Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

A New Sense of Reading

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Mia Zamora:

These days, the role of the reader is much like the role of the learner (in a 21st century digitized context). I see a kind of inherent transformation in both of these roles. Reading used to be a more solitary act, bound to a private and somewhat intimate domain. (Imagine being curled up for some time with a good book…add a fireplace and a big comfy chair). The act of reading in the analog world has always been about reception and private mindscapes. But, today (with the advent of E-Lit), we are presented with a new sense of reading, which necessarily includes a step into an open interactive world, a step marked by vivid agency and choice. In many ways, I see today’s learner positioned like that new kind of reader. Twenty-first century readers and learners must grapple with an open networked world of possibilities, they must exercise their own agency, effectively, in order to determine their own course of meaning.

I think this last part is especially difficult to understand for those who don’t spend a lot of time reading digital and/or online texts. Reading as a social, interactive act, that you have new responsibilities when you read networked texts is a foreign idea for many reading and writing teachers (and others.) Reading is no longer just consumption; it’s participation. We read and click. We read and comment. We read and share. We read and archive. We read and remix. We read and revise. And on…

The obvious complexities of all of that require new literacies that the current Common Core standards don’t address. But more, it requires a shift in mindset, in our stance as we approach the texts we are reading. For most of us who have been using social media to learn over the years, these skills and dispositions evolved out of necessity. I don’t think many of us were “taught” how to interact with connected texts. We have an opportunity now to help our kids understand and develop ways to read deeply and powerfully in digital environments, but only if we can do that for ourselves.

The Text Focused Common Core

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While it would be nice if I could figure out who “John” is who posted the following to the “Art of Learning” Facebook group, I agree with the sentiment nonetheless:

The Common Core will not prepare our students for the challenges of 21st century careers because it focuses primarily on text-based literacy skills that are more appropriate and suited for the 19th and early 20th century classroom and workplace.  David Coleman, supports a “close reading” approach to literacy that was first introduced in the mid 1900’s.  “He embraces what in the 1940′s and 1950′s was called New Criticism, a movement in U.S. universities that emphasized sticking tenaciously to the text of whatever one is reading…New Criticism cautions the reader not to go beyond the text to consider, for example, the biography of the author, the social or historical period in which he/she was writing, or, for that matter, even one’s own personal feelings, attitudes, and experiences in relation to the text.“

While supporters of the Common Core are quick to point out that there are also CCSS anchor standards for media literacy and 21st century skills, Appendix A clearly states that media other than text is inferior and not a priority when it comes to classroom activities and instruction.  “These sources [video, podcasts…], while not without value, cannot capture the nuance, subtlety, depth, or breadth of ideas developed through complex text. As Adams (2009) puts it, “There may one day be modes and methods of information delivery that are as efficient and powerful as text, but for now there is no contest…”

While being able to use and understand words in text are no doubt still a basic part of communication and a fundamental literacy, we’re now coummicating and creating meaning in the world in interesting new ways that are profound and important and, as the author suggests, basically missing from the CCSS. And while reading and writing in traditional ways need to be mastered, using video and and audio and photos and other forms of multimedia to communicate ideas are now a requirement as well, a “common” requirement if you will. Note (again) the NCTE literacies, i.e. “Active, successful participants in this global society must be able to…create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts” among other things.

But since it’s not explicit in the standards, we’ll most likely leave that up to kids to figure out for themselves.  

Low Tech Search Lacking in College Grads

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Interesting findings from a research study by Alison Head at Project Information Literacy titled “How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace (pdf).” In short, the answer is “not very well”:

The basic online search skills new college graduates bring with them are attractive enough to help them get hired. Yet, employers found that once on the job, these educated young workers seemed tethered to their computers. They failed to incorporate more fundamental, low-tech research methods that are as essential as ever in the contemporary workplace.

And:

Most college hires were prone to deliver the quickest answer they could find using a search engine, entering a few keywords, and scanning the first couple of pages of results, employerssaid, even though they needed newcomers to apply patience and persistence when solving information problems in the workplace.

And, finally:

A majority of employers said they were surprised that new hires rarely used any of the more traditional forms of research, such as picking up the phone or thumbing through an annual report for informational nuggets. Instead, they found many college hires—though not all—relied heavily on they found online and many rarely looked beyond their screens.

There’s much, much more in the report, which is worth the read. 

