21st Century Skills and Life Skills

21st Century Skills

• 21st-century skills are a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and characteristics that educators, reformers, and employers believe are crucial for success in today's world, especially in college programs and workplaces.

Life Skills

• Life skills are adaptive and positive behaviors enabling individuals to deal effectively with daily challenges and demands.
• They include managing and living a better quality life, achieving ambitions, and using skills such as flexibility, initiative, social skills, productivity, and leadership.
• A definitive list of life skills does not exist. Individual skills deemed more or less relevant based on life circumstances, culture, beliefs, age, gender, geographic location and other factors.

Categories of Life Skills

• Social skills: encompass self-awareness, empathy, effective communication, and interpersonal relationships.
• Thinking skills: include critical thinking, creative thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making.
• Coping skills: involve managing stress and emotions.

21st Century Skills (Detailed)

• Critical thinking, problem-solving, reasoning, and analysis: Includes interpretation and synthesizing information.
• Research skills and practices: Include interrogative questioning methods.
• Creativity, artistry, curiosity, imagination, and innovation: Encompassing personal expression.
• Perseverance, self-direction, planning, self-discipline, adaptability, and initiative: Includes strategies for self-improvement.
• Oral and written communication, public speaking, and presenting: Incorporates active listening.
• Leadership, teamwork, collaboration, cooperation, and facilitation in virtual workspaces: Stresses collaborative efforts.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy.

• ICT literacy includes proficiency with computer programming, media and internet skills, as well as data interpretation and analysis.
• Specific areas include civic, ethical, social justice aspects, and financial literacy, entrepreneurialism, global awareness, multicultural literacy, and humanitarianism.
• Scientific literacy, environmental and conservation, ecosystems literacy, health and wellness (including nutrition, diet, exercise, and public health) are also considered crucial 21st-century skills.

Literacy for the 21st Century

• Alvin Toffler's perspective emphasizes the need for continuous learning and adaptation, suggesting that true illiteracy in the 21st century is an inability to learn, unlearn, and relearn.
• Literacy skills adapt to reflect technology use, highlighting the need for skills in problem-solving, collaboration, and multimedia presentation.

Literacy Skills

• The concept of different literacy types are now changing and considered to be overlapping. Used interchangeably include: Information literacy, Digital literacy, Web literacy, and Media literacy.

Media Literacy

• UNESCO (1982) emphasizes the role of powerful images, words, and sounds in media consumption.
• The key takeaways concerning the notion of media literacy are to identify key concepts, connect ideas, ask relevant questions, create a response, and recognize fallacies.

Expanding the Concept of "Text"

• Media messages now encapsulate many forms beyond written texts, including verbal, aural, and visual formats, all forms of multi-media culture.
• Today's learners engage in a multi-modal culture of 'reading' and 'writing'.

Information Age

• The explosion of information requires new learning approaches for students.
• Students must be able to determine what they need to know, when they need to know it, and how to locate and analyze the relevant information.

21st Century Learning

• 21st-century learning encompasses not just traditional content knowledge but also skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, analytic reasoning, complex problem-solving, and teamwork.

Comparing 19th-20th and 21st-Century Learning

• 19th and 20th centuries focused on limited access to knowledge primarily through print and content mastery.
• The 21st century, however, offers infinite access to information through the internet, with an emphasis on process skills and lifelong learning.

Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills

• Hard Skills: Digital literacy, people skills (interaction, collaboration), managing others, flexibility, and adaptability.
• Soft Skills: Applied skills (personal and interpersonal skills), and learning-based skills like life skills (problem-solving), people skills, and social skills.

Learning and Innovation Skills

• Skills include critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, collaboration, creativity, and Innovation.

Digital Literacy Skills.

• Digital literacy encompasses related concepts such as: Information literacy, Media literacy, Information, Communication technologies, and ICT Literacy.

Life and Career Skills

• Essential skills for navigating the 21st-century career landscape include flexibility, adaptability, initiative, self-direction, social and cross-cultural interaction, productivity, and accountability.

Defining Global Literacy

• Global literacy involves understanding global knowledge, current political, social, and economic issues and events that enable individuals to be effective, responsible global citizens.

Global Literacy Promotes and Encourages

• Global literacy promotes inquiry, reasoning, problem-solving, collaboration, communication, respectful global citizenship, and an understanding of global systems and cultures.
• It emphasizes an understanding of 21st-century skills and technologies and advocates for students to speak up for themselves and their community.

Improving Global Literacy

• Effective global literacy can be improved through remembering adult learning, emphasizing the mother tongue, promoting a love of reading, embedding literacy into other educational aspects and creatively making use of relevant technology.