I’m in one of my favorite places, an independently owned coffee shop. Brenda and I stopped and stayed at the Davidson Village Inn, in lovely Davidson, North Carolina. It’s my kind of college town, and my kind of coffee shop. Yesterday, we’d just enjoyed an old fashioned country church picnic in my home town. For those of you, for whom this old tradition is foreign, please indulge.
Every family brings their best home cooking, lays it out on plywood tables along with gallons of sweet iced tea. You walk around the tables, both sides, and fill your plate. then you find a nice shady place under a tree to sit, gorge, and reminisce about past church picnics. There were five different kinds of deviled eggs, and I sampled all of them. In addition — two varieties of meat loaf, a potato casserole, green bean casserole, pig in a blanket, two kinds of chocholate cake, and to balance things, a small plate of banana pudding. Needless to say, we didn’t feel like driving all the way home to Raleigh.
So here, on Monday morning, sitting in the local coffee shop, sipping on the community’s free WiFi, is a blog entry I’ve been working on for several days. I make no promises that it’s quality will reflect that many hours of work!
Dan, an educator associated with one of the New York BOCES, wrote an important comment on one of my recent 2¢ Worth blog postings, One Obvious Miss. He expressed some logical concerns about recent discussions on new literacies, what I called learning literacies. The vision of these new literacies that he seemed to be coming from were similar to that of many educators, one that is bound to the effective use of emerging technologies. The truth is that this is exactly the notion that I’m trying to get away from. Here’s what Dan says, and I am inserting my comments, unindented.
I worry a bit about the notion of new learning literacy. It seems that whenever I turn around, there is a new tool developed that everyone is trying to “figure out†and apply to learning tasks. Each tool seems to morph and change in an eyeblink.
Technology is constantly morphing. But the skills that I am thinking of are far more fundamental and tied not to any specific longstanding or fleeting application of technology, but to the changing nature of information that has resulted from this technology revolution. In a published print information landscape, the fundamental skills were the ability to read the text in front of you, process numbers and concepts logically, and write a coherent paragraph — the three Rs.
Now that information is increasingly networked, digital, and overwhelming, the three Rs have expanded.
- It’s not just can you read? — but can you expose the text’s context?
- It’s not just can you do arithmetic? — but can you employ information?
- And merely being able to write on paper is not nearly enough. Can you express ideas compellingly using not only text, but images, sound, animation, and video?
These skills result in the ability to use the information around you to accomplish goals, regardless of the technology. It’s about the information!
Learning skills involve the ability to access information and answers, process them in a value-adding fashion, and express what you know and have learned to others — within any contemporary information landscape (and today that information is networked, digital, and overwhelming).
Dan continued,
Applying a blog… a wiki.. or a tool being mashed together as we exchange this writing? – is knowing how to do this “literacy†if the tools will disappear?
Knowing how to do it — is not literacy!
Knowing how to learn to do it — is literacy!
I saw the K-12 Online Conference RFP and the term “perpetual beta†jumped out at me. I had seen it a few days before too.
I have used at least 4 podcast/audio creation sites this past year. All were labeled as “beta†and all went away. I loved two of them.
I like the tool sites I see like bubbl and picnik.
I understand the group processes and tagging, the power of the Web2.0.
But “learning literacies†for the future may be a slippery fish to latch onto if our ideas and tools are in “perpetual beta.â€
I feel your pain, as do most of us (over 50). It’s the nature of today’s information environment that it is not merely a place to consume, but also a landscape so rich and accessible that any of us can also become producers and even architects of the environment, inventing, building, and improving in a vicious and exhilarating cycle.
Sometimes I am excited and sometimes I think we are creating chaos out of order!
Get use to it. It’s all the more reason why we need to factor it all down to fundamental skills — can you use today’s information environment to help yourself learn what you need to know, to do what you need to do?
These revolutions may be overwhelming, but we NEED to use and accept them. Students are getting bored out of their minds reading textbooks, completing worksheets, and completing robotic assignments that mean nothing to them. Using these technologies available to us, we can help create a society of people that create, edit, publish, reflect, and can imagine. Wouldn’t that be wonderful!
I see the boredom on the faces of students every day. I am on the front lines, witnessing the ancient teaching procedures still in effect today. I work as a technology teacher in a Title 1 elementary school. I have the opportunity to be exposed to all the students on a daily basis. I am not a classroom teacher, so I can actually reflect on what I see happening with other teachers in the school. Worksheets, textbooks, encyclopedia’s, and dictionaries are outdated. All of these tools were once great because that was all we had. Not anymore. These WORKSHEET teachers fear change, they fear technology, and most of all, they lack the drive to learn what they need to learn in order to teach the kids that proper way to use these technologies. As a younger teacher, I hope to be a leader in this revolution of knowledge and imagination.
These revolutions need to be discussed in this fashion. There is a need to completely change the process in which we are educating in our schools. Worksheets, textbooks, encyclopedia’s, and Dictionaries are not enough anymore. We are using tools from the 1800’s to educate a generation in which knowledge, power, and information is at the strike of a key. We need to challenge our students to become imaginative creators, editers, thinkers, and self reflectors. This is the challenge. One-dimensional WORKSHEET teachers need to get on board or retire. It is time that we learn the new literacies that are children already know!
