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Literacy Two Point O

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Saved by Mike King
on March 28, 2009 at 11:35:40 am
 

 

Literacy 2.0

By Michael King

 

As the 21st century dawns, Americans are once again experiencing a profound and rapid shift–from an Industrial Age to an Information Age. American schools are experiencing what historians of the future will call the Third Industrial Revolution, a transition to a knowledge-based universal substrate of knowledge based linking of the internet to co-collaboration websites of the new Alexandrian libraries of the future. To secure the workplace of the future, young people will need the skills and knowledge base associated with Web 2.0 shared canvases, where every splash of paint provides a richer tapestry of knowledge.

 

It is true that making this paradigm shift from the industrial age to the information age during a time of uncertainty finds many a scholar not sure just how literacy 2.0 will serve in the improvement of teaching and learning. For more than two centuries, schools have used printed paper materials, such as textbooks, to educate students. With the development of new technologies, Literacy 2.0 resources are reaching a limitless realm. Schools that are not presently tapping into these resources soon will find themselves left behind in their quest to improve the learning curve.  This is not to say that technology, alone, will educate today’s students. Technology is the tape measure in the toolbox that teachers can use to extend student learning opportunities. In order for schools to reach their vision for implementing school-based technology learning programs schools must be empowered to draw the pathways to get from the present to the future.  

 

To meet the challenge of the skills needed for the workforce of tomorrow, schools will need to realign their present visions by establishing new priorities that are linked to the new standards of co-creating environments in Web 2.0 collaborations. This does not mean that schools must change their beliefs; however, they must examine how their present beliefs support the challenges of required change. If schools are to be viewed as workforce providers of the future, then they must engage in strategic exploration of Web 2.0 potentials for the expansion of knowledge.


  


Web 2.0

The new Web 2.0 is different in its architecture for it now offers new applications where learners can share, create and contribute to new knowledge by direct participation rather than receiving passive information. True integration of technology into the learning process is a united effort among all teachers and educational leaders who must layout a strategic plan for implementing technology into the school. These strategies should include the development of (1) the understanding of collaborative learning as it relates to Web 2.0 applications (2) the design of more sophisticated forms of content design as it relates to co-creations (3) excepting the idea that learning should be teacher facilitated and not teacher directed.

 

The emergence of social networking tools will have an impact on education by shifting the illusions of individual perceptions on how we as a society will learn together. In the current world we have been taught to break apart our problems and the results have become a fragmented world. A world pieced together by individual resolves or ideas. Web 2.0 has given us the ability to expand the capacity to create new patterns of thinking that are nurtured in collaborative learning. What fundamentally distinguishes Web 2.0 from traditional Web 1.0 read only web is the potential to expand collaboratively on basic disciplines.

 

Web 2.0 is an expansion of the original applications of Web 1.0 which is most commonly referred to as read only web. Read only web 1.0 allows users to explore the network for information seeking. Web 2.0 is a new set of tools that allows users to collaborate ideas through new mediums of expression. These mediums of web 2.0 expressions technology allow non-web designers to create, remix, and mash together their own content online. As collaboration of media mash-ups become more common ground the idea of co-creation becomes synonymous with Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 content creation tools occurs through the design of multi-user interfaces such as wiki’s, podcasting, vodcasting, and blogs. 

 


Co-Creating

Within the next decade co-creating may become one of the most powerful engines of change and innovations that the education world will experience. Co-Creating with other students and educators across the nation is like tapping a knowledge pool of similar interest, a reservoir of creativity that may emerge through an enthusiastic wealth of talent producing warehouses of digital curriculum. It will not be an easy change and many tough challenges lie ahead to offset the standardized models of the existing rigors of traditional education. There is nothing wrong with mass co-creating, yet some see it as moving away from traditional practices of “drill and be drilled” forms of learning.

 

The problems are even more alarming when educators become facilitators of learning that moves distinctly away from mass customization; limiting flexibility and relying on elements of creative thought. After all it was the Wright brothers who decided to fly after mashing together ideas about bicycles and creating new ideas about propulsion and wing designs. True co-creating does entail deeper knowledge of existing technology. Technology that is currently not prevalent in American schools, at least from the digital natives’ point of view. These cries for change are now beginning to take hold as the business world is for the first time recognizing a new workplace; a workplace where individuals use the network to drive company decisions and collaborate daily in a new Web 2.0 environment. 


The Digital Divide

These new initiatives of Literacy 2.0 are beginning to emerge nationally recognizing that there is a digital divide between real world business practices and general education career preparations of the work force of tomorrow. The new workforces of the Lego workers are now being recognized for their co-creating ideas, workers that generate the remixing of multiple concepts on a large collaborative scale, creating new mashup products. Is it possible that the real world is moving everyday closer to global collaboration and the self contained classrooms of today are shifting in another direction? A direction of isolation, building the Great Wall of China and containing all knowledge, rigorous curriculum to specified outcomes, measured and assessed to a world where these measurements may no longer be important in determining success in the workforce. Has the term collaboration changed from working well with others to the mixing of ideas for the recreation of deeper meanings of the disciplines?

 

In this new of world of digital natives who will monitor exactness? Who will control the truest forms of knowledge for others to repeat the same paths of learning? Who will be the valedictorians of their class as individuals climb the latter to earn their rights to prestigious degrees of higher learning? All of these questions will be pondered as the world becomes flat. In fact the gap between the development and use of technology is like crossing the grate digital divide of leaving all children behind. Are we now standing on the other side of the great digital divide looking for ways to bridge the gap? And is it to late to cross over?

 


The Future of Literacy 2.0

In many school organizations, intoxicating rhetoric about visions and noble intentions usually abounds, but without a strategy for communicating those ideas, nothing will be realized. Achieving success will require more than rhetoric; it will require the capacity to communicate a compelling image of a desired state of affairs - the kind of image that induces enthusiasm and commitment in others. 

 

How do schools communicate their vision and future goals? How do they then get their stakeholders aligned behind those goals? The answers to these questions can be obtained through the management of meaning - or the mastery of communication. To master meaning through communications schools of the future will need to design architecture for Web 2.0 learning environments for the expansion of structured exact knowledge outside of the normal classroom day. These newly designed Web 2.0 architectures will initiate all necessary points required for the planned implementation of methods addressing the issues of quality learning both at home and at school.  The bottom line is this: The unassailable, standalone classroom is out the door. So say hello to Literacy 2.0 that looks like a library that interacts and talks.  

 

Today a new age is evolving, a newly formed conceptual age; an age and time when people collaborate to expand disciplines. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies. In the past we have individually mastered our own proficiencies as we explored our world from one perspective, our own. Now with collaboration technologies individuals are enlightened by becoming aware of individual perspective by exposing ones own knowledge to the outside world. Being myopic with a bit of stigmatism is not a bad way to view the world as it provides a benchmark to an individual’s singular perception. A perception as it is seen through a shattered mirror. The fragmentation of the mirror is in the reflection and how the pieces fit together is in the collaboration of shared thoughts by others. It is in the shared thoughts that our vision clears which makes Web 2.0 both a telescope for new ideas and a microscope for harvesting knowledge.

 

(Read Article E-Learning 2.0 How Web Technologies are Shaping Education) also read (Back to School with Web 2.0) 


 

 

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