STSD Curriculum & Technology Update

Regular updates and musings on curriculum and technology in the Salisbury Township School District in Allentown, PA.

21st Century Skills & New Media Literacies

As with anything worth doing there are always resistors and critics. In Monday’s Washington Post, education reporter Jay Matthews titled his column The Latest Doomed Pedagogical Fad: 21st-Century Skills. In his column, Matthews contends that there is nothing new about 21st century skills. “Young Plato and his classmates did the same thing in ancient Greece.” There is a typical flaw in Matthew’s thinking - understanding how age-old skills look different in the technology-rich world of 2009. What is different then? Take two minutes to watch this video, and I think you’ll start to see how technology changes, in both bold and subtle ways, the rules of the game where “skills” are concerned.

For a detailed response to Matthew’s column, read Will Richardson: Response to Jay Matthew at the Washington Post

New Definition of Collaboration

During the Monday, August 25 presentation, Louise and I talked about the new definition of collaboration and shared a brief video segment from the a keynote presentation at this summer’s National Educational Computing Conference. The entire video is actually available for viewing as a webcast on the internet by clicking here. You will be prompted for first name, last name and email. Use the following: first name: stsd; last name:stsd; email: or use your own. (The actual interview with the two teachers starts at around 24:00. You can scroll ahead to that point.)

In the video, you’ll hear directly from these two teacher who used technology and new ways of collaboration to re-imagine their classrooms. We both found this keynote very inspiring and hope you will too. If you watch the video, please leave a comment below!

The Future is Now…according to the Rutgers University English Department

There are lots of interesting points in this short presentation:

1. “...the nature of communication has totally changed.”
2. “English, as the site that excels in human expression, and in the study of human culture related to expression—we should be the place that’s at the very cutting edge of education for students in these areas.”
3. “We now live in a world where we don’t simply go to the web to draw information down, but that people are actively participating in and contributing to the knowledge and information that is on the web.”
4. Because we now live in this read/write world, it’s essential that the English Department provide our students with training in how to live in this world.”
5. Collaboratories - “...spaces where students can work on multimedia composition. Because to compose, and to compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to not only excel at verbal expression and written expression, but you also have to excel in the use and manipulation of images. That is what it means to compose.”
6. Writing in the 21st century - “It’s multiply authored. It’s multiply produced. That’s where English is going.”

What are your thoughts?

Teenagers and the Internet

With the title, “What’s the matter with kids today?: Nothing, actually. Aside from our panic that the Internet is melting their brains,” Salon.com writer Amy Goldwasser offers a brief article that prompts us to rethink our ideas about how and why students are different today.

Teenagers today read and write for fun; it’s part of their social lives. We need to start celebrating this unprecedented surge, incorporating it as an educational tool instead of meeting it with punishing pop quizzes and suspicion.

We need to start trusting our kids to communicate as they will online—even when that comes with the risk that they’ll spill the family secrets or campaign for a candidate who’s not ours.

This article made me think about how we still want our students to consume more than create. When we allow kids to create, we give them more control. This can be scary for us! But the nature of information, and therefore knowledge, has changed. As adults, are we working from a narrow definition of literacy that may not encompass the changes being experienced outside of school? What do you think? This is valuable for us to reflect on as we move full steam ahead on our literacy/technology initiative. Feel free to leave your comments below!

Toward A Definition of 21st Century Literacies

On February 15, the Executive Council of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) adopted a statement titled, “Toward A Definition of 21st Century Literacies.” This professional organization has begun to articulate the shift that needs to occur in education if we are to teach literacies relevant in the real world. The connection between reading, writing, technology, social networking, collaborative problem solving, multitasking, information evaluation and ethics is addressed.

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF 21st-CENTURY LITERACIES
Adopted by the NCTE Executive Committee
February 15, 2008

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

1. Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
2. Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
3. Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
4. Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
5. Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
6. Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

How will we carry these ideas into the classroom? What will an expanded view of literacy look like? What will be different? What are we already doing?

I believe the educational system must embrace changes that are bringing about the need for a new definition of literacy beyond simply reading and writing. These will always be important, but for the future viability of our students in a flat world with far fewer boundaries, a shift is necessary.

It is difficult to predict the future, but from examining past and current trends, futurists try to paint a picture of what we might expect. Futurist Ray Hammond in his book, The World in 2030, says this:

The speed of technological development is accelerating exponentially and, for this reason, by the year 2030 it will seem as if a whole century’s worth of progress has taken place in the first three decades of the 21st century.

Most of the world’s futurists, futurologists and computer scientists agree that at some point between 2030 and 2040 a milestone in technological development will be reached that will cause a rupture, a complete disjoint, in human evolution. Around this time we will build the first computer that is the intellectual equal of a human. Because of the accelerating, exponential nature of technological development (fueled entirely by faster and richer information flows) it follows that a short time after that we will be assisted by our super-intelligent computers to build a machine twice as clever as the most capable human. Shortly after will appear a machine four times as clever as a human, then eight times as clever, then sixteen times as clever, and so on.

A few things are certain: the speed of change (technological and otherwise) will continue to increase; and we can barely begin to imagine what the future will be like, but it will likely be significantly different than the world we live in. How can we prepare our students for this uncertain world? Think about it: in 2030, our current students (K-12) will be between the ages of 27 and 50. Will they have the skills necessary to navigate the world? Will those skills be sufficient to adapt to new literacies they will encounter in the future? Will their literacies be sufficient to grapple with and solve the problems of the planet?

Links: Toward A Definition of 21st Century Literacies; The World in 2030.