Transcript Literacy in the Information Age

Literacy in the
Information Age
Bonnie Bracey
MECA
The George Lucas Educational Foundation
This presentation will
• Be a short history walk through school as
we practice it.
• Confront some of the problems in
teaching and learning
• Introduce some ideational scaffolding
• Question some practices
• Establish time to think , what is literacy?
The Mindset of Schools
• Today‘s public education system was
created over a century ago in a time
before computers, before television,
before airplanes, before automobiles,
before radios, before telephones, before
satellites, before computers, and entirely
before electricity was available in
anyone's home. Does it fit now? Is it
relevant?
That was Then….
In fact, today's public education system
was designed in an era when more than
90% of young people still lived on farms
or in rural areas. Consequently,
education was institutionalized and
legalized as a seasonal enterprise.
Prisoners of Time…. http://www.ed.gov/pubs/PrisonersOfTime/
Schools adopted the six-hour day and the ninemonth calendar to accommodate farm life.
Summers were reserved for harvesting crops
and other agricultural activities.
Schools were designed to serve the needs of a
slower-paced, far less technological world - an
era called the Agricultural Age.
At the end of the 19th century, with the beginning
of mechanization and urbanization, the
Agricultural Age began to give way to a new way
of thinking as the Industrial Age swept across
America.
Industry has changed. Small family farms are now
combined into cooperatives and agribusinesses.
Schools Entered the Industry Age
Regimentation was in….
Schools were modeled after the assembly line
factories of the early 20th century, with
teachers seen as the workers, students as the
products they produced, and schools as the
production line.
Schools tried to make students regimented
"learning machines" so that they would be
equipped to play efficient roles on the assembly
lines of the day, doing precisely defined tasks
over and over accurately as rapidly as possible.
?????
Many speakers reference the fact that a teacher
from a hundred years ago could function, fairly
easily , in today’s teaching and learning
environment.
Some Changes, Some Problems
But Basics are in….
Reading, Writing , Math
Is the new literacy testing?
Have We Established New
Literacies?
Make a mental or an actual list of the
changes you believe have happened
in the schools because of the use of
new kinds of literacies?
What Kind of Schools Fits
Today’s America?
How have literacy practices changed
over time, and responded to new
technologies? What is the agent of
change for new practices?
Sputnik
For a brief period of time we reacted to, and
met the challenge of new space learning and
technology. We encouraged constructivist and
hands on learning. Some kinds of Science and
Math were in. We wanted students to construct
knowledge.
New Literacies Come and
Go
• But the concern with Nation at Risk is that we
were not doing well in meeting our goals, and that
standards were not established. Evaluation , and
meeting the goals was seen as a need. So we
entered the age of Standards..
• National Standards, State Standards, Curriculum
Standards, Local objectives, school needs, and
ALL of this is ,subject to testing and evaluation of
a sort.
Teachers are Swimming in a Sea
of Standards
Without the use of technology , it is
almost impossible to even know the
tasks and standards that elementary
teachers must react to!
Do We Have Testing? You Bet
Testing is the Mantra of Our Age
But is it evaluation, in a reality base?
• Conceptual
Framework ?
Schools, Libraries, and
Community Centers
• The use of technology , and the
dissemination to the general public
was decided to be through these
places.
What do you think?
• How do technological, linguistic,
political, and economic forces shape
literacy practices today?
• How is meaning constructed in both
personal and social terms?
• How are ethical and policy issues
shaped by the changes in literacy?
Creating the Possibilities for
Change
• How can we understand and facilitate
learning through new technologies?
Improving Technological
Literacy Needs National Effort;
Potential Benefits Are Many,
Report Says
Most Americans know little about the
world of technology, yet from day to day
they must make critical decisions that
are technologically based, such as
whether to buy genetically engineered
foods or transmit personal data over the
Internet.
Technology
• The use of technology as a learning tool
in the classroom is often confused with
the broader concept of being
technologically literate -- knowing
something of the nature and history of
technology, as well as having a certain
level of skill in using technologies and
thinking critically about them.
• Neither the educational system nor the policymaking apparatus in the United States has
recognized the importance of this more
comprehensive view of technological literacy,
says a new report from the National
Academies' National Academy of Engineering
and National Research Council.
http://www4.nas.edu/news.nsf/isbn/03090826
25?OpenDocument
Informed Decisions
It calls for a broad-based effort to
increase the technological literacy of all
Americans, a goal that will have many
benefits including more informed
decision-making by citizens and
business and government leaders about
the development and use of technology,
and a more erudite population that will
be better prepared for the demands of
today's high-tech work environment.
Defining Technological Literacy
• One useful way to think about technological
literacy is as a component of the more
general, or "cultural," literacy popularized by
educational theorist E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Defining Technological Literacy
• Hirsch pointed out that literate people in
every society and every culture share a body
of knowledge that enables them to
communicate with each other and make
sense of the world around them.
• The kinds of things a literate person knows
will vary from society to society and from era
to era; so there is no absolute definition of
literacy. In the early twenty-first century,
however, cultural literacy must have a large
technological component.
