The inspiration for this entry came in an email exchange with my mom, who works in developing educational tools for school boards. She sent me a link to a new way schools are thinking of integrating technology in the classroom, and I was a bit dumbfounded that things are where they seem to be, and not further along.
I’d imagine most students are ahead of the way formal education is considering technology, but in a messier way. To drag up an old term, “Computer Literacy” is as important as literacy. What good is being able to read something if you can’t find it, assess it’s authenticity or reliability when you find it, or understand that now we are moving into a discussion based information society rather than a question and answer…
To clarify this, when I say question and answer, I mean approaching a problem in a “conventional way” (though frankly, conventions have changed so this isn’t really a valid term when applied to the following concept – but I digress) where you have a question, and you go to the library (where books are vetted before purchased and cataloged) and looking up an answer in a book nets you a fact that is for the most part, fixed.
Now we exist in a more discussion based information world. Though some people still go to places of authority for information (like me, even if it’s online, eg, National Geographic), in certain circles it’s as often, or perhaps even moreso, that people will ask the community, via Facebook, Twitter, whatever. Wikipedia is a great example of how this discussion has manifest, and has for the most part evolved into a massive peer reviewed journal compendium megapedia. It may not be suitable for first sources, but the best entries all cite multiple sources and you can use that to do further research.
I can recall taking mandatory library classes in school, where we’d learn the Dewey Decimal system. I don’t know if those are still part of the curriculum, but I’d hazard the statement that in today’s society, having an equivalent that talks not only about how to find, but how to evaluate information online is vital, far more than the knowledge of the Dewey system (though that is good to know). Does this exist in current curriculum? I don’t know.
Curating the discussion has become a new theme that has developed in journalism discussion in the last few years. Essentially, at the root, it’s talking about how research is done. There are no shortage of tools (which I am only now starting to explore) but Storify.com is one that seems intriguing. It allows the user to collect and curate a story across multiple social networks, pulling comments from Twitter, Facebook, etc, photos from Flickr.com and so on. It still needs to be curated correctly, but the issue is becoming less about finding the information, and more about evaluating it. And just to add some credibility, Storify was started by ex- Associated Press staff. Andy Carvin of NPR also has made a massive impact, using Twitter to curate stories on unrest in the middle east, and a NYT reporter recently said his twitter feed from Joplin after the tornado was some of his best reporting.
None of this is to say that Twitter or Facebook are the most important things in the world, but rather it’s how they are used. Facebook has more photos online than anyone else on the planet. More than Getty Images, more than Reuters, more than the Associated Press. Imagine the significance of that. Certainly, it’s about the kind of photos, but it does drive home the impact of how a population can create a lot of media, and I’m sure as you can imagine, a lot of it is crap.
Immersion is the only way to teach this stuff. It’s like a language – use it or lose it.
I was tweeting back and forth with a friend and former co-worker last week about how she and her son were in a fight about how much online time he gets (one hour/day). She’s a new media fiend, and I found it interesting that she was restrictive about time, rather than quality. I suggested she take her son, who loves Wikipedia, through their local neighbourhood and do some research so he can update the wiki for where they live. Not only is it something he’d love to do, but he’ll learn about his community, about how information gets online, and who puts it there, and about how important it is to be correct in what goes up. I also suggested she not count that towards his allocated time online. She loved the idea and is running with it. I can’t wait to see the results. That exercise will do more for his abilities with a computer than sitting in a classroom talking about the “computer” as if it’s a separate entity sitting off in some air conditioned room munching on punchcards.
Computers are everywhere and what we do with them is going to determine how our lives advance. Do we want to be educating our kids in a way that makes them illiterate for the real world they are about to enter?
