H Duderstadt, New Tech Maven

I’