This is a world in which comfort with ideas and abstractions is the passport to a good job, in which creativity and innovation are the key to a good life, in which high levels of education–a very different kind of education than most of us have had–are going to be the only security there is. Too often, our testing system rewards students who will be good at routine work, while not providing opportunities for students to display creative and innovative thinking and analysis.
Source: New Commission on the Skills of American Workforce - Read Executive Summary
Via Weblogg-ed

These kinds of assertions regarding creativity and innovation as the "new" keys to a good life are supported by Dan Pinks' book, A Whole New Mind, which is a perfect response and companion book to Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. Specifically, Pink writes that:

High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas in a novel invention. High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

Join a book study of Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, starting in January. The book study will be done entirely online.

The new Texas Long Range Plan for Technology seeks to transform K-12 education. To accomplish this, the following points are made in the introduction to the Key Area: Teaching and Learning:

Use information and communication technologies to collaborate, construct knowledge and provide solutions to real world problems and situations that are encountered

Now, it would be easy to view this statement through the lens of current practices. That is, a traditional model of schooling where the district scope and sequence, the teacher decides what is to be learned and then serves as the source of knowledge as the student acts as the receiver of that knowledge and is measured periodically on master of that knowledge.

This is NOT the intended approach by the Texas Long Range Plan for Technology, and instead, the suggested approach is as follows:

Texas students must become active participants...it is vitally important that students gain skills for collaboratively constructing, using and communicating the knowledge they need for a chosen task, project, or other learning project.

This is critical when you consider that one of the flatteners Friedman shares is Outsourcing. It is very easy to send routine tasks--like preparing powerpoint presentations--around the world to people who will produce it for a fraction of what it would cost American workers. So, the changing nature of jobs is to move from productivity to creativity.

This shift from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age--the age of high concept, high touch--highlights the importance of enabling our students to synchronize outsourcing efforts. Pink calls this essential sense "Symphony," or the ability to add "invention and big picture thinking (not just detail focus)."

If students are focused on productivity while "using information and communication technology, constructing knowledge and providing solutions to real world problems," what they have to produce will not be in demand in a flat world. In fact, the abundance of information and cheap high tech labor will result in unemployment. Instead, our students must learn how to conduct a symphony of productivity work, a way of organizing the routine work that is done in other locations outside the classroom.

This is emphasized by the Commission's executive summary, that shares that leadership...

...does not depend on technology alone. It depends on a deep vein of creativity that is constantly renewing itself, and on a myriad of people who can imagine how people can use things that have never been available before, create ingenious marketing and sales campaigns, write books, build furniture, make movies, and imagine new kinds of software that will capture people's imaginations and become indispensable to millions.

You can't do this WITHOUT technology. It's indispensable, indivisible from what we are learning in schools. If it isn't, then maybe what is being taught shouldn't be.