It just came through the airport intercom, Kansas City International now offers free Wireless Internet, just configure your computer to…
I love it. It was also interesting to see all of the Rest Areas on I29 between Sioux Falls and Kansas City with Wireless Internet signs. I didn’t partake, but they were certainly more accessible than Panera Breads.
I just posted another comment on yesterday provocative post, and I’d like to repeat it here:
I do not disagree with anyone here, and terms are important. But do you disagree that information is increasingly
- networked,
- digital, and
- overwhelming.
If you agree, what would you call this change. I still believe that these are important developments, especially as we try to keep a handle on the basic literacy skills we should be teaching our children?
I look forward to reading and learning…
I agree! So what tools do we use to handle the information ourselves and what tools do we teach to students to ease their information overload?
-networking/social sites = appropriate use thereof
-digital literacy skills = increasing less linguistic MI
– overwhelming = RSS tools
What is the community consensus?
I might agree with networked and digital, but overwhelming is an emotional response, not a fact about information.
What if it’s not overwhelming to some people? Why include a built-in emotional bias in what we teach children?
It seems counter-productive to base your educational vision on fear.
I do disagree with the statement, although not the underlying idea behind the statement.
In David Thornburg’s post, he identified a difference between data, information, knowledge, and understanding. I remember hearing this from Clifford Stoll at a university lecture some ten years ago and I still use this as a mental framework quite frequently (today in fact, in discussing our district’s test score analysis).
Is information becoming more networked – not in my opinion based upon what I think information is (which is a representation of data into some form comprehensible to some person – words, sentences, images, …). People are certainly organizing and networking information together, and we are using technological ways to sift, sort, and analyze, but the information itself is not becoming different by its very nature (in my opinion).
Is information becoming more digital? – no, but we are storing more information digitally. I don’t think that this by itself changes the nature of the information. It does allow us to use other digital tools to work with the information, but does not alter the information itself.
Is information increasingly overwhelming? no, but we have more of it, and much easier access to it. This is more like splitting hairs but the information itself is not more overwhelming, we just have quicker access to it because of how we have stored it. We’ve always had too much information. There are books I’ll never read, but that was true long before the first web browser came out. There have always been conversations that I will never be a part of; which are really transfers of information which some will internalize into knowledge when that information is assimilated or accommodated into one’s own schema. We know capture more of these conversations, but the words are the words (information).
So, I don’t necessarily agree that the information itself is changing, but I do believe the amount of information stored and made available is increasing and we are really trying to find ways to make sense of what some might call infoglut.
And as David Warlick points out, it should change the very nature of basic literacy skills our children need to have. They will absolutely need to cope with a world different from mine. The ability to read for comprehension becomes much more important than the ability to read for retention (which is how I recall my school days). Writing changes in huge ways when one has to mentally consider that his/her writing could potentially be read by a nearly limitless audience (and peer review and editing is a wonderful thing). I think students will need to excel at the ability to turn information into knowledge, and in turn transfer knowledge (and hopefully help others understand). Isn’t that a goal of the teaching and learning process?