Some questions from Douglass Johnston via Cass McNutt:

They say that in 1900, we encountered 1000 pieces of significant information per six months. In 1960, it was within one week. Today, it’s within one hour. How much knowledge can we actually retain when our “seven plus or minus two” short-term memories have to constantly filter, direct and trash most of that data?

No doubt, we have an amazing amount of information coming at us (especially those of us who spend way too much of our time staring at a computer screen.) But I think the question is not so much what we can retain (as I would argue we don’t need to retain as much these days,) but rather how much knowledge can we find when we need it. Filter? Yes. Direct and redirect? Absolutely. Weed out? Without question. But I have to tell you, in many ways, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a part of my brain, just as del.icio.us and Bloglines and other tools are becoming. I don’t need to retain all of it, do I? And in fact, I usually retain the most relevant, most important information anyway because I make it more brain sticky by blogging it.

Johnston continues:

It also begs a question: which is better, the instant access to vast quanities [sic] of lower-quality (on average, that is) information, or the more difficult access to rarer quantities of high-quality information?

Beg it might, but the reality is that most of us (read: our students) are going to have to deal with the vast quantities of average information and, subsequently, become really skilled at vetting, synthesizing and recognizing patterns in what we find. And, I would argue that just about every post here is a result of that work, some more work than others. (I’m amazed, in fact, at just how much of my blog I can retain.)

If you read his whole post, you’ll also see that he refers going to the Web for answers as being lazy and that somehow having to find the answers through books or encyclopedias made the knowledge more memorable. I don’t agree. I see it as using the best tools available to get what you need. Sometimes that’s the Web, other times that’s a book. Neither will do you any good if you’re not skilled at using them.

Johnston asks a final question in his post:

Where, then, will that lead the education system, and how can it adjust to the notion of near-instantaneous research replacing memory?

Yeah…that’s the big one, isn’t it?

I love questions, especially ones that make me think real hard about the answer. Maybe that’s why I’m having so much fun these days, ’cause there are so many difficult questions being posed about education and technology and the mixture of the two.

Via Harold Jarche comes a link to someone else who is posing big questions, Mark Federman of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. Like this one from his essay titled “Why Johnny And Janey Can’t Read, and Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can’t Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time“:

“What is valued as knowledge, who decides, and who is valued as authority?”

Ok, just my opinion, but I think this should be must reading for this community. The way in which Federman structures this essay is downright masterful, and the ideas it conveys are profound. As usual, here are a few snips with some hopefully cogent reactions.

Federman traces literacy from the oral tradition through the introduction of the alphabet through Gutenberg’s press through the introduction of Morse Code and he does it in a pretty captivating narrative. Let’s just say I learned a lot (including why the Cluetrain Manifesto has 95 theses…guess I missed that part of history class.) Especially interesting to me was the way in which he discusses the way in which we assign authority to authorship:

When we invoke knowledge that we obtain through the proxy of an author’s book, we assume some of that author’s patina of authority.

I wonder if that holds true for what we do with blogs…

And in terms of the pace of all these changes, (something I’ve been lamenting a lot of late) he says:

Roughly speaking, it takes about three hundred years for the foundational knowledge ground of a culture to change, that is for the society to change its conception of what is valued as knowledge, who decides what is valued as knowledge, who controls access to the knowledge itself, and who controls access to those controls. The time span is relatively easy to understand: for the transition to be complete, there cannot be anyone left alive who remembers someone that remembers someone who was socialized and acculturated in the prior system of knowledge.

The most disruptions occur about halfway through that period, and guess what? Right now, Federman says we’re about 160 years into the current 300 year period, ever since electricity and the telegraph “undid” the effect of the written word. And now, with Google and the current tools, we’re undoing even more.

