Down to Fundamentals
Our world is flooded with tools and functions that simply could not have been imagined when I was in school. It has reshaped the very nature of information and our relationships with that information. Michael Wesch's million times viewed YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, illustrates this so well...
We'll need to rethink a few things ... copyright ... authorship ... identity ... ethics ... aesthetics ... rhetorics ... governance ... privacy ... commerce ... love ... family ... ourselves.
Our greatest challenge, as educators and as a society that values education is making sure that no child is left behind -- but not in the politicized sense of making sure that every child can read and perform basic math. Our challenge is rethinking education in a world were we are rethinking almost everything else. How do we prepare children to be rethinkers?
One of those functionalities that is causing us to rethink one foundational institution is best represented by the web site, DIGG. DIGG is probably best described as a news aggregator where readers post news stories, either from their own perspective through blog entries or direct links to other news sources. The effect is essentially a newspaper where readers are the reporters. The feature, however, that distinguishes DIGG and has been copied by so many other news services is that readers are also the editors of this news source. As you read stories in DIGG and judge them to be valuable, you can click a button labeled DIGG. Doing so indicates that you dig the story and that adds value points. The order that the stories appear in DIGG are determined by the number of value points, meaning that readers determine what's going to be on the front page of DIGG news. We are the editors!
So, if we DIGG it, is it so. If enough people believe something, does that make that idea more accurate, more valuable, or more important. Because blogging becomes the talk of NECC, and then podcasting, and what will almost certainly be Second Life at next month's international conference, does that make it the technology that tech savvy teachers should be embracing. The quick answer is, " " Well, that's the point. There is no quick answer. It depends. It depends on what you want to achieve. It depends on the context -- both macro and micro. It depends on a thorough examination of the information and of the technology. It begins with some fundamentals. We'll get no where without fundamentals.
A magazine cover of a teacher flying through the air of a digital realm, called Second Life, is going to look like fluff to many in our community. And hearing about 21st century skills is going to sound like so much self-esteem blather. They are going to demand that we get back to basics, and I would suggest the very same thing. Can children read? Can they solve problems with numbers? Can children write?
It's a flag I've flown before, but I believe that the time has never been better for us to get down to fundamentals and ask the questions, What does it mean...
- to be a reader in a networked information landscape?
- to be a processor of information when information is digital?
- to be a communicator when messages must compete for attention in order to be heard or seen?
- and what are the ethical issues of using information today?
There are two basics that I believe we can all agree on right now.
- e are preparing children for a future that we can not clearly describe, and
- The very nature of information has changed
These two ideas must converge to become a foundation for our considerations of 21st century skills and how or whether we should be taking our children into multi-user virtual environments. We must redefine literacy, expanding on the three Rs in a way that reflects today's information landscape, and to prepare children for an ever-changing world, we need to change our notions of what literacy is for. It is no longer merely the about to read a newspaper. We become literate, so that we can keep learning and adapting. It isn't just literacy, it's learning literacy.
Then the degree to which new technologies can be applied to learning (and learning to learn), should be the measure of whether we should adapt and adopt them in our classrooms and other learning environments.