virtual skills

I've been thinking again about the "s" word in higher education. An associate dean who also manages our workforce development initiatives forwarded and interesting article about 21 century skills requirements in the UK. I'm still not sure why I should particularly care about what the UK is doing in regard to preparing their future workforce, but I'm sure it's not that dramatically different from what we need to do here.

What I keep finding across all this reading is the (almost) tired old gripe about college graduates lacking written communication skills. The added twist is that employers are now associating "written" communication skills with an employee's ability to exploit computer-based communication. By exploit I mean the ability to navigate and create content in a range of computer-based spaces, not necessarily computer-based tools.

While there clearly needs to be a lot of work here at SU on how well we address the communication skills requirement, I'm wondering (in the wake of a recent mini-seminar discussion), how prepared are students before they get to college? Anecdotal observations indicate that college students today are generally more proficient in the Web 2.0 spaces, if only that they are coming into the classroom with some awareness of these spaces. In more than a few cases, they're awareness is greater than their instructors'.

Our challenge -- the challenge of writing instructors -- is to find ways to embed Web 2.0 and the 3.0(?) virtual spaces into our instructional activities. These instructional spaces differ from our traditional writing spaces is that they allow students think about content differently. How differently is something I'm curious about.

Random association: Web 1.0 and recently 2.0 spaces require skills for identifying and aggregating content. Web 3.0 spaces require skills for creating content. And yet, how do those skills differ?