The Literacy of Access

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Few quotes that I have found sum up the complexities, challenges and potentials of this new information landscape better than this one from Brian Solis. I’m thinking this would be a great starting point for discussions around how to best help our students navigate these spaces effectively:

Access to information and people is intoxicating. Creating an online portrait of who we are or who we want others to see is equality alluring. But without direction, governance, and discipline, we are at risk of giving ourselves to the very networks we value rather than managing the platforms to our advantage. Our participation must be inspired by purpose and parameters. No, we are not obligated to connect with everyone who connects with us. We are obligated to maintain balance in who we are, what we value, and equally the value we invest in the communities in which we participate.

The Fallacy of Information Overload – Brian Solis

SOPA in the Classroom

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As Royan Lee points out, there’s every reason to have a conversation with students about SOPA and PIPA in almost any classroom right now. (If last Wednesday wasn’t a teachable moment, I don’t know what was.) For most older kids, the debate strikes at the heart of their practices online, and even for younger kids, the larger themes are well worth the mention in general terms. My guess, however, is that a very small percentage of students have had a chance to learn and think about those proposals in the presence of peers and teachers.

Why? For one, I wonder how many teachers could lead a cogent discussion about them. The whole world of online interactions and knowledge sharing is not something most teachers yet participate in. But as Royan points out, in order to have a really meaningful conversation about SOPA and PIPA, students need to have a larger context other than the pirating of copyrighted music and films. He writes: 

Do you know what made it a lot easier to have a discussion about SOPA and PIPA in my class? The fact that my students post regularly to the internet, comment on one another’s work, receive comments from the far reaches of the globe, remix work, share links, and honour CC licensed work.

I asked the students how they would feel if their ability to do all of things was restricted, or even taken away, without debate or a tribunal of some variety. The room went silent for a minute which felt like an hour, but we proceeded to have a rich discussion about democracy without ever mentioning the word itself.

I know they still care much more about whether the next Eminem song will get on their iPods, but at least we were speaking about something we really know, not just have heard of.

And Royan can do that because he really know this through his own practice as well. Those conversations in his class would have been far less relevant without that.

It’s 2012: Help Me Find Some “Bold Schools”

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For lots of reasons, some of which I articulate here, 2012 feels like it’s shaping up to be a critical year in the conversation about schools. Politics and money are no doubt driving the mainstream conversation, but I sense an Occupy Wall Street-ish push back coming from a lot of parents and educators that seems to be finding some traction as well. In fact I’ve had some interesting conversations of late with some very “successful” public schools who have hit their testing boiling point and are starting to resist the status quo. As this year starts, I’m actually feeling a bit optimistic for the first time in a long time. Not optimistic that change will come any time soon. Not optimistic that we’ll adequately deal with the poverty problem that is a the root of so much about what is wrong with this country and its education system. But instead, optimistic that we might at least be on the verge of gaining a voice in the larger conversation around real equality in education, equality that in some part stands on regular, dependable access to technology and the Web.

Given that window, we need schools that are bold in their practice right now. And by “bold” I mean schools that make sure their kids pass the test and get “college ready” because, unfortunately, that’s about the only definition of “success” that people want to talk about right now, but also schools that prepare their kids for a world that the tests and the definitions of “readiness” or “achievement” haven’t caught up to yet. A world that I think is so wonderfully articulated by the National Council Teachers of English 21st Century literacies that I keep trotting out wherever I go. In other words, bold schools are the ones that do both, because to do anything less at the moment would not serve our students in the ways they need to be served. Equally important, bold schools are the ones that know that those two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. You look at SLA or High Tech High and you see that creating student-centered, inquiry-based, technology-rich learning opportunities in our classrooms can help kids navigate the world they live in AND pass the test. 

What a concept.

To that end, I’ve decided to dust off my journalism degree this year and do some “real” reporting and writing about those schools that are being “bold” in that context. As much as my travels will allow for side trips and site visits and interviews of teachers and students and leaders in those spaces, I want to really wrap my brain around what’s special and replicable about those schools and share them back out. Who knows, there may be a book in it as well.

Along the way, I’d like your help, if you’re so inclined. And my first request is to help me identify some schools that I might visit. But one caveat: I want these to be entire schools where that type of boldness is being displayed, not isolated classrooms or teachers. I’m looking for places where there has been a commitment as a school community to the best of what a progressive education can offer along with an immersion in technology and connectedness to the world. Schools whose teachers and whose graduates are literate by NCTE standards. And schools that are advocating in their communities for this different path. These schools can be public or private and anywhere in the world.

Any come to mind? If so, please note them in the comments.

