Forcing a Magnetic Fieldof Essential ICT Skills

for The 21st CenturyAssembled by David Warlick

Problem Statement

ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) will announce the new NETS Refresh standards. At a glance, they are visionary, broad, and spot on with current conversations about 21st century teaching and learning.

However, in their vision and broadness, these new standards seem difficult to define at the classroom level, where teaching and learning happen. There will be many presentations and conversations about this in the near future, and this presentation represents one voice.

I did what I often do, I went to familiar turf, tierra familiar (thanks Google). I went back to my thinking about the information revolution and lined up the characteristics that define today's information landscape, that information has become increasingly networked, digital, and overwhelming.

Slide 1

Applying the new web (Web 2.0) on this listing, it seems to me that as information has become networked in the past 10 to 15 years, it has also become more participatory during the past three to five years. We are not only access information through networks, but actually interacting with that information in many trans formative ways. As information has become more digital, it has more recently become trainable. Using tags and types of aggregators, we can literally train information to behave in useful ways -- on a personal level. And, finally, as information has become overwhelming, it has also served to connect people, through their ideas. It has become (forgive my use of a non-word) collaboratory, facilitating groups of people working together on common goals from diverse perspectives.

Slide 2

These ideas about the changing nature of information have been useful to me as a way of spring boarding into new notions of literacy (Skills necessary to use information to accomplish goals). Starting with the three Rs, reading, in a networked and participatory information environment, expands into Exposing the value of information and ideas. In an increasingly digital and trainable information landscape, arithmetic expands into a wide

Slide 3

range of skills involved in employing that information to solve problems, answer questions, and accomplish goals. And, as we become overwhelmed by information, and at the same time challenged to collaborate through the storm of information, writing has expanded into a range of skills involved in expressing ideas compellingly.

This new information landscape has also necessitated a new layer of concern for our visions of literacy. Largely because much of the information that we use today can not be contained inside a file cabinet, the covers of a book, shelves of a bookcase or rooms of a library, we can no longer guard it, protect it. There for the position of gatekeeper has shifted from something that teachers and librarians do to something that we all must know how to do -- and the thread that runs all over this is ethics.

Slide 4

Now I've been thinking about this for a long time and writing about it, and I have some sense of what all of this should look like in the classroom, how we teach children to be exposers, employers, expressers, and ethical users of information. So an interesting sense of tranquility came over me when I moved the magnet of these ideas up close to the new NETS Refresh -- because they lined up, just like those iron filings.

Slide 5

Slide 5

Exposing the value of information is very closely aligned with Information Fluency.

Employing information requires the creative use of information tools, inventing solutions to new problems, and then critically examining the results.

Expressing ideas is entirely about communication.

Ethics is responsibility, and, in my mind, that's what digital citizenship should be about -- learning to use information responsibly.

None of this happens without the tools. They are not the outcome, but the avenue, and the avenue is constantly changing.

Lots of Overlap -- of course