Jon Pederson wrote a blog yesterday (Challenge to the “New Information Environment”) about literacy in the “New Information Environment”. In it, he mentioned me and Will Richardson (hey, I’m going to notice any mention of me and Will Richardson in the same article), and other luminaries, in a discussion of literacy. I would add several others to the list who are doing some serious work in defining these literacies. I listened yesterday to a podcast from Wesley Fryer with Chris Moersch talking about what Chris calls Digital Fluency. I’d known about Chris’ work through his LOTI (Levels of Technology Integration), but wasn’t aware that he had done so much thinking and research about literacy.
I’d also add, among many others, Don Leu, and his team at the University of Connecticut. One of the projects they have been involved in is using security tools (software used to keep track of workers productivity by recording every keystroke made on their machines) to track students’ efforts to answer questions and solve problems using the World Wide Web. They have identified a range of higher order thinking skills required to answer basic low level questions within a vast, highly indexed, hypermedia information environment (WWW). Very cool stuff.
Jon went on to ask two questions that I think are very important — and I’d like to take a stab.
When is it developmentally appropriate to introduce this type of thinking to students? I’m confident that this type of critical thinking/information gathering can be applied at high school. I know that my 3 1/2 year old won’t understand. We teach students about evaluating resources in middle school, but are they truly ready at that point to deconstruct a Wikipedia entry and be a critical, independent thinker?
As teachers, I would say that it starts at the beginning — kindergarten. Jon is not talking about technology skills. It’s confusing that this discussion usually happens among technology educators within the context of technology considerations, but the skills are about information.
Treating content as conversation cracks straight through to the way that we talk in our classrooms. When a teachers says, “The world is like this…”, then that teacher is conditioning students to assume that because it was said in a classroom, by a teacher, then we must assume that it is true. Those students will have to be retrained to understand critical evaluation of information as anything other than just another academic task.
Instead, the teacher should say, “According to this author, researcher, scientist, with these experiences, the world is like this…” Including supporting information with the information we are presenting, conditions students to understand that content must be coupled with supporting information, in order for that content to be useful. Again, it cuts right down to how the kindergarten teacher teaches every day.
What percentage of adults have the required skills to a) navigate this environment and b) be critical consumers of information? Can we expect our students to be proficient with these skills when adults aren’t?
This is an excellent question, and I’d love to see the percents myself. Pew Internet and American Life project has a lot of good statistics, but I’d answer the question this way. The adults who have managed to gain these skills are those who had to. People who work in professions that have access to networked, digital information and owe their success to decisions based on that information, have gained those skills, or else they don’t do it any more. You learn it when you have to. It’s called life-long learning.
What’s really hurting our children is that most teachers don’t have to. They can continue to teach with five-year-old textbooks, cut off from the world by four solid walls, and experience the success that their leaders expect. They won’t teach contemporary literacy, because they don’t need it themselves, because they’re still working within an antiquated industrial age institution.
In preparing for a keynote address in Minnesota later this week, I found a fascinating video about a virtual reality tool designed for young children to learn in. It was entirely compelling. Regular readers know that I believe that we need classrooms and teachers to personally guide students into their futures. But unless we become a whole lot more relevant to our students and their future, then we’re just going to drop off the edge.
But it’s going to be a beautiful day here in Dallas, Texas, where I’ll be working with teacher in a 1:1 school district. Great fun!
What percentage of adults have the required skills to a) navigate this environment and b) be critical consumers of information? Can we expect our students to be proficient with these skills when adults aren’t?
I don’t know what the percentage is either. But I do know that I get all kinds of “crap” e-mails forwarded to me by “educated” adults (some of them teachers) who believe that anything they get in an e-mail must be true, no matter how biased or one-sided, especially if it contains a quote from a so-called expert.
If college educated adults are so easily deceived, how can we ever expect them to teach our students?
a) Can’t wait to hear what you have to say about the one-to-one environment.
b) the scarier thing isn’t that teachers won’t teach the new literacy… it’s that they can’t because those skills are not yet represented on the standardized tests. (And may never be.)
Dear David,
I can only speak for my district, but teachers are very receptive to the inclusion of information literacy skills in the units they develop. We develop many multi-disciplinary units and I encourage both an information literacy and computer literacy skill in each unit.
The team planning approach with the classroom/content specialist, library media/information specialist, and computer teacher/technology specialist, has worked well for us, as well as for many other school districts. With all three of these people involved in planning and teaching (co-teaching if schedules allow, which is not often), students are exposed to these important skills across the content areas, whether they are conducting in-depth research for a project or are simply looking for some facts. You know me…I keep harping on the “you have to know something about a topic before you can figure out if what you find is correct” and “how do you know that author has the credentials to write about that topic?” whether I am talking to the superintendent, a classroom teacher, or a student. This conversation has become even more common as I debate the merits of the information on Wikipedia with anyone who will listen!
All of our classroom teachers are not at the advanced technology literacy level, but they do understand these important skill sets and I see them practicing these information literacy skills in their own professional life, too. I do believe our students are being mentored and are acquiring these skills…
Kathy
David, I’ve blogged about your ideas this morning. The post is “The Buck Stops Here”. http://21stcenturylearning.typepad.com/blog/
I’m also adding my 2 cents as a comment:
Last night–I caught one of my students ( a preservice teacher) online. He was in the mood to chat. He shared that now that he was midway into his education program he was questioning his decision to go into education as a career. His disenchantment came from the disconnect he was seeing in his education courses. He complained that while we were advocating constructivism and 21st century learning, we were assigning behavioral type assignments to carry out in the field and do with the students. He also vented that his cooperating teacher was not modeling anything close to what he was learning about. That students in his class had never worked in groups and barely could read and when they did it was simply calling words from a page. That there was no wonderment or excitement about learning and certainly no “technology as a medium” examples to follow.
I started thinking. I have often said you cant give away what you do not own. If I do not own a car- I can’t loan or give one to you. If I do not own contemporary literacy- how can I give that to you? Maybe these K-12 teachers feel they do not “need it” because it was never given to them. If teachers of education do not own it–which seems obvious by the way we structure our classes and our reluctance to embed the concepts we are advocating in our assignments and assessments, then how can we expect to pass it on? How can we expect to give to our preservice students what we do not own and in turn, how can we expect these emergent teachers to think they “have to” ?
While I agree with you David that principled changes in K-12 education are desperately needed– I think we have to start at the root of the problem first– Colleges of Education.