At some point in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be asking you to help me flesh out in more detail the characteristics of bold schools. I’m hoping to have lots of these conversations at SLA during Educon in a few weeks. I’m sure I’ll be picking a lot of people’s brains while there. 

Regardless, my sincerest wish for you to set a powerful path for your work and learning this year. As someone who may or may not be Goethe once said:

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Let’s be bold this year. 

Privacy in a Networked World

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danah boyd articulates the move from private to public in online spaces about as well as anyone, I think:

Social media has prompted a radical shift. We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.” Most of our conversations in a face-to-face setting are too mundane for anyone to bother recording and publicizing. They stay relatively private simply because there’s no need or desire to make them public. Online, social technologies encourage broad sharing and thus, participating on sites like Facebook or Twitter means sharing to large audiences. When people interact casually online, they share the mundane. They aren’t publicizing; they’re socializing. While socializing, people have no interest in going through the efforts required by digital technologies to make their pithy conversations more private. When things truly matter, they leverage complex social and technical strategies to maintain privacy. [Emphasis mine.]

And this is more than just knowing how to “leverage complex social and technical strategies to maintain privacy,” something that in and of itself should be a required literacy for anyone using social media. (Are we teaching this?) It’s also about how we consume and share what others make public. 

We had this discussion during a Leading Edge session yesterday, and I was struck by how little I had really thought about that piece of it. That it’s not just about making good decisions when we publish, but it’s also about making good decisions when we consume what others publish as well. Not so much in terms of what’s good content and what’s not so good content. But in terms of what responsibility each one of us has as gatekeeper for the other. 

Are we teaching that, too?

All of which leads me back to why, I think, we have to help move educators into these public spaces online. There are levels of complexity here that can only be understood by participating, and while I realize there are risks, we have to find ways to mitigate them for the sake of teaching our kids those network literacies that will allow them to flourish. 

What Creates Interaction in Facebook (and Elsewhere)

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While this is meant for Facebook pages, I think these ideas probably hold true for wherever we blog and post:

The main highlights from the study, published on the Facebook for Journalists page, suggest journalists with Facebook pages should take note of the following facts:

Starting the conversation: Posts that include a question or call to action from the journalist received the highest amount of feedback;

Personal analysis is effective: Posts that included the journalist’s analysis and personal reflections had 20 per cent more referral clicks than that of an average post;

Images work: Photos received 50 per cent more likes than non-photo posts, and journalists who shared links that included a thumbnail image in the link preview received 65 per cent more likes and 50 per cent more comments than posts that did not include images.

What do you think?

(Now if I could just find an image…;0))

Teachers Must Think Internet First

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Still waiting for most schools to begin to value the deep digital skills that our kids need.

Digital skills are now vital for education and employment: we know that you’re 25% more likely to get work when you have web skills, and, once in that job, you’ll earn 10% more. Unison, the biggest public sector union, has just conducted a skills survey of some of its 1.3 million members. Almost half of middle-aged, low-paid women (cleaners, catering staff, carers) argued that lack of digital savvy was their most serious skills gap. Our figures show that 4 million of the 8.7 million UK adults who have never used the internet are from our hardest-to-reach groups.

[…]

Connecting more people with the web is a vital first step. But the close correlation between disadvantage and digital skills underscores what a vast untapped market there is for great, innovative educational tools to reach and engage our hardest-to-reach groups.

There is a large and growing body of evidence that shows that technology can transform people’s experience of education. The clever use of technology lets students study at their own pace, using interactive, collaborative, conversational teaching modules, supported by teachers who can tailor their support to individuals’ needs. This is hugely significant, especially for those who might have had bad experiences of the traditional classroom environment first time around.

The Internet: Where Anonymity Goes to Die

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From the “Are We Teaching This Stuff?” Department, is there any doubt that we need to be having conversations about privacy and publicness online with our students, starting in like first grade? I’m still amazed at what I see some of my kids’ friends posting to their Facebook pages. 

The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view. To some, this could conjure up comparisons to the agents of repressive governments in the Middle East who monitor online protests and exact retribution offline. But the positive effects can be numerous: criminality can be ferreted out, falsehoods can be disproved and individuals can become Internet icons.

Content Curation is a New Kind of Authorship

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This is an amazingly great piece by Maria Popova that is definitely worth the read, but this quote really struck me from a reading literacy sense. 

