home

=New Internet Literacies for Educators--BLC '07=


 * The compelling questions:**

What will our students have to know to succeed in their worlds? How do we move our teachers and our schools to prepare those students more effectively for their futures.


 * The compelling quote:**

"We have been seduced by our inability to imagine ourselves as superfluous to student learning." [|Artichoke Blog]


 * The Trends are Clear:**
 * Networked--learning and connecting in virtual, passion-based spaces
 * [|Taking IT Global]
 * Hyperconnected--their lives will be lived in a world where connections are ubiquitous
 * Hypertransparent--their lives will be lived for everyone else to see
 * Collaborative--
 * Open--More and more of what we create we share openly, and more of the tools will be open source.
 * [|Creativecommons.org]


 * The Changes are Significant**
 * Content is no longer scarce: [|MIT OpenCourseWare]
 * Content is constantly changing: [|Wikipedia]
 * Our kids understand social technologies more than we do. [|Business Week Chart]
 * Technology is rapidly evolving [|Multitouch Computers]


 * These are hugely challenging times.**


 * The Business World Today**--Internally, IBM has 26,000 internal bloggers, 20,000 wikis with 100,000 users, and a social network that is used by over 400,000 full and part time employees. They own 50 islands in Second Life. (Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2007, as [|summarized here].)
 * The Business World Today**--Internally, IBM has 26,000 internal bloggers, 20,000 wikis with 100,000 users, and a social network that is used by over 400,000 full and part time employees. They own 50 islands in Second Life. (Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2007, as [|summarized here].)


 * The Question**: Are our classrooms and our practices preparing kids for the world that they will be facing when they begin their life's work?

The "literacies" that they will require are much more complex.

Our students are entering a world where they will be expected to be:
 * **Self-learners**
 * The US Dept. of Education estimates that by the time they reach 38, our kids will have changed jobs over a dozen times. [|Source]
 * Who will teach them?
 * Are we teaching them to be lifelong, continual learners?
 * **Self-starters**
 * Passion-based learning
 * "This is a world where if you are not doing it, someone else will." --Friedman
 * [|The Sam Jackson College Experience]
 * Are we teaching them to generate their own projects, to take control of their own learning? (They can, you know.)
 * **Self-selectors** in terms of building their own personal, perpetual learning networks
 * Who are my teachers?
 * Who or what defines an "expert"?
 * Who can I trust?
 * How do I build a [|learning network]? (delicious network explorer)
 * What does community mean?
 * Are we teaching them to measure authority in new ways, to find other learning opportunities, to build personal learning networks?
 * **Self-editors**
 * More of what we consume has no traditional editor
 * [|Martin Luther King.org]
 * Understanding the network as an editor
 * Cult of the Amateur
 * Are we helping them understand editing as a natural part of their interaction with information?
 * **Self-organizers**
 * Folksonomies
 * Tagging and RSS
 * [|Google Reader]
 * Are we modeling ways to make sense of information, to archive it and recall it?
 * **Self-reflectors**
 * Blogging as reflection
 * Are we giving them ways to think about their learning?
 * **Self-publishers**
 * Can they use the tools?
 * Wikipedia--[|Tucker]
 * Do they understand the ethics of publishing online?
 * **Self-regulators**
 * Are we modeling balance?
 * Are we providing strategies for making best use of online time?
 * **Self-protectors**
 * The nature of privacy is changing
 * "[|Most Teens 'Not Bothered' by Cyberbullying]" Totally Wired"

So how can we begin to bring these changes and literacies to our students? How must our homework change?

Students need to be participants, creating real work for real purposes for real audiences, even at the youngest levels.
 * As Marco Torres says, we need our kids' work to "have wings"
 * [|Those Awesome and Amazing Ants]
 * [|International Space Station 07]
 * [|First Grade Beach Trip] (VoiceThread)
 * Flat Classrooms Wiki
 * [|Parents]

So what are the challenges, and how do we overcome them? What are the "Yeah, buts"?
 * 1) **"We don't have the technology."** Talk about and model the uses of these technologies in your own practice as much as you can. Start a conversation about the ways in which you can bring free and open hardware and software to your schools.
 * 2) **"My supervisor (principal, superintendent, etc.) won't let me do this."** Be a beacon for these changes in your own practice, ask for small opportunities to implement.
 * 3) **"My parents don't want their kids 'out there.'"** Teach them why it's important for their students to be using these tools, that they are using them already, that they are not going away, and that they need to understand how to use them safely, effectively and ethically.
 * 4) **"I have to make sure my kids do well on the test."** Make the case that this is not either/or, that the ends can be met through these means and at the same time, the "standards" can be met.
 * 5) **"I don't have the time."** At the end of the day, as an educator, you don't have much choice. You need to make the time, You need to understand these changes for yourselves.
 * 6) "**I'm scared**." You should be. On some level we all are.