Persistence & Resilience

"It's not that I am so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer." - Albert Einstein

As a parent, I want to step in and just do things myself to save time, but by not letting my children learn how to fail and retry, I am not helping them become persistent.  Also, if I solve all their problems for them, they won't be resilient when they have to solve problems for themselves.

On November 11th, the last day of the iNACOL Online & Blended Learning Symposium of 2015, I tweeted:  "Students are going to face a world we can't even imagine.  They need to be resilient." What does it mean to be resilient?  I went to my favorite search engine, and the first thing that popped up was a definition of resilient.

For a person or animal, it means one who is able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.

So how are we preparing students to be resilient and persistent?  This troubles me, because I don't have an answer to it.  I see my children, 3 & 5, who are very persistent when it comes to something like wanting to have a piece of candy, but who walk away from something that might be a little tough for them.

For a Christmas present, my daughter was given a knitting set.  She was persistent that we open it; however, I had no idea what I was doing, so I had to learn.  During the time that I was trying to figure it out, she was persistent that she could do it (without any instructions).  Once I figured it out and showed her how to do it, her persistence with it lasted about 3 stitches.  She's five, so I don't expect her to have all the fine motor skills to do it, but this is typical of her.  She doesn't have the persistence to stick with a project.

Right now, the Kirkwood HSDL program has a 95% success rate for the 15-16 academic year; however, I expect that number to go down.  I don't see all of the students that have due dates of January 8th, 2016 finishing by that date.  Some haven't started their classes that they signed up for in August and others may have worked for two weeks, taken two weeks off, and then never got back to their course.  So, that brings me back to the question...how can we teach persistence and resilience to our children/students?

Me to We

I was on a bus.  It was an air conditioned bus, which meant that I was luckier than a lot of the native people to that country.  The year was 2002.  The place was the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.  I believe the bus was near the Caribbean sea, but what I remember about that bus ride was a person. The person was from Canada.  He spoke about how important it was going to be to become a global citizen and gave us the name of his website.  I have no idea what the website is now, but I remember the experience.

I not only remember the experience that I had on that bus, but I also remember the experience that I had during the spring of 2002 when I could live better than most of the native people in Merida, Mexico.  As a 20 year old, the magnitude of what I was doing didn't sink in.  I didn't realize that I was living a privileged life, because in some ways it was worse than any lifestyle I'd known; however, I now know that that experience changed my life and molded me into who I am today.

The greatest experience wasn't living in the Casa Blanca, as it was affectionately known to the native people.  It wasn't experiencing a new culture with my college friends and driving our friendships deeper, although it did that too.  The greatest experience was going to a village, staying overnight at a former convent, and experiencing the really rural life that I had only ever read about, and the tamales cooked in banana leaves in an open fire pit were the best that I'd ever had.

However, that village didn't have many of the things we take for granted each day.  One woman that we visited had a small hut.  There may have been one electrical outlet, but I couldn't swear to it.  The water wasn't readily available and there definitely wasn't indoor plumbing.

I'm reflective on this time today, because as we look to jobs of tomorrow, the culture in the USA is shifting from that of a "me" to that of a "we" culture.  At a meeting I was recently at, someone stated it this way, "Youth want both a vocation and to be an advocate."  Service is at the forefront of a lot of youth's mind and they are being careful about where they are investing their time, how resources are allocated and being part of the global world.

It's easy for us to get wrapped up in the terrorism in the world, but there's another group out there that is gaining and it is causing a movement from me to we by providing people with interconnectedness that is unprecedented and combining it with universal love.  In his discussion, co-founder of Asana, Justin Rosenstein, shares about these items.  You can view the 30 minute video here.  He describes how we're all microorganisms of a global ecosystem that works a lot better when there's harmony and any war is a civil war, because we're all one collective people of the world.

As one people of the world, we need to put our efforts on living with loving kindness towards each other and our planet.  In addition, we need to zoom out and see the whole picture and by doing so we can see that technology has helped people do just that.  By seeing the humans across the division between the Arabs and Israelis, Facebook has done more to promote peace in the Middle East than 30 years of conflict resolution has done.

I hope that all of us, young or old or in-between, can fight for love and peace and keep moving ourselves toward more harmony with the universe and moving into a culture of we not me.

LiFi - Not WiFi

I grew up in a house that was "green" before "green" was a way of life.  It was an earth-berm home, southern facing, and designed to be energy efficient before energy efficiency was a global concern. My dad said that he plotted the land for two years before even breaking ground to get it at just the right angle and he did a lot of the design work himself.  In the early 1980's, solar cells weren't great, but today it would be possible for a 1000 square foot house to be almost self-sustaining on solar energy, depending on location.

As we move into the internet of things and the growing digital divide, Harald Haas has a prototype of a solar cell using existing energy to stream videos at a speed of 50 mbps.  His Ted Talk from September of 2015 shows the possibility of using LEDs and solar cells to move from Wi-Fi to Li-Fi.j

What could that mean for learning?  What could that mean for people who are in isolated areas of the world?  What could that mean for closing the digital divide?  I am anxious to see what the answers to these questions are!

Jobs of the Future

Last month, I had the privilege of attending the iNACOL Online and Blended Learning Symposium and spent a lot of time tweeting.  Today, I want to dive into one of my tweets from the last day of the conference:

Students are going to face a world we can't even imagine.  They need to be resilient. #inacol15

I worry about my own children and their resilience to the ever-changing technology.  They're three and five.  They don't know a time without a SmartPhone, a time without instant access to whatever TV show floats their boat on a particular day (currently Jake and the Neverland Pirates).  Nor do they realize that once upon a time car windows didn't roll down with a button, but with a crank (and thank goodness for the ability to lock the windows).

Technology has taken a 90 degree shift from where it was in the early 1900's.  Economist, Andrew McAfee, graphs the most significant changes in human history and shows it turning at almost 90 degrees with the invention of the steam engine and other inventions from the industrial revolution in his TED Talk from June 2012.

Those of us in our thirties today have seen computers go from green-screen number munchers to the colorful games like Candy Crush and Cookie Jam today.  We've seen computers move from being solitary objects that aided word processing to being able to interact with people who are literally a world apart and on the fly.  We have seen textbooks become digitized and to some extent replaced.  We've also seen music personalized and watched both the invention and extinction of Napster and MySpace.  So, why does this matter?

It matters, because as McAfee also points out, the philosopher Voltaire stated that work saves us from three great evils:  boredom, vice, and need.  The robots are coming; in fact, they're here and they're replacing some of the jobs that human beings used to do.  This includes such things as driving, stocking shelves, and order fulfillment.  So McAfee also suggests that we double-down on infrastructure, and encourage entrepreneurship.  Robots aren't that good at repairing bridges yet and the jobs of the future really don't look like those of the past.

What will the jobs of the future look like?  Hopefully, they'll look like a cure for the world's diseases, an elimination of poverty, and more intuitiveness about the human species.