The point is that new tools in general, and Twitter in particular, greatly challenge the binary dichotomy of attention as something that is either given or taken away, distracted. Instead, these tools allow us to direct attention to destinations where it can be sustained with more concentration and immersion. They offer a wayfinding system that is, on the whole, the polar opposite of traditional media’s: While “old media” fought against the scarcity of information, new media are fighting the overabundance of information. The resulting directional-curatorial nature of our communications tools is something that fits comfortably neither in the “text” checkbox nor in the “speech” one. It does, however, allow people to discover the most relevant, interesting, and impactful information, in any medium, and then relate it to other information in a networked ecosystem of meaning that helps us better understand the world and each other.

I totally agree with this description. But here’s the edu-angle: sooner rather than later, I think the tension is not going to be rooted in the “finding good stuff” space as much as it will be in the “how do I switch my brain into deep reading mode?” space. While I don’t agree so much with Carr and Lanier and others who lament the end of intellectual dialogue in the 140-character world, I do worry that our brains and, especially, our kids’ brains won’t get enough regular workouts to sustain deep thinking and synthesis unless we help them.

#IranElections: Why We All Need to be Editors Now

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If you’ve been following the news out of Iran the last few days, odds are you’re following it very differently from even a few years ago. Ten years ago, most of what I would have learned would have come from the TV news or the New York Times the day after. Five years ago, it was the New York Times or other traditonal media websites that I probably would have turned to. Today, however, for me at least, it’s Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia and then the New York Times website. It’s a bit of a different process, I’d say.

While we’ll wait to see how social tools affect the outcome in Iran, we can’t wait to begin to teach ourselves and our kids how to make sense of media that we ourselves have to edit. The complexities here are huge, in both an information and technological context. We’re reading and viewing content created by people whose identities and agendas are unkown to us.  While much of it is raw, we can’t know how much of it is made to look raw, how much of it has been edited, how much of it is true. I can read the Tweet above and believe it, or I can wait for confirmation. I can do what all good journalists have done throughout time which is verify and reverify before believing and reporting.

The difference is, obviously, is that I have to do this for myself. I now have access to the raw information, the stuff that I used to pay for someone else to find and sift and synthesize and share. I can choose to continue to take that route, certainly, to only check the reputable media outlets for updates and “news”. But if I do that these days I deny myself a greater understanding of not just how to consume all of this but how to participate in it. I’m not in Iran (thankfully) but I can still share the best of what I find about Iran for others in my network. I don’t take that task lightly, because I want to be a trusted contributor. I want others to share with me so that we can sift and filter and synthesize and contribute the best of our resources and thinking. As Donald Leu writes, these days “we read online as authors, and we write online as readers.” And, I would add, we need to read and write as editors as well.

I know that we should have been teaching these skills and processes all along with every piece of information we read or shared. But the reality is that we as an educational system haven’t been doing a very good job of it. Right now, however, we and our kids simply can’t get away with not having these skills any longer. I know the school year is over for many, but for those that are still in session, welcome to a teachable moment about the world, democracy, technology, media, and most of all, participation.

Kathleen Blake Yancey Interview on Thursday

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Just a quick programming note: my interview with Kathleen Blake Yancey, author of “Writing in the 21st Century” and former president of the National Council of Teachers of English, has been rescheduled for this Thursday at noon EST. I have a host of questions to ask, but would love to know what you want to know, i.e. literacy, writing, reading and the importance of Web technologies in the process of all of it.

Please tune into our PLP live channel on uStream if you want to participate in the chat and converation.

"What is Literacy?" Elluminate Session Today at 1 ET

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So I know this is short notice, but yesterday Ben Grey, Ryan Bretag, Sylvia Martinez, Doug Belshaw, Bud Hunt and others were having one of those (I think) maddeningly frustrating chopped up, hard to follow Twitter “conversations” about literacy that I and a few others started to chime in to and at some point I just thought we should “get a room” so to speak to have the conversation in a more coherent way since there were all sorts of interesting ideas being expressed and the whole thing resulted in scheduling an Elluminate session for today at 1 pm ET (time conversion here, tip to KJ) and that’s a long sentence but I’m not awake yet and you get the gist, I hope. If you’re not familiar with Elluminate, you need an Internet connection and a microphone and about two minutes to get up and running. I’ll be in the room 20 minutes or so beforehand to help people get going. Not that it’s going to matter, I don’t think, but seating is limited to 100, first come first served. Right now, I have about 25 Twitter RSVPs, so… I’ll moderate the conversation as best I can, and we’ll cap it at an hour (unless people want to continue on.) I’ll also record it and offer it up if anyone wants to check back. This is my take, but the topic is loosely based around these Twitter back and forths here and here, a conversation/debating medium that Dean Shareski aptly describes as “determining the best basketball team via free throws.” Join us if you can!