Consider the reversal that has occurred here. In the traditional literate structure of the academy, indexers who controlled the portals to knowledge were very few, very knowledgeable, and possessed a high level of public trust. In the traditional literate system, assertion of both meaning and value of a collection of knowledge by that trusted individual, whose power and authority were vested through an institutional proxy, was paramount for establishing the redibility of that collection. But it seems that we are in the process of changing from the traditional, closed system of knowledge to a more open system of knowledge. A single person or authority asserting meaning and value is automatically suspect, like in the example of Sears.ca; it is the collective wisdom of all the Maries and Steves and Alices that creates trust.

In other words, we have our work cut out for us.

Today, establishing the credibility of knowledge sources is a challenge of such complexity, that the literate frame has no mechanism with which to approach the problem. Stated simply, for any avenue of inquiry, both the information and the information sources themselves have both become subjects of research in a way that makes problematic, and fundamentally challenges, the existing academic structure. Research can no longer be a deterministic, linear process, akin to that delineated by the so-called scientific method. Rather, establishing the credibility and reliability of both information and sources comprise an emergent information seeking problem that is subject to multiple, interdependent processes and contexts, all of which, save one, are only incidentally connected to literacy.

Federman makes all of this sync nicely with connectivism, talking about how we need the ability to think nomadically and to recognize patterns in what we are reading and consuming. We need to be able to think “widely and diversely about a topic,” a phrase which doesn’t much resonate with what we ask of our students today. And he says that our “former literate quest for truth [today’s classrooms] gives way to a quest for making sense of the world as it is experienced.”

So what does this all mean?

…today’s youth and tomorrow’s adults live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity. Everyone is, or soon will be, connected to everyone else, and all available information, through instantaneous, multi-way communication. This is ubiquitous connectivity. They will therefore have the experience of being immediately proximate to everyone else and to all available information. This is pervasive proximity. Their direct experience of the world is fundamentally different from yours or from mine, as we have had to adopt and adapt to these technologies that create the effects of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.

And what is this new world like?

The UCaPP world – ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate – is a world of relationships and connections. It is a world of entangled, complex processes, not content. It is a world in which the greatest skill is that of making sense and discovering emergent meaning among contexts that are continually in flux. It is a world in which truth, and therefore authority, is never static, never absolute, and not always true.

Now, does that sound anything like what are current educational settings are like? This is such a big shift, and this essay makes the case so clearly the significance of what we’re seeing and feeling. I urge you to read the whole thing…

In a comment here a couple of days ago, Stephen Downes linked to his “Principles for Evaluating Websites” post, and I just wanted to make sure I commented on how absolutely must reading it is for anyone struggling with how to navigate this new Web. I’ve said this before, the bottom line is that even for those who have always been tuned into the need to evaluate information, it’s a much harder task these days. And Stephen really nails it in so many ways in this post. Briefly, here’s what he says, but you need to go read the whole thing.

1. There are no authorities. Authorities sometimes lie and are themselves fooled, so ultimately, you must be the one to determine if something you read is true.

2. What you already know matters.

3. You need to learn who to trust and you do this through repeated contact.

4. Learn to distinguish facts from appearance of fact. Personally, I think this may be the hardest to teach.

5. Be on the lookout for generalizations, especially universal ones.

6. Statistics can be misleading.

7. Go to the source, whenever you can. If, for instance, a study is online, go look at it before accepting someone else’s interpretation. I should do more of this, I know.

8. Motives matter. Remember: EVERYONE has an agenda.

Bottom line, as Stephen says, “determining what to believe – or to not believe – is a matter of trust. You need to determine for yourself who to trust about what.” And that’s what makes this so difficult…it’s work.

Best part? He includes some examples of trustworthy and untrustworthy sources.
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There’s a great article in the new Kairos titled “New Literacies and Old: A Dialogue” which is a back and forth Q & A between Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan of the University of Baltimore. The gist of the discussion centers on the future of writing and the redefinition of literacy, and if you have a spare 20 minutes, the whole thing is definitely worth the read.

