Human Voices Wake Us

On February 23, I attended a workshop presented by David Warlick on Contemporary Literacy.  I’ll admit that I already supported the topic ahead of time, so me thinking it was fabulous might be a little biased.  I’m going to highlight some ideas that stuck with me:

What has changed is the nature of information.  We don’t need to teach our kids technology skills; we need to teach them how to work the information.

The technology has had a profound impact on our culture.  We will communicate in profoundly new ways.

We learn in the 21^st century by sharing.

Education society was perfect to prepare students for work in straight rows, performing repetitive tasks, under close supervision in an industrialized society.  Now the mills are gone. The current workplace is the home office with informational tools.

Cell phones connect families in a way never before.  We’ve decided as a culture that we want to carry our information devices with us in our pockets. 

Only 1/100^th of 1% of all new information in 2003 was printed.  We are spending too much time in the classroom teaching students how to use paper.

Don’t let distance and walls get in the way of the learning we want to achieve.

We are not preparing children for our future; we are preparing them for their future.  We know almost nothing about the future we’re preparing our children for.  What do our children need to be learning today to prepare them for an unpredictable future?

We are still working on assumptions that information presented is always true.  Examples include not only web information, but curriculum texts. We need to teach students that they can’t assume authority.  Need to teach students to question everything.  Teachers should bring as much information out of the Internet as possible to teach students how to judge information. We need to teach kids to teach themselves. 

Students have no recollection of the 20^th century.  We should be teaching 21^st century skills, but we are in 19^th century classrooms.

50% of students say they do school work in social networks online.

Kids no longer have to say goodbye to their friends when they leave high school.  They can now stay in constant contact via social networks.

We want our children to be students we want to teach instead of learners they are. We need to ask students questions as if they had Google in their pockets.

The huge problem in our schools is the disparity of kids who are in a community of learners online versus kids who have no access. If we’ve decided as a nation that all children need to read, we need to provide technology access too.  The new illiteracy will be technological. 

Teachers used to make students experts.  Now students are making themselves experts. 

It’s not about the technology; it’s about the information. For teachers, information is a product to consume.  For students, it’s something to remix.

We don’t need to provide project-based learning, but job-based learning. Technology doesn’t get students excited- it’s not new to them. 

If students become intellectual property owners, they will respect others’ intellectual property.  One way to do this is to house students’ projects in the library as a resource for others.

Teachers who don’t use technology are emphasizing technology and the Internet as a playground.  They are not teaching students how to evaluate information and use technology as a tool.

Some suggested websites:

www.davidwarlick.com            presenter’s site

www.uuorld.com          explain the world with maps

www.prezi.com            zooming editor for stunning presentations

http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/            fair use & copyright

www.ning.com create own social network

www.phunland.com      2D physics sandbox

www.gamesforchange.org         real world games; real world impact

www.missiontolearn.com          26 learning games to change to world

www.scratch.mit.edu                create stories, games, and animations

www.tagcrowd.com                 visualize word frequency through tag clouds

www.wordle.net                       generate word pictures 

www.tikatok.com                     create books to share

I don’t Twitter or do RSS feeds or anything else that updates me every minute.  I figure I don’t need to be a slave to that kind of immediate “look at me now!”  I know I would drop whatever I was doing and check out the latest.  And, yes, I’ve read the blogs about how great Twitter is and how the man Twittered he was arrested and had tons of people automatically working to get him free.  Seeing how I don’t plan on going to Egypt anytime soon, I figure I’m okay with a regular cell phone.  The thing is, I don’t want to be in touch 24/7.  I want to choose when I want to read my blogs or check my email.  (My husband gets email alerts on his cell phone, as I’m sure many do, and he is constantly looking at it when it buzzes.)   I use Bloglines. Whenever I feel like it or have a few extra minutes, I can check and see which of my favorite blogs have new posts.  I like the fact that I control that, not some electronic notification.  I love technology and all that it can do.  I’m in total support of all those tools.   Everyone should keep using them if they make people happy.  Frankly, I have enough stuff going on in my own life to need to know each minute what’s going on in yours.

As I’ve been reading articles for my doctoral study, I’ve come across an interesting idea:  how the globalization of the economy will affect students when they become workers.  You may have noticed that I’m reading Wikinomics, which speaks about globalization.  This is fascinating stuff.  Here’s my train of thought on this: School should be a reflection of society.  We teach values and knowledge that our society finds necessary.  Curriculum changes as those people in office decide that our values have changed.  Right now state lawmakers are discussing putting technology essential knowledge and skills in the every grade level.  Of course, our personal lives are always way ahead of our school lives.  I read a statistic that only 18% of teachers blog or know someone who does.  I bet if you ask that same question to students, the percentage would be very high.  So, not only should school reflect society in regards to the use of technology, but another responsibility of school should be to prepare students for the word of work.  Businesses have been complaining for a long time that schools don’t do a good enough job with this.  And looking at how companies are outsourcing work to all parts of the world, students need to be prepared for a workforce much different than the one we were prepared for.  Hardly anyone holds down the same job for 30 years anymore.  We need to prepare students to work in a global economy, which includes being able to communicate effectively through digital tools, being able to work with a team that might not be physically present, and being able to adapt to new situations on a daily basis.   If educators keep acting like we live in a bubble that no longer exists, we will be doing our students a great disservice.

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