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I have a couple of other Elluminate/UStream session interviews scheduled, one this upcoming Tuesday at 11:30 am ET with Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs and one of the real pioneers in thinking about social tools and one of my best teachers, and another with Professor Carol Dweck, author of Mindset which is a fascinating look at how attitudes affect learning. More to come on both of those…

UPDATE: Original session link was wrong…fixed now.

UPDATE: Session archive is now published.

Reading Online is Not Reading On Paper

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(UPDATE: Please read the correction above reagrding this post to understand the cross outs.)

I’ve been a Mark Federman fan ever since his great essay “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“ from a few years ago, which, if you haven’t read it, would land on my required reading list for anyone interested in this conversation. Federman is with the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and he’s one of those people that just pops up from time to time to get me thinking.

His latest pop (Correction: This is actually by Mark Bauerline. Oh, the irony.) is in The Chronicle Review and it’s titled “Online Literacy is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming.” It’s an interesting recap of some of the online reading studies that have been done by Jakob Nielsen over the years, but it  quickly turns to a discussion of why technology has met with mixed (at best) success in the K-12 classroom over the years. In a word, it has to do with reading:

Digitized classrooms don’t come through for an off-campus reason, a factor largely overlooked by educators. When they add laptops to classes and equip kids with on-campus digital tools, they add something else, too: the reading habits kids have developed after thousands of hours with those same tools in leisure time.

In many of my presentations I ask those assembled what percentage of their reading is done online and whether or not they know of anyone who addresses online reading literacies in the classroom. You can probably guess the results: not much, and zero. (Well, almost zero.) Once again, this is one of those areas where the kids are doing it already and the educators in the room don’t have much to go on in terms of what the differences are or any substantial practical experience. Federman Bauerline makes the point that when new technologies enter the classroom, teachers see change. Students, on the other hand, see the status quo:

Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures toward the screen. If digitized classrooms did pose strong, novel intellectual challenges to students, we should see some pushback on their part, but few of them complain about having to learn in new ways.

For some reason, probably because I was a former English teacher, I reflect on this whole reading is changing discussion a lot. Probably 75% of what I read I read online. The other 25% is almost all books. I read all of my news from papers, magazines, etc. online, all of my correspondence, all of the blogs that I follow. And, as I’ve written before, my reading habits have changed a great deal. It has become an effort for me to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives.

Federman Bauerline argues that screen reading cannot provide those skills, and he argues it persuasively.

We must recognize that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can’t bridge them. Screen reading is a mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking.

This resonates. In fact, I’ve made myself take time over the last few months to read longer texts, and after plowing through three really, really engaging and challenging novels in the past month or so, I’m feeling like my brain is back in gear somehow. It’s getting closer to balance.

What continues to concern me, though, is the paucity of conversation about any of this in our schools. This is hugely complex, and it requires a strategy and good pedagogy. I feel almost blessed that my kids enjoy reading books, longer novels, Meg Cabot and Mike Lupica type stuff that are even above their age levels a bit. And I love talking to them about what they read. But as I watch Tucker search for and read helps and hints about Spore, I can see the difference. It’s not bad, but it is different. And it’s a difference we need to name.

(Photo Revision by -nathan.)

WeGottaStopThis.org

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Just an observation here, but three times in the last week I have been speaking to different educators who in passing have made the point that we do a good job of teaching kids that .org sites are more trustworthy than .com sites but that in general, we really don’t have a solid grasp of online literacy.

Ya think?

"Social Filters"

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Great article in the New York Times that asserts the Clay Shirky idea I noted here earlier of a publish then filter world.

According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

I like the phrase “social filter” that the article puts forth as a way to capture what I think is a big shift in emphasis on many of the basic reading literacies that we should have been teaching but by and large haven’t been doing a very good job with. We have to be editors, not only in the sense of identifying those pieces of information that should be “passed on” but in assessing those that have been passed on to us. It is a bit more complex, and potentially problematic, when the filter who is suggesting something for you to read may not be very well trained in the skill of filtering either.

While, as the article points out, much of this trend is a technological version of “word of mouth,” I think the difference is the scope of the potential personal audience, the ease with which we can copy and forward what we find, and the speed with which it all happens. Think Twitter for all of that.

And this is a younger vs. older thing. While two-thirds of those under 30 use social networking tools to disseminate and consume information, only 20% of those over 30 do. I’m guessing those percentages are about right for education as well.

