Life-ready signals
To be a professional, a knowledge worker in the 21st century, means keeping up with jargon, acronyms, and shifts in terminology. Some of this is necessary, as I’ve explained in my work on ambiguity, some isn’t.
This article by Kristine Chompff on the Edalex blog introduces a term new to me: “life-ready signals”. It doesn’t seem to me destined to catch-on, any more than ‘durable skills’ has or will, but is nevertheless a worthy attempt to recognise the behaviours that go around hard skills and knowledge.
I also think that we need to do something about the acronym soup: while I might understand someone saying that we use RSDs to build a VC as part of a learner’s PER within an LER ecosystem, it’s gobbledegook to everyone else.
For anyone interested in this kind of thing, we have a community of practice called Open Recognition is for Everybody (ORE) which you can discover and join at badges.community)
For us to understand life-ready signals, we must for a second talk about semiotics and the definition of terms. Because the term “life-ready skills” has evolved, so has the term “life-ready signals.”
Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, of which language is a part. It depends partly on the object being described, but also on the way the person reading that description interprets it. For these terms to be meaningful, we all need to interpret them in the same way.
Life-ready skills are the thing being described. Life-ready signals are those “signs” being used to describe them. For a learner to tell their own story, they need to be equipped not only with the skills themselves, but the proper “signs” to share them with others in a meaningful way.
It’s also important to note here that with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) there will always be skills that machines will never master, and those are the life-ready skills we are discussing here.
Source: Edalex blog
Image: Giulia May