I especially find Moulthrop’s definition of the new literacy interesting, and it has a great deal of relevance when thinking about the read/write Web:

What’s the new literacy like? For one thing, it understands any text or writing practice as at least potentially connected to a hypertextual network: we would always teach “writing in the archive,” as the Danish theorist Rune Dalgaard has called it. And while cross-textual relations have certainly been a part of print culture, the new literacy would recognize that, as Pierre Lévy says, the “pragmatics” of communication have fundamentally changed. The Internet is not a system for filing sheets of paper, even if we do still talk about Web “pages.” In electronic writing, the technical foundations of the word itself have changed.

So a new literacy also needs to consider the extension of alphabetism into logical processing. This doesn’t mean letting graduate students count Visual Basic against their foreign language requirements; it means teaching them — and potentially, students from middle school up — how to design documents with markup languages. As we move closer toward Berners-Lee’s “semantic Web,” this will seem all the more necessary.

A new approach to literacy also means inviting our students to deploy writing in forms other than academic essays, book reports, and five-paragraph themes: in Web logs, serious IM dialogues, hypertexts, and my particular favorite, multi-user object-oriented spaces, or MOOs.

I find the whole idea of moving the instruction of writing toward the design of documents with markup languages to be really intriguing. But it’s not a big stretch to think that in 10 years or so, most all writing will include links that annotate the text. And certainly blogs facilitate that linking process. The thing is that when I do a quick mental survey of the English teachers here at my school, there are only a few who I think might even start to understand what’s on the horizon. Not that I fully get it either, of course. But that wouldn’t be any fun anyway.

The Online Journalism Review has an interview up with Dan Gillmor, author of “We the Media…” which if you haven’t read yet you should. The book is a great primer for the changes that we’re going to have to prepare our students for, changes that are becoming more profound each day.

Since I think a lot about how we teach our students to find and read good sources of information, I find it particularly interesting when Gillmor talks about blog reputation systems.

You learn what you can trust and what you can’t. I don’t think anyone picking up any publication or going to a site for the first time should automatically trust it. If I’m directed there by Doc Searls I will give it an automatic boost in trust before I start — not complete trust, but Doc has a lot of credibility with me. That’s part of what’s emerging as a sort of free-floating reputation system that will help us find the best sites to go to. It would be wonderful if journalism organizations would point to blogs and say, “Don’t make any crucial life decisions based on what you read here, check things out, but this looks pretty good.”

I think that this is already happening, that the more reputable sites are already being filtered and identified in a variety of ways. And those sites then nurture the reputations of others and so on. It’s definitely a different model from the past where I used to pretty much point to the New York Times, the Washington Post and a few others and say “this is probably as close to the truth as you’re going to get.” Now it’s more like use them as a starting point, but find other sources from other mediums and define truth for yourself.

And it’s back to readers needing to be editors.

But the burden is also on readers/listeners/viewers. They MUST start being more skeptical, and people of whatever political or social persuasion should constantly realize that people are trying to spin them.

It’s pretty amazing to me how little it seems schools are understanding the importance of this. (Maybe it’s just me.) But with the pace of change in education, I guess it shouldn’t surprise me.
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(via edblog) Now you can export your Furled sites by department in MLA or APA format, among others.

The export page just got updated to include two new features. First, you can now export items from a specific topic (in any of the available formats). And second, you can now export items in various bibliographic citation formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE). The citations only contain the data that we collect (i.e. title, view date, URL), but we will increase the amount of meta-data (i.e. author, publication, etc.) in the near future.

I love this. I have just got to grab someone by the lapels, drag them into my office, show them how to Furl, and make them promise to start using it with their students. Better yet…we need a Furl Club!

