I’ll be in Memphis for the next few days at the renowned Laptop Institute, on the campus of Lausanne Collegiate School, and at points across that river city where blues music, good food, and merriment are to be found. I’ll be making three contributions to the conference, a keynote address on contemporary literacy, an unconference-style session that will unveil itself in its own way, and a presentation on Web 2.0.
In the literacy keynote, I will describe how, during the past 10 to 15 years, the information that we use to accomplish our goals has become increasingly
- Networked,
- Digital, and
- Overwhelming
These three emerging characteristics of information have, I believe, changed what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Reading, arithmetic, and writing continue to be at the core of literacy. However, there are other skills today that are as critical to a democratic and economically viable society as the ability to read text on a piece of paper. This development, I believe, should affect our notions of the basic skills as they are integrated into what and how we teach.
During the past two to three years, new developments in the information landscape have almost suddenly appeared. Their characteristics have long been known by a younger generation of video gamers, who prefer spending their time interacting with information and being a participant in emerging plots and character relations, while we, of an older generation, prefer passively consuming information, accepting the plots and characters laid down by authors.
The rise of blogging, podcasting (and vodcasting), wikis, and the glue that ties them and much else together, RSS, more closely align with the video game view of information than the blook-reading and film-watching mode that is my information consumption and was the central part of my education. The information landscape is increasingly a place that we participate in, observing our experience, reflecting on what we observe, reporting it to the blogosphere, reading, reflecting, and writing some more, and constructing uniquely valuable content — along with the junk. Information flows through new channels and on new levels and it is tied together through tags and folksonomies, remixed, and attracted back to us in new and educationally potent ways.
Today, as information becomes increasingly networked, digital, and overwheming,
- Content rises increasingly out of conversation rather than formal and procedural publishing,
- The behavior of content depends more and more on the behavior of its readers, and
- People are increasingly connecting to each other through their content — through their ideas
These three emerging characteristics offer to change not only what and how we teach, but the very structure of the education experience, evaporating the definitions of teacher, learner, classroom, textbook, and all of the other firmwares of the institution, and making education an integral part of living. This, by no means, means the demise of the teacher, classroom, student, or even the textbook (though that surely must evolve into something far more networked, digital, and overwhelming). It simply means that what happens in the formal learning experience must look much more like on-the-job training, where we are helping children learn to become life-long learners.
Our indication of educational success must be much less a measure of what students know, and much more a measure of what they can teach themselves.
Image Citation:
Etech, “Laptops and Conversations.” Etech’s Photostream. 14 Mar 2005. 16 Jul 2006 <http://flickr.com/photos/oreilly/6500382/>.
In searching flickr’s creative commons directory, I was amazed at how much people love their laptops. 😉
Technorati Tags: education, laptopinst, laptopinst06, web20, technology, warlick
The three “emerging characteristics of information” that you return to in this post are, of course, very similar to the three that you lay out in Raw Materials for the Mind. In my work with teachers this summer, we have found these three categories to be useful tools for understanding why the new technologies we are learning matter. In a 3 1/2 week summer institute in New York City, eleven teachers have been wrestling with Web 2.0 technologies that allow us to:
1. access and manage rich interactive information
2. create and self-publish compelling content using multimedia
3. connect and collaborate with others locally and globally
This is our re-mix of the categories that you describe in “Raw Materials…” We are using yet another version at a 4-day Institute, “Technolgoy Matters” with about 20 teachers that I’ll be helping to facilitate for the National Writing Project in Chico, California next week.
One thing that we are finding is how impossible it is for these categories to be linear. To be a blogger (one of the goals of the NYC work), a teacher finds herself moving in and out of connecting and collaborating, creating and collecting.
Thanks for such a clear guideline!
Paul,
This is an intriguing list that aligns equally well with the characteristics of the Web 2.0 breakout that I mention, though I must reorder yours…
Nice fit! Great luck to you on your institutes…
Hi Dave,
I talked briefly with you at NECC about my group’s butterfly blog.
In order to inspire students to be life long learners, we need to have inquisitive educators.
As you can see in our blog, participants (many of them are very experienced master teachers) stepped outside their comfort zones to incorporate Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in their projects.
In addition to learning this model, participants had their first blog and Flickr experience.
http://butterflydanceproject.blogspot.com/
It’s interesting to observe the evolution of our blog. A few of the “lurkers†became active participants after a few weeks.
After viewing the blog, one can how their learners benefited from this experience.
http://www.comsewogue.k12.ny.us/~ssilverman/butterflies/index.htm
I’m quite confident that I’ll have many educators join my fall project which will include UDL, blogging, Flickr and Wikis. They will most likely be the only teachers in their schools that will be using these tools. Unfortunately many of them will have to work from home because of the filtering systems in place.
Several years ago when I began hosting online projects, many teachers were resistant to join because their school districts were concerned about safety. I remember one risk taker who joined my winter literature project. After her work was showcased on the project web site, her administration was so pleased that they encouraged the rest of the faculty to join future projects. Another risk taker from a parochial school in Canada joined and after seeing the project, the school bought more computers.
So, that’s what I hope to accomplish now. Hopefully, by providing a model of how these new tools can foster learning of educators and students, policies will be changed.
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