jennyann north's List: Web 2.0

• While it is important to recognize a legitimate body of knowledge and to train  students in that knowledge, if we do not develop students who can think  critically, challenge existing parameters, and creatively and innovatively plan  new designs, new projects, pose new questions, etc., we not only fail to use the  available technology effectively, but more importantly, we fail to develop the  kinds of students who are being looked for by employers and ultimately society  itself.
• the kinds of skills required in today's workplace and higher education fields of  study are transferrable and global and more complex.

• Students must be multi-layered in terms of their knowledge and understanding  of their fields and its place in the global community. Students who see only  tasks and how to please teachers successfully in their course content  requirements will find themselves increasingly irrelevant in today's workplace.  Students, however, who have been trained to question, analyze, synthesize,  apply, and transform, will always be in needed both academically and  technologically.
• We need a K-12 system that is relevant and global, inclusive and applied,  academically rigorous, and fully skill-based.

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• Learning How To Manage Content
  Students who can learn how  to look for helpful information and organize that information into meaningful  content are developing knowledge management skills that are vital to future  success.
• Knowing what to look for
• Capturing relevant data
• Organizing data effectively
• Reproducing data in a relevant context:
• Understanding and Maximizing Authorship
  The idea of students  as authors is not new to conventional education, however, what is new is the  scope of the audience to which those student authors can write or produce. No  longer does student authorship mean only for teachers or local schools or even  school communities, rather, to the world. Students can now maximize the notion  of airing their own work both creatively and academically via Internet tools in  blogs or podcasts or even via social networking tools. Additionally, while  student work could be displayed for a short while on the walls of rooms, it can  now be captured and displayed without limits. Perhaps the main benefit is that  their work can also receive feedback and criticism from a wider audience and,  therefore, they discover the realities of accountability to a field of study or  a professional industry. Through this kind of exposure, students can learn early  in their career that knowledge exits socially and that ideas must be worked  through a community of learners in order to find legitimacy and relevance.
• While Internet security is a very real challenge for schools and individual  students, these challenges should be thought through and connections pre-set and  protected, so that students can connect freely with other students around the  world as well as organized professional critics.

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• In other words, students, regardless of their technical ability, still require  teachers to be hands on with their instruction and informative about various  higher level skills that they will need to be successful higher education  students and employees.

• One such skill is collaboration--not to be confused with cooperation. While  the latter is a useful skill as well, developing collaborative skills is  something very desirable for future employers. That is, students who know how to  evaluate a problem or situation; assess what information and resources are  needed and what others have and can contribute to the challenges; maximize all  of the resources and build on what is available to meet and address; and,  hopefully, solve the problem or challenge posed.

   

  Parts of this process are cooperative and critical to the overall success;  however, the latter stages of maximizing what is available and/or "known" or to  explore and gather additional information and resources and to build on those is  ultimately the full success of collaboration.

• Steve Hargadon argued, however, that most of the current students already use  these tools, and, while their parents may still be in a Web 1.0 world, students  use Web 2.0 social networking tools and other authoring tools regularly. He continued:

   

   

  "But I believe there are more positive, less alarmist, reasons. In fact, I  think the inherent characteristics of Web 2.0 are so aligned with significant  educational pedagogies that we are going to have to dramatically rethink our  educational institutions and expectations because of them. Even though the  benefits of Web 2.0, like those of a liberal-arts education, resist easy  assessment methods and therefore present a challenge to how we measure  educational success, I'm optimistic that they will ultimately prove so valuable  as to require that we rethink teaching and learning."

• I supposed that if I had really looked I could have found a lot more. The point  is, there is a discipline of 'new literacy' (or whatever we'll call it) forming,  and it is composed of elements such as the examples that are being shown here.  Education in this new literacy can - and must - replace the naive memory-based  retention-based fact-based text-and-test model of education that has dominated  for the last century or so. As I stated at my talk in Melbourne, one of the  problems we had over the last century was that it was too easy to get  students to learn things, to remember things - too easy to persuade them, too  easy to convince them, too easy to march them into prejudice and war