Education in the digital age

Abstract

In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman (2005) argues that technology, economics, and population growth have created a global economy where competition favors countries with trained workers willing to accept low wages. The science and technology necessary to produce and sell mass-produced goods and services has spread across the globe, and the high-wage economies of developed countries reward those who can do innovative work and punish those who can not.As a result, schools and universities face a new challenge. In the old industrial economies of developed nations, graduates who had mastered basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics were able to find good jobs. But young people in such countries today need to think less like assembly line workers and more like professionals who solve problems that do not have easy answers. They need to learn judgment and discretion rather than obedience. Skills that once were the preserve of the elite are increasingly the prerequisite for entry-level work of any kind. In the digital age of global competition, schools and universities have to train young people for creative thinking, collaboration, and complex problem solving.Here I argue that the same technologies that make innovative and creative thinking critical skills for the future also make it possible for students to prepare for that future through well-designed and sophisticated computer games for learning. Computer games, in other words, may be a critical part of the future of education in the digital age, and while in this analysis, because of my own particular expertise, I draw examples primarily from the United States, the issues hold for any nation that wishes to prepare itself and its citizens for our changing world.