web-based technologies that can be useful for the emerging world of learning and work.

If some of you are interested in exploring any of these matters further, I will be happy to organize a small workshop. I am far from being an expert, but I’m happy to share what I have learnt from my limited experience with interested others.

Best wishes

Gautam Sen