A really interesting article by J.D. Lasica titled “Transparency Begets Trust in the Ever-Expanding Blogosphere” picks up on some of my fairly inarticulate ramblings from yesterday. The idea that I’m struggling with is how we can introduce both the reading and writing of blogs into the curriculum as a tool for students to sort through and reflect upon the increasingly complex issues that confront our world. Can bloggers and blogging collectively give a more honest and truthful account of issues than mainstream media? Here’s what Jeff Jarvis says in the article:

“We are witnessing the growth of a culture of transparency,” he says. “Bloggers are more trusted, I think, because they are human and too often news organizations are not. Bloggers tell you who they are (usually) and what their backgrounds and biases are and their readers can judge them and engage with them on a personal level. News organizations are big and often monolithic and are reluctant to admit let alone share perspective or agendas.”

If true, the implications for teaching are huge (as well as journalism, obviously.) Especially if David Sifry of Technorati is correct when he says:

“People trust The New York Times and Washington Post and link to them,” Sifry says, “but there are a huge number of people who are going outside the bounds of traditional media to these new media forms to get their information and, more importantly, to participate in the discussions around news and topics.”

I’ve lobbied for an intensive media/info literacy course for all at my school, and I just feel more and more of an urgency for this. We need kids to participate in these conversations. We need them to know more and manage more information. We need to model this participation. Using blogs is one thing, but reading and really blogging is where the true benefits of this come in.
—–

“It’s hard to know what’s true online.”
—Dan Gillmor

Not exactly sure why, but as the rest of the carload slept yesterday during our drive home through the Berkshires, I decided to indulge in an hour of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly on the radio and the experience was, in a word, unsettling. Not because of the politics; spinning is a fine art that both conservatives and liberals have mastered. No, what was really scary is that both of them opined that it was basically the job of the listener to find where truth lies.

Hannity, as he interviewed the authors of the latest anti-Kerry tome regarding his service as a swift-boat captain, basically said it was his duty to raise these issues because his audience needs to have all the “facts” in order to make up their own minds and come to their own conclusions. O’Reilly, at the end of his show, responded to a caller’s concerns about the general ignorance of the electorate with a quote that went something like “hey, the Constitution protects everyone’s right to be a moron.” Nice.

My angst here lies in the fact that it is REALLY hard to figure out what is true and not true these days. The whole swift boat affair is a perfect example. Way too many charges and counter charges. Unfortunately, most people would rather take the word of Hannity and O’Reilly and Franken than do the heavy lifting (and most likely get all confused in the process.) Used to be that we could somewhat trust the major newspapers to give us the straightforward scoop on what was happening, but now even their motivations and biases are in question.

So where do we find truth? And where do we find it if we don’t want to do the heavy lifting? And how do we teach our kids to figure it all out for themselves?

My instinct wants to say that blogs and bloggers are an answer here, somehow. That reading blogs and writing in blogs and becoming part of the discussion is a good start. I keep thinking about I-Law when Lawrence Lessig basically said that everyone should start a blog and read blogs, simply because of the democratizing potential they have. This is heavy lifting…reading, writing. But potentially it’s also a new way of teaching our kids to make sense of a increasingly difficult and complex world. While blogs and the like may add more static to the signal, I also think they get us closer to a collective truth. It’s not easy, I know, and a lot of the same issues apply to blogs as to other media. But there is that social aspect of all of this, the reputation that readers and users assign to products and ideas. That’s kind of an unexplored but important part of this in my brain.

Dan Gillmor, in an interview at Wired about his new book, said:

“It’s hard to know what’s true online. We’ve evolved a fairly good BS test in the analog world: I know the supermarket tabloid story about George Bush’s latest Martian love child is almost certainly false. But one website looks as good as another, and some people perversely believe — and can then spread easily — anything they see online.

The opportunity for outright fraudulent behavior is also greater, with Photoshopped pictures, phony press releases, pump-and-dump chat room schemes and the like. Again, the lies can spread at the speed of light and rumor.”

The need to help our students sort all of that out is just becoming more and more acute.

(via Peter Ford) An article in Teachers Magazine (UK) highlights the use of Weblogs with younger students in England.

