New Cognitive Skills and Research Methods for a Fourth Industrial Revolution: Critical Review
摘要
In the context of rising industrial revolution 4.0, scholars search for “new” skills and competencies that students and researchers need to learn today and in the near future. Because of the economical demand for perpetual changes in technologies, methodologists propose to develop in learners/researchers critical and transdisciplinary thinking, (meta)ability “learning-to-learn” and skills of “thinking about thinking.” Therefore, “metacognitive skills” and “higher order thinking” are considered as a key and distinctively “new” component of science and education 4.0. By using comparative historical method and qualitative analysis of proposed methodological strategies the work crucially revises their “novelty”. It is argued that these and some other “brand-new” skills were discovered long before in philosophy and were the driving force of human development for centuries. It is evident that education 4.0 for the future should be able to constantly incorporate new technological tools of learning and be up-to-speed in its curriculum with the latest achievements in science and technologies. However, we debate, the core cognitive skills, learning/research strategies required for the development of science are essentially the same. In spite of this fact, it is demonstrated that modern educational theory 4.0 reinvents, “rebrands” or merely returns to the oldest research methods. In the context of a knowledge economy, we also revise the increasing dominance of technological thinking promoted as progressive and universal. For preventing the technocratic “dive” of society, a paradigm of “cognitive ecology” or “thinking ecology” is proposed. It is aimed at the preservation in education and society “cognitive diversity,” nonpragmatic values, and intuitive (creative) research methods.