My notes on TCEA session Navigating the Digital Information landscape: The New Basics by David Warlick

Redefining literacy in the 21st Century. David’s goal for the presentation – get all the way through without mentioning technology. Session is about information (synonymous with technology)

Web2.0 document handout is a wiki – David uses his wiki handout to show use of a wiki.
Can be edited and updates as people edit it.
Can add blogs after attending presentation through editing wiki
2.0 conversation as opposed to old web – library

Future – What do we know about the workplace? Picture of an office in the future
Information age – last ten months more and more people have given up the telephone that sits on the table for the one that you can carry around in your pocket.
After conference go home and go to grocery store – more men with cell phones
We have made the decision that we want our communication something we can carry with us
(cuts table phone out of picture
5 exobytes information generated in 2003 but only 0.01% got printed
Cut paper out of picture
Webcams cut chairs out of picture
In future we may be wearing our technology – jacket in Europe marketed by levi straus – built in mp3 player, headphones, gps, phone rings gps toe rings
Cut computer out of the picture
Almost nothing left of the future office. This is about what we know of the future we are preparing our children for – almost nothing.

What do children need to be learning today to prepare for the future

Conclusion – stop integrating technology – integrate literacy
Teach our kids how to teach themselves

The three Rs are the same literacy taught in the 50s – we need reading. How to teach students to be able to validate information

Wikipedia has warnings about info that may be inaccurate – do newspapers and text books?

We have been taught to read whatever was handed to us by someone we trusted. Our kids are reading online – anyone, anywhere can publish. We have to teach literacy to be able to read text but also skills for exposing truth,
Example how many planets in solar system? Look in text book and Pluto is included – wikipedia has already been updated. It was updated in less than a minute.
Wikipedia and books – not a competition. Understanding what your library and the web is really good at and teaching student how to decide how to make a decision about which is appropriate at a particular time

Other skills

– Find information
– -decode it
– critically evaluate it, and
– organize it into personal digital libraries
We don’t replace literacy – we expand it

Arithmetic – all children need to understand the language of numbers
2 things have happened – solving a problem now is maybe a thousand numbers digital

Raw data – columns and rows of numbers from all over- searchable databases
Example data on earthquakes in a certain year range.
Highlight data, past into excel
Everything goes into first cell’
Convert text to columns – wizard finds column breaks and formats
Can tell it not to import entire columns
Imported info – made a graph scatter plot – showed a map of earthquake activity – world map tsunami
Arithmetic expands into employing information – raw material
Keyboard (piano) number generator
Compose music – process information

Writing – long tail (need to research this some more – many definitions out there)
Anatomy of the long tail
New media industry – rhapsody amazon netflix
Counted up number of products each sold and number of each product sole – created a graph which they expected to see but at the point where you couldn’t make money there was a long tail that showed ones that couldn’t be sold. (according to their larger percentages)This tail goes on because there is a new digital market for artists
Rhapsody makes 20% of revenue from the long tail – point being that anyone can make money on the internet selling their book, art, whatever. Maybe not enough to completely pay the bills but you could write and market a book that would sell enough to pay for kids college tuition (which David Warlick as done)

6.7 gig over the internet in 58 seconds – more than 200 sets of encyclopedia Britannica or 4 hours of dvd quality video
how do you get your message through in that storm of information – have to successfully compete with media for kids attention

writing expands into expressing ideas compellingly

sfett video student created a video showing corporations that use child labor and sweatchops – very powerful music with images and facts done by a fifteen year old as an alternative to writing a paper

writing – quality of information expression translate to video multimedia music communicates powerfully

need to teach the thread that stitches the other expansions together – ETHICS
information flows today without containers – not in pages in books. Nothing to keep it form growing larger and larger
teachers and librarians used to be gatekeepers – they stand at the gate not realizing that the walls are gone. We need to teach our kids to become their own gatekeepers –
ethical use of information should be an integral part of any literacy discussion

redefine literacy and integrate that

computers are now the pencil and paper of their day

David’s son – image with ipod, hooked into playstation, playing collaboratively online and instant messaging at the same time. We see this as technology – son would say this is information , he wouldn’t say a word about it being technology (youth everyday normal environment)
We need to be thinking less about the machine and more about the information

Why this is important – we are notinvesting in the next century- in our classrooms

china will surpass us in broadband by 2006
US has fallen to 21th in household broadband
US will be passed by slovenia in 2007

1983 nation at risk report
education reform has been happening ever since

in industrial age the curriculum didn’t change – now the world is the curriculum and it changes everyday.

“we will have achieved education reform when no teacher thinks they can teach the same thing the same way every day”

http://landmark-project.com
http://davidwarlick.com