The project has generated a lot of pride. “We’re the first junior school to do it,” I’m told by Stephen, aged 10, who is writing about wrestling. Stephen chose wrestling as his subject matter because he “knows loads about it”. His motivation for creating his weblog is the same as that of all the other pupils: he wants lots of people to read what he has written.

—–

Greg Ritter has an interesting post on the value of Furl and its function in the creation of what he calls a “Personal Web.”

However, the most important thing Furl does is allow you to carve out a sub-section of the web that you’re interested in and deal with that sub-section in a Google-like manner, meaning being able to search the full text of the web pages. John Battelle hit the line drive on this back in April, calling it the Personal Web. Bookmarks are a list of page titles. A Personal Web — like a Furl collection — is a repository of content. It’s the difference between being the card catalog and being the library.

It’s worth clicking the link inside that quote to get an even more interesting perspective on the significance of Furl.

But wait…there’s more. You can share your PersonalWeb with others. And Mike just added a recommendation engine, so you can see links the service thinks will be interesting to you, based on what you’ve already Furl’d. Now, let’s play this out. Imagine Furl on, oh, Yahoo, for example. Or Google. You now have a massively scaled application where millions of people are creating their own personal versions of the web, and then sharing them with each other, driving massively statistically significant recommendations, and…some pretty damn useful metadata that can be fed into search engine algorithms, resulting in…yup, far better search (and…far better SFO (Search Find Obtain) opportunities).

Now from a student research standpoint, Furl is a no-brainer. The ability to capture full text and search it with all of your other saved pages truly does create a first step toward a personal piece of the Web. To be honest, Greg opened my eyes a bit when he talks about the power of that search function.

Furl is more valuable than other bookmark managers, because it indexes the full text of every page I “furl.” Not just the page title, not just the metadata I add, but the full text of the page. I quickly did away with categorizing “furled” pages once I realized I can use Furl’s fairly decent, Google-like query syntax. That’s great because hierarchies are bitch to maintain and keep relevant (just ask Yahoo). Furl is like Lookout for bookmarks. Or, more to the point, it’s like Google for bookmarks.

I’ve got a slew of categories that are becoming a bit unwieldy. I use them primarily because I think I’m going to want to push that category’s links with the XML feed to various pages on my site. (Still working on that.) I’m going to need to get into the habit of furching more often…
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It’s interesting to me to be thinking about literacy in terms of new online technologies while actually using those technologies to in some way understand the concept. I don’t think I’ve ever been involved is more of a metacognitive process; every post I write about this topic is weighed against what I am experiencing. Everything is reflective. How has my literacy changed? How has my writing, my reading changed? What do I need to know to be “literate” in this medium that I didn’t need to know before? What of what I’m doing now really is significant? Is any of it significant? What will stick, and what will that mean for my students? Is this really a collaborative exercise, as Tom asks?

Some amazing thinkers are writing about this stuff. Much of it is way over my head, and I fear they are thinking about it in ways that go beyond my fairly simple attempt to define what, if any, new skills and abilities we will need to function and prosper in a Web infused world. While there may be a need to rethink a need for literacy at all, I’m trying to stay grounded in that “how can we make sure our students are prepared for their future” question as much as I can. I kind of feel like my own guinea pig.

Anyway, just some snippets from around the horn to pull into one piece. (Does that make this collaborative?) From Charlie Lowe:

It is within a free culture, to reference Lessig again as Will did, that collaboration really happens because we begin to deny ownership of our texts, and instead value contribution to community more, and within that free culture, creativity through reworking of texts and working together is invited, rather than a taboo where one must seek or have permission to work or use the “author’s” text. This is why weblogs and wikis are indeed creating more “open texts” (although, I don’t like that term because it is a bastardization of open source principles), because they exist within a community discourse which is highly connected (not the other way around) and many of the participants are those that seek a free culture.

