Essential Skills in the 21st Century

In his information age speech, Alan Berkson discusses the essential skills people need to be successful so far in the revolution we currently find ourselves in. The speaker believes the having the ability to vet, synthesize and curate will enable people to do well and should be taught to children moving forwards.

Being able to vet is the most critical of the three skills, according to the information age speech. This is the ability to check for accuracy and validity, and essentially verify information you are given. In a world where advertisements masquerade as news and experts engineer the top search engine results, we need to develop a healthy skepticism. More than ever we rely on third parties to check sources for us, so we now need to learn or improve our researching.

Synthesizing is if you can find the information you need to solve a problem. It's about finding, learning, understanding and applying knowledge.

There are two elements of curation: sharing and context. While sharing is about putting information out there, context is sharing a piece of your understanding.