Teachers often wrestle with two big questions: How do people learn, and how can they do it better in a constantly evolving context? Therefore, what are 6 channels of 21st Century learning?

1. Dialogic Response

Learning is a conversation–whether personal, local, and direct, or more general, global, and digitally-based.

2. Community Interaction

Communities–including local physical communities, and digital, niche communities–nurture relationships and frame content.

3. Abstraction & Creativity

Creativity isn’t just art and whimsy, but the overlap between the macro thinking and micro details to solve the challenges of daily living.

4. Media Literacy

Digital media evolves constantly in both form and function, from text, images, hyperlinked documents, and interactive video (the ‘form’ part) to communicating, curating, duplicating, citing, attributing, grouping, and sharing (the ‘function’ part). Understanding the nuance of individual platforms–and how they work together to serve human-focused needs and opportunity–is ‘media literacy.’

5. Play

This is the opposite of compliant response to teacher-centered environments. In play, learners freely experiment, show ambition, follow curiosity, and take risks to create, design, evolve, and connect in ways that are otherwise impossible under compulsion.

6. Self-Directed Learning

Play is a big part of self-directed learning, but more broadly can include academic response, project-based learning, game-based learning, and other ‘school-like’ learning forms while students hold themselves and one another accountable to their own criteria of quality.