From Derek Mueller:

The tapping and commenting and fisking–linked, interested, etc.–seem more prevalent than the sort of sharing and appropriating, which is to suggest that blogging as spontaneous media doesn’t prefer to wait. Entries are often buried in a matter of days, comments with them, and the temporality machine rolls, calendars overturn. I get the feeling that blogs play the moment, invite the rush; whereas collaborative efforts can be slow and laborious, blogs thrive on freshness, vigor, never expiring.

And from Alex Reid:

My point is that new media “opens” the concepts of text, reader, and author to the point where they cannot be distinguished. In its place are physical machines, both organic and inorganic, whose symbolic behaviors and interactions produce, among other things, cognition and consciousness.

Now regardless of how these other ideas sit with mine, this process is what I’m thinking and talking about. Just these acts in this post, the reading, the synthesizing, the writing, the selection of what to cut and paste, the hyperlinking, the reflection, the sharing of the experience, the publishing…all of it is a new form (genre) of…of…learning.

Which, as it so often does, brings me back to Anne, who today keeps it all in focus.

I don’t think we have a complete grasp of how the open nature of weblogs and all the different dialogues are going to shape our future. I know a lot of people still are not into these “conversations” and I also know that we have yet to harness the true power of it in our classrooms, but more and more each day I realize that the main reason I’m blogging is to learn. In addition, I want to enable our students to have a voice in this journey and learn right along with us. The focus of learning with technology through reading, writing, responding and reflecting on weblogs gives me hope.

Can I get an “Amen?”

I’ve been participating in a pretty interesting (I think) thread at Jeff Rice’s Weblog about new literacies and I wanted to pull some of the thoughts over here for some further thinking. (If you surf over there, read the comments from the bottom up.) One phrase he uses does a good job of naming this blog and wiki produced writing: “open text.” He defines it as texts created “within a network which writers and readers tap into, alter, appropriate, confiscate, download, share, etc.”

An open text is much different than what print creates – closed, authorial creation. The bigger picture would be to imagine an academic setting in which students don’t produce closed, authorial (name on your paper/do your own work) writings, but something more open and networked (and by extension, the classroom, too, would take this form).

Kind of goes to the mix, rip and burn culture that Lawrence Lessig talks about. And it also goes to the heart of where my own murky thinking about all of this is…it really is the collaboration, stupid. Aside from the digital paper part of it, which is important, collaboration IS the big idea here. It is what is truly different about Weblogs and wikis. And I’m really starting to believe that these technologies are the first(?) step down the road to completely changing how we think about reading, writing and producing products in general. Jeff says:

For example, if one has students work with weblogs only so that they can post their homework, why use the weblog? Same with a wiki. If students are just posting essays, we don’t need a wiki? But if students are doing something with the wiki that they couldn’t do without it – like creating highly networked and interconnected texts, with each other, other courses, other schools – then it seems like we’re starting to work with new media differently, right? That also is going to mean that the ways information is created and transfered will shift as well…so that what we used to ask for (literacy) no longer applies as is.

The opening up of the text is what is new. To use a written text as an example, right now, our students print the “final” copy, at which point, you can put a fork in it. It’s done. And despite the fact that we’re big on collaborative learning, that’s always been, for me at least, a very nebulous undertaking. In writing, it usually just means offering corrections or primarily insignificant suggestions on content. Rarely have I seen students significantly interact with someone else’s text, and I think part of the reason is they don’t own it and that the effects of that interaction have little or no audience or lasting purpose beyond the classroom walls.

But now, all of a sudden we have online, “open” texts. Texts that are not finished, per se, but are continually (perhaps) evolving from the interaction of others. Texts that can reach a wide audience. Texts that everyone can own. Texts that can have a real purpose for being created. This is a significant shift.

The big question here is, obviously, whether or not the collaborative construction of content will be the norm in the future. And if so, in what ways are we going to have to rethink what it means to be literate? It can’t be just reading and writing any longer. It has to include editing, publishing and managing of texts as well. And real collaboration skills. It incorporates all if not more of what we’re doing in this community: blogs, wikis, RSS, aggregators, online information managers.