We Will Explore
• How the nature of texts is changing
as they are re-presented through
online communities, web sites, video,
hypermedia, virtual reality, robotics,
and other new technologies.
It is not just about a book!
Where Are We Going?
• The literature of science fiction
provides us with vivid images of life in
the future. To understand that new
realm, we look for a computer like
HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey to
guide us as we work and play with
robots, explore strange lands and
times through holodecks, or transport
our bodies on rocket ships.
Are You Ready?
As different, or fanciful as these
notions may be, they often pale in
comparison with the latest news
items about cloning, virtual reality,
and microbots. Ubiquitous computing,
parallel computing and virtual reality are
new too.
What Personal Technologies
do you own?
The Future Is Now!
Count Them…..
• Often we sleep, awakened by an alarm, we scoot
out of bed and dress for school. Some of us put on
shoes that were designed for the space program,
zap some coffee in the microwave, and you may
have used a number of personal devices.. Shaver,
hairdryer, electric toothbrush, lint brush, ( if you
have a dog or cat), and then get into a car, which
has smart dust and motes as a part of the
infrastructure. We reach for a cell phone, or
headphones, and make sure we have our credit
cards and or pagers.. Did I miss some things?
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Microwave
Electric Blanket
Coffee maker
Toaster
Cell phone
Athletic shoes as in Nike
Pager
Watch
Television
Cable
Fax Machine
Xerox Machine
We Are Living in the
Future
Last Year This Time Did You
Think..Of Ubiquitous
Computing?
Ubiquitous computing arrived early
and with stealth.
Smart rooms and campuses are
taking shape.
Are you ready for it?
What Intrigues Us About
New Media? What Next?
We can easily be enthralled by the
possibilities of new media.
What possibilities have you considered?
What new media might be aimed at you?
What new practices insert themselves
into your daily practices?
New Trends
We realize that being able to take a
digital photo and send it instantly
to a far-away friend, to build an
online community of people with
similar interests, or to study online
from a distant university, are just
harbingers of what may be coming.
How do we help learners as we
all become immersed in a new
information age?
We need a way to engage critically with
students—to understand the promises as well
as the perils. Doing so would mean applying
what Walter Kaufman (1977) calls dialectical
reading to the evolving new media culture.
This means that as we attempt to understand
and engage with the changes before us, we
neither embrace nor reject them, but rather
enter into a kind of dialogue with them,
asking what they mean and what they could
be, and how our interactions with them can
lead to useful reflection on who we are.
How Do We Prepare
Teachers?
There are calls now for computer
training as a core component of
literacy and worries about issues such
as web site content and the need for
new literacy skills.
In this context, teachers worry about
how they can teach the technical skills
that are sometimes more foreign to
them than they are to their students.
What Shapes Media Use?
• What media are emerging in
our literacy practices?
Is It Just About Technology?
• Shedroff does not cite the need for more
technical skills, even though he probably
feels that need at times, but rather, a
desire to be have learned how to be more
fully human in his interactions with others.
His work recalls Murnane and Levy’s (1996)
argument that the new basic skills are not
only the hard skills of minimal reading,
writing, and computation, but the soft
skills.
Soft Skills
such as : the ability to to communicate
effectively both orally and in writing,
and the ability to work productively with
people from different backgrounds.
Understanding the perspective of others,
being able to work with complex, messy
situations, and learning how to learn may
become more crucial than ever.
How Does Your Staff
Development Help
You?
Does it…
Have the goal of improving student learning at
the heart of every school endeavor ?
Help teachers and other school staff meet the
needs of students who learn in different ways
and who come from diverse cultural, linguistic,
and socioeconomic backgrounds ?
Is mentoring an important part of the
normal working day of all public school
educators ?
Is it rigorous, sustained, and adequate to
the long-term change of practice ?
Is it directed toward teachers' intellectual
development and leadership ?
Or is it sit and get?
Mentors
Is it directed toward teachers' intellectual
development and leadership ?
Does it foster a deepening of subject-matter
knowledge, a greater understanding of
learning, and a greater appreciation of
students' needs ?
Is it designed and directed by teachers, to
incorporates the best principles of adult
learning, and involves shared decisions to
improve the school ?
Professional Development
Does it address personal and district needs
and advances the profession as a whole ?
Does it makes best use of new technologies?
Is it site-based and supportive of a clearly
articulated vision for students?
Interactive Study
We must look at how students make meaning as
they both respond to and create texts;
How cultural meanings are re-created within the
new media. Students read and discuss changing
notions of literacy; They study new literacy
practices through a research project; And
they learn from each other through discussions
about current events and personal experiences
with new information and communication
technologies.
What Will Prepare Us?
Educators today feel both the excitement
of this emerging world and the challenge
of preparing young people to live
productively within it.
They rightly wonder how to assess the
changes they see in the new information
age and how to decide what learning
experiences can best prepare students
for it.
Bonnie Bracey
[email protected]
Teacher agent of change…
Content: Bertram C. Bruce
UIUC
Presentation constructed from
research, books, and papers