Well your post may have taken a lot of work but it is an interesting read. This is a major issue for teachers/families/communities around the globe – change can be extremely challenging and when there is the complication of money, politics, values, historical ways of doing things etc it just becomes all the more difficult.
Good food for thought … thank you once again.
“Knowing how to do it — is not literacy!”
“Knowing how to learn to do it — is literacy!”
True. There is a difference and we must be aware of it. Knowing how to do it shouldn’t be enough but we should also know how to learn to do it.
I feel that this is a corner stone to retooling classrooms, the distinction between
Teaching children how to be taught,
and teaching them how to teach themselves.
The question is, what does this look like? 😉
It’a jarring to attempt to hold the idea of learning literacies and this week’s Time Magazine cover story (http://tinyurl.com/2qnj2q) in my head at the same time.
I realize NCLB looks at traditional literacies, but can this be done without throwing learning literacies by the wayside?
One of my greatest frustrations with standardized testing is that it does not test my kids the way they learn, nor does it ask them to apply their learning in any truly useful way.
Sec. Spelling speaks of the possibility for national education standards. No mention is made of whether those standards are to be fluid, contemporary expectations for creating successful 21st Century citizens. No mention is made of the ideas set forth by The World is Flat or Wikinomics or the like.
If we are set to revise NCLB and dedicated to serving students as best as possible, musn’t we truly look at the total mission with which we are charged and dedicate ourselves to global revision?
Just me?
Never have we had more information available. The body of knowledge is growing rapidly. “Learning literacies” emphasize skills that allow our students to handle this info gut. Learning literacies are vital.
In our county, the superintendent had an outside audit of the written curriculum. A resounding complaint echoed by this audit was that the curriculum is a mile wide and an inch thick. The audit recommended an increased focus on curriculum control in order to be sure that priority content is covered effectively without spreading the instruction too thin.
I believe room needs to be made in the curriculum in order to effectively cover learning literacies. The question then becomes what can we give up in order for this to happen?
Dave, thank you for an illuminating discussion. I am happy to have turned the tables and given YOU something to think about and respond to.. it’s usually the other way around!
BTW.. I stumbled across something I published more than 12 years ago. You might find it an interesting read since it was written at the time I first witnessed Mosaic!
It is always interesting to find that what you write today.. follows you for decades!
Dan
– http://tinyurl.com/2z9arx
Dan!
Wow! That was way beyond it’s time. It seems that much of what you talked about in that article is only now truly coming to pass.
Yes. I was aware in 1995 that there was a shift coming in information and how we learn. For many of us, our generation saw primary meaning in TEXT, occasionally supported by pictures, but we could also see that the new generation arising in 1995 was moving to a process where primary information was held in other media, often explicated by text. While that shift was evident to me, I could not, and probably still have not, broken from the methods of my own learning.
I reflect on the time, last year, when I was explaining to a group of teachers how they could insert pop-up comments in a Word document. I “explained’ by actually evaluating some of their writing using that process. I was making a point too, about the nature of ELECTRONIC tools that went well beyond formatting on paper.
Only later did it hit me that I had also taught them how to include embedded audio clips within Word with only a cheap microphone.
But I, a product of my time, didn’t think to pick up the mike to evaluate their work! I typed my reactions as inserted commentary!
Aha… we are so text oriented, even when we see emerging the world that is NOT.
Thus.. this message, and not an audio/video file to you!
Thanks again for the responses.. so quick too!
True. Almost all of us are literate, but we can’t ignore the fact that many of us do not know to learn to do it. It would not be complete understanding if we do not know how to learn.
I am coming to believe that unless you have the skills to learn, then you are not literate. It is no long the three R’s. You are not literate unless
And do all of this within a contemporary information environment.
It’s not just literacy, and then learning literacy. It’s just one literacy. I suspect that if we stack literacies up, then they will all continue to take a back seat to 19th century literacy.
Dave,
Nice conversation.
Your revised definition of literacy is very useful. Thank you.
I was bit by the technology bug a couple months ago after listening to your presentations in Utah. Since then, I’ve implemented a number of technology tools in the classroom, most notably blogging, podcasting, and more slideshows.
I did have an interesting experience yesterday.
For economics class, I led a discussion. I planned it to go for half an hour, perhaps. We talked for just over an hour. Towards the end, one student said, “These past two economics classes have been awesome.” A number of students agreed with him.
There was no “technology” in the classes to which this student referred. We simply had engaging discussions on important topics. And I know the students walked away with an improved view of the world.
My point is that while technology is fun and useful–it’s always a matter of meeting the students where they are at. A good teacher will go “find” the students, wherever they may be in their own search for knowledge. Then, that teacher will join the students in their search. There are numerous tools available to help in the exploration, and many of them are a blast to use. But they are always in the service of the students (and teacher, sometimes).
I was just thinking again about your definition of literacy. . .and I crunched it together with the “old school” definition. I propose that many “educated” people can be accurately labeled illiterate literates.
Literacy in a world where the tools for writing and communicating are constantly changing is a very tough problem facing schools today. One I don’t see schools addressing enough. My feeling though is that there are certain underlying skills that students (and hopefully teachers) can practice in order to become more literate.
These are:
– Creative thinking
– Effective personal and digital communication
– self-learning of new digital technologies
…..help me out here….what would you add?