Luckily, I’ve got a couple of nights under the stars coming up to think more about this.

“The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.”
—ALA

I’ve been working through some ideas for a piece about Weblogs and wikis and all these new tools and their impact on “literacy.” In a nutshell, the Internet has changed the requirements of what it means to be literate. While just about everything we used to teach with was a finished, edited text, the Web now provides us with a gazillion unedited texts, which means it’s no longer enough just to be able to read; we have to read critically. And now that the Internet is a read AND write technology, part of our literacy has to include skills to communicate and collaborate with a much larger, less contrived audience. Finally, since there will no doubt be an ever-growing body of information out there to deal with, we need to be literate in managing information what we find relevant and meaningful.

In my travels this morning, I landed on the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education put up by the American Library Association. It gives some pretty in depth definitions of information literacy, and lists 23 performance indicators for information literate students. What struck me is how many of them can be addressed by blogging:

The information literate student retrieves information online or in person using a variety of methods.

The information literate student extracts, records, and manages the information and its sources.

The information literate student summarizes the main ideas to be extracted from the information gathered.

The information literate student articulates and applies initial criteria for evaluating both the information and its sources.

The information literate student synthesizes main ideas to construct new concepts.

The information literate student compares new knowledge with prior knowledge to determine the value added, contradictions, or other unique characteristics of the information.

The information literate student validates understanding and interpretation of the information through discourse with other individuals, subject-area experts, and/or practitioners.

The information literate student applies new and prior information to the planning and creation of a particular product or performance.

The information literate student communicates the product or performance effectively to others.

The information literate student follows laws, regulations, institutional policies, and etiquette related to the access and use of information resources.

The information literate student acknowledges the use of information sources in communicating the product or performance.

Weblogs are such a great tool for doing much of this, and they offer a transparent, organized way for teachers and students to measure these proficiencies and others.

So I want to pick up on the idea that realizing Lessig’s definition of media literacy in students will also require a type of Internet literacy that deals specifically with the publishing piece of the process. And, it will require this literacy in teachers as well as students. Again, these are probably not new ideas; I just need to articulate them in ways that make sense for me. Comments welcomed as always.

Obviously, this is a literacy of the tools that I’m talking about. How do we effectively use Weblogs, wikis, syndication and bookmarking technologies et. al. in ways that can facilitate the constructivist learning that is becoming more available to students? But more, how can we teach

Transparency, editors, contributing to the body of knowledge, constructive learning,

Now that we can have a read-write relationship with the Internet, and if we believe that two way ability has postive implications for education, we need to add a new layer of literacy, one that not only facilitates the use of the tools (Weblogs, wikis, etc.) but that also teaches the editing function. That’s what I want to say. That it’s one thing to be literate in a passive sense, in the deconstructive sense, but it’s another to be literate in the constructive sense. And it’s more than just ripping, mixing and burning the media. It’s synthesis, it’s editing, it’s taking on a higher responsibility somehow with what you construct, cause you’re not just dealing with the what does the teacher want stuff. Your dealing with a whole bunch of other editors who are trying to get to create and understand their own truths as well.

Blogging the verb is in there somewhere.
Implications for teaching and assessment.

Telling students to write according to the logic of print (whether the writing is on paper or not – I am talking about the logic not the medium) is to force students to reject the communicative practices around them: IM, the Web, Film, TV, music, etc.

—–

“From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.
”
—Elizabeth Daley

I added a new “Literacy” department today as it seems like this concept is getting more an more of my attention. Part of it is due to Lawrence Lessig and his book Free Culture, which is literally keeping me awake at night thinking about its implications for education. I want to explore some of those ideas further here in a kind of brain dumpy, random way as there is much to get my brain wrapped around and I do, after all, have all of this digital paper to use up.

