The prolific use of technology in school brings up an interesting question with respect to literacy. Specifically, has the prevalance of IT in education changed the definition of student literacy? I was prompted to reflect on this question after reading a great entry on Clay Burell’s blog, http://beyond-school.org/2008/12/25/truly-twentyfirst-c/. Before reading this post, my reaction to educational IT was that we are teaching kids the same things, but we’re calling it something different. New tools, same ideas. While I still think there is some truth to that, I definitely overlooked the idea of what Burell calls “online identity management”. Essentially, students don’t define privacy in the same sense that many of their teachers might.
But I do believe that literacy in the online world is more similar to traditional print media literacy than some of us would originally think. For example, just because the New York Times (print edition) is a large, corporate media news source, does not mean that they have no motives or reasoning behind the stories they print, the pictures they publish, and the editorial decisions they make. Just as a crack-pot with an Internet connection has an agenda, so does anyone in the business of information dissemination. There is a danger in assuming that print media sources do not require the same level of evaluation and critique as online sources.
These questions are essential to explore (and to have students explore) as IT is further integrated into the “typical” classroom.
February 13, 2009 at 4:23 pm
I’m sympathetic to your point about print, totally.
But the fact that I used an RSS search of hyperlinks to my blog (identity management
to find your post, and then connect with you over a shared concern (Media Monopoly and corporate propaganda as “objective news”), and give you a link from Harpers (great read on the Kaplan Education/WaPo connection, which makes Jay Matthews and all other WaPo education journos suspect in my book): http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/0082166 points again, in the longest sentence I’ve written this week, to something new.
February 14, 2009 at 1:27 pm
I won’t comment on the topic itself. I just wanted to say I reckon this is pretty cool, Mike, don’t you? Clay has just illustrated one of the main points I was trying to make yesterday, that blogging can lead to some excellent learning. You read what someone has said on their blog, offer your own thoughts and link to their post, and voila, you may have a conversation going. Clay is one of the more prolific and thoughtful commenters I’ve seen though, replying to most everyone who comments on his writing.
By the way, one small suggestion: you should change set the timezone settings in your dashboard. (Settings >> General)
Ståle
February 15, 2009 at 4:40 am
Well Mr Kopp, I would say this was very cool. To tap into an interesting ongoing discussion so easily and with such immediate feedback is inspiring indeed.
February 15, 2009 at 11:17 pm
Great point – and thanks for the replies. I think what we are seeing is a shift from more external, information behemoths to personalized information networks (not exactly an original thought on my part!). But where this becomes interesting is in our application of these information networks, as individuals and as teachers. For instance, some information networks like MySpace and Facebook have simply been hijacked by the aforementioned behemoths of mass marketing in a grasping motion to avoid irrelevance. I’m interested in “taking back” the networks – using social networking and information networks as a learning tool, but not being forced into the land of facebook, or even ning. In other words, how can I show kids (and model for them) that gathering and interpreting information does not need to be governed by the external forces of marketing (i.e. what you should be reading, subscribing to, keeping updated with, etc.), but that they have immense power to control the information and to demand something meaningful. But I guess this is all a part of online identity management, isn’t it?
February 16, 2009 at 12:30 am
A couple reactions:
1. I hear you on the proprietary and herd-marketing traps. My solution is to self-host my own WordPress blog on a hired server, so my space is really my space. I appreciate Ning and Blogger and all that for their services, but there’s not enough control over the future of our work there. That’s why Open Source (WP, Moodle, etc) are vital. The content and the platform are the user’s to own, administer, and portably carry from place to place. You can’t do that with suckass proprietary platforms like Blackboard. (At $50k USD, it makes the free – and superior – Moodle a steal.)
2. Nothing original here, but RSS subscribing to keyword searches on Google Blogs, Google news, technorati, etc, is a way to get alternative info-streams that we pull, rather than have pushed on us.
3. Facebook and Twitter and all? If the people you populate your network with are smart and well-informed, then the tools enable them to share their smarts in real time. So to experience the power of Twitter, a person needs to develop the social (networking) skills to build that sort of rich human personal network.
I get all sorts of cool links from smart people on Twitter who read stuff and apparently think, “Clay would like this one.” That’s magic. So are del.icio.us shared bookmarks. Other ppl basically sending cool stuff my way without my asking.
There’s literally something heavenly about all of this disembodied mental communion of people around the globe – people, mind you – who couldn’t do it, though, without the tools.
February 21, 2009 at 3:40 pm
[...] brings up the influence of technology on changing student literacies in his blog post, What is Literacy?; Steve refers to confidentiality restraints in implementing Web 2.0 tools in an early years class [...]