Finally, I find this really encouraging, especially in an age where talking heads hold so much sway:

Young people also identify online discussions with friends and videos as important sources of election information. The habits suggest that younger readers find themselves going straight to the source, bypassing the context and analysis that seasoned journalists provide.

Obviously, that can be good or bad, depending on who those “seasoned” journalists are and who your friends are. But I’m just thinking that if we can teach kids to go to the source and do their own cogent, reasoned analysis, that’s a good thing. Again, establishing these skills and habits in our students has to be something that we model and include in every part of the K-12 curriculum.

Yet Another Reason We Should Be Teaching, Not Blocking, Wikipedia

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In three weeks of February, the Barack Obama entry in Wikipedia had almost 2 million views and was the seventh most visited (and, really, second most visited in terms of content) article on the site. John McCain‘s had 1.1 million. Hillary Clinton, who apparently more people “know” about, had about 422,000. In those same three weeks, the Wikipedia home page got over 140 million views.

The point? People are turning to Wikipedia in large numbers to learn about the topics that are of interest and importance to them. Many of them, no doubt, are kids. Go figure.

Now look, I know as people read down the entire list, there are entries that might make some uncomfortable. Sites that will make some say “See! We can’t let our kids be getting wrong information about THAT!” or in some cases, any information at all. I hear that.

But those kids who go to schools where Wikipedia is blocked or passed off as a non-credible resource or not in any way addressed in the curriculum are no doubt reading Wikipedia anyway without any context from us as to what it is and without any guidance from us as to how to use it well. And so, instead of seizing an opportunity to model for them the power of participation, to help them understand the importance of editing, and to give them a real sense of how the collaborative world works by involving them in the negotiation of the “truth” that those articles represent, we’re simply enabling our kids to use Wikipedia badly.

I’ll say it again. Errors are everywhere. You might as well shut down the Internet, unsubscribe to every newspaper and magazine your library gets, and turn off the television set if the concern is that kids might be getting inaccurate or biased information. If we’re not raising a generation of reader/editors, we’re not doing our jobs. Wikipedia can help in that work.

And, just in case you haven’t seen me ref this before, here’s hoping you’re not using this Physics textbook from the venerable Oxford University Press in your school if you have a problem with Wikipedia.

The Kids are All Right…

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Alec Couros’ post on digital citizenship makes some valid points, but I’m not convinced that a few examples of really vile content and lazy practice are reasons to think that the concept of citizenship is in some way fundamentally shifting. But I also don’t fall all the way to the Tom Hoffman side of the fence that says citizenship is little more than what many (though not Tom) would call information literacy.

What rings most true, however, was Stephen Downes’ comment about Tom’s post where he says, simply,

The vile content – and it most certainly is vile – is neither new nor original. And it’s not the kids that are creating it.

The fact is that we have been conditioned to see the worst at the expense of the best, primarily by a media that is always on the lookout for the lewdest, awfulest, stupidist behavior of our cultural icons. A media that then inculcates a connection between crass insignificance and news. And, perhaps to that extent at least, Tom is right. If we teach ourselves and our kids to simply stop and use these “five habits of using one’s mind well,” we’ll get a long way down the citizenship road.

  1. How do we know what’s true or not true? How credible is our evidence?
  2. Is there an alternate story? Perspective? How might this look from another viewpoint?
  3. Is there a connection between x and y? A pattern? Have I come across this before?
  4. What if… supposing that…? Could it have been otherwise if x not y had intervened?
  5. And finally, “who cares”? Does it matter? (And, perhaps, to whom?)

Especially the last one.

But I also believe that citizenship suggests more than critical thinking. It requires participation and action. It requires contribution. And the ways in which even our kids can contribute in this environment and the global scale those contributions now have do change the equation. And most importantly, let’s not forget that a lot of kids are creating and contributing and participating in ways that should make us very proud. For instance:

A ten-year old girl in upstate New York who starts a blog Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference that in just a week’s time has caught the interest of a whole bunch of kids from around the world who want to make a difference too.

Or the imminent launch of a network of student bloggers from around the world:

Students 2.0 Launch Teaser from Sean on Vimeo.

Or, though it’s not directly related to kids, the uber alternative to vile (religious music aside):

(Add your own examples below…)

Point is, there is a lot of good stuff out there too. And not that that fact is new or original, but there are a lot of kids who are doing it, and in the process, learning citizenship. And at the end of the day, if we really want to help our kids become good citizens themselves, the best we can do is to use our own minds well and model our own participation wherever and whenever we can.