David Warlick, one of my favorite educational technology folks has a great new post about the idea that we should integrate literacy, not technology:
I have often said that we should stop integrating technology and instead, integrate literacy. If you hear this in my keynote address, then you may get the picture of what Im trying to say. If not, and technology scares you, then youve got a big smile on your face because you can forget the computers and get back to reading instruction, something you are comfortable with.
Let me try to clarify here. We have technology, coming up against currculum, and the scraping is irritating not only to us, but to those who pay for it. We need a gasket in there. We need something that smoothes the friction and eases the connections. That gasket is information.
This may sound like semantics to lots of folks, but it’s not. As long as we talk about technology integration, then we run the risk of ghettoizing what we do… putting it in the corner, if you will. It remains too easy for technology to remain what "those" teachers do in "that" room that no one else in the school ever goes to.
When we think about expanding the notion of literacy to include all of the ways we expect students to digest, synthesize and create information, then the questions we ask become different. Just a few that come to mind are…
How will our students learn when they leave our classrooms?
What is the revelance to how we learn in the classroom with the way we learn outside of it?
Will our students be prepared to be information providers, not just information consumers?
What are the new modalities of information storage / retrevial / transferral, etc… that our students will face and how do we prepare them for it?
There are more… and anyone who wants to contribute them, please feel free to leave a comment… but these are the questions we need to ask if we want to make sure that our students don’t suffer for our unwillingness to adapt to a changing world.