Early on in the book, Lessig includes a definition of media literacy from Dave Yanofsky of Just Think!:

Media literacy is the ability…to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way media works, the way it’s constructed, the way it’s delivered, and the way people access it.

Lessig emphasizes the importance of getting kids to learn how to “write” media, to understand its “grammar.” This, obviously, is a messy process, one that I would suspect few teachers could accomplish well. “Few of us have any real sense of how difficult media is,” he says, then adds later:

One learns to write by writing and then reflecting upon what one has written. One learns to write with images by making them and then reflecting upon what has been created.

And he quotes Elizabeth Daley, dean of the USC School of Cinema-Television, who says:

From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It’s the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can write with this language, and all the rest of us are reduced to being read-only.

As Lessig says, the crucial point right now is that the 21st Century could be both read and write, making the aim of this literacy to “empower people to choose the appropriate language for what they need to create or express.”

From my English teacher background, one of the most interesting parts of this is the expansion of the definition of literacy to go beyond the primarily passive relationship we currently have with the various texts in our lives. That’s not to say that understanding text isn’t important, but “reading” the text is no longer the only way that students can construct meaning. On some level, we’ve known that. We ask students to interpret with music or art or poetry or any other number of ways. But the major shift, as Lessig sees it, the NEW thing about all of this is what we’ve been talking about in this community since the beginning: publishing.

But unlike any technology for simply capturing images, the Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously. This is something new in our tradition—not just that culture can be captured mechanically, and obviously not just that events are commented upon critically, but that this mix of captured images, sound, and commentary can be widely spread practically instantaneously.

He then goes into a long discussion of the potentials of Weblogs not just as a vehicle for publishing these constructions but as a way for people to engage in meaningful discourse that he believes could in some ways resuscitate our democracy.

Lessig’s premise for Free Culture is that for creativity to flourish, we must be able to create derivatives of work that has come before us, to take old ideas and products and better them with our own innovation, and that current restrictions of copyright are drastically reducing the freedoms we have to do that work. In an educational sense, he quotes John Seely Brown of Xerox, who says:

Kids are “shifting to the ability to tinker in the abstract, and this tinkering is no longer an isolated activity that you’re doing in your garage. You are tinkering with a community platform…You are tinkering with other people’s stuff. The more you tinker the more you improve.” The more you improve, the more you learn. This same thing happens with content, too. And it happens in the same collaborative way when that content is part of the Web. As Brown puts it, “the Web [is] the first medium that truly honors multiple forms of intelligence.”

Lessig says “tinkering with culture teaches as well as creates.”

Now I know this constructivist sentiment is nothing really new here. In fact, to me, one of the most powerful potentials of this is the idea that kids can now contribute to the larger body of knowledge, that the meanings they construct can be shared beyond the classroom. It moves away from the old “what does the teacher want?” game to “what is the truth here, what is the importance of this content, and how can I construct my own meaning that contributes to a wider understanding of it?” Or something like that. And that’s powerful stuff. For instance, look at Ken’s response to my post yesterday.

Couldn’t a good science teacher and a group of willing students make a dynamite wiki site teaching themselves and providing resources for others to learn these powerful incidents in the history of science? Wouldn’t you learn pretty much everything you need to know to pass the test in the process of making the site? And couldn’t you very nicely use a group weblog to support the question-asking and the stages of inquiry that lead up to the wiki presentation? Couldn’t a decent educational researcher run up some test scores on pilot and control groups and see if the software, approached rightly, deserved a place on the list of best practices?

Why can’t blogs and wikis raise test scores? They can certainly facilitate the teaching of the core content standards, and they can potentially make learning more meaningful. And yes, we need some research.

Enough for now. I haven’t even gotten to my initial point which was something about how in concert with this new media literacy of active, constructive learning, there is an Internet literacy which deals with blogs and wikis and rss and the like. If we want to achieve the vision, we need to understand the tools. Maybe tomorrow…