Tom is surely right when he says that most teachers will focus their efforts on just one or two of these new Internet tools. Heck, most will probably focus on none of them. And believe me, I’m still trying to get a handle on whether or not wikis in high schools are good ideas at all. I can’t get past the idea that someone will just want to keep messing things up.
But having said that, I think it would be great if teacher training included at least some cursory coverage in the ways that these tools are opening up new ways to deliver and experience curriculum. And we obviously need to continue to explore the way that Weblogs and Wikis and RSS et. al. can impact the information and cultural literacy of our students.
Rob Wall, a new addition to my edblogger list, says:
“…it’s a new literacy, and the stakes have been raised. 4 years ago, I was presenting workshops to teachers and students on creating web pages. That’s not enough anymore – there are some tools…that raise the bar up from getting content on the web to integrating multiple sources of content on the web. Blogs are sure a great start – I like to think that blogging has helped my writing skills – but blogging has led me into related tools like RSS aggregators, and the need to collate knowledge on the web led me in the direction of wikis and furl.net (way cool tool/service!). Knowledge needs to get out there, as before, but it also needs to be able to form connections in a manner that is transparent to the author.”
That last comes pretty close to what I’ve been thinking. The information is great, but it’s what we do with it, and what we teach our kids to do with it that is more important. Editors, filters, connectors…the fully educated child is going to have to be much more of an active consumer of the information she receives. There is much moving in that direction with contsructivist theory and project based learning. These tools facilitate all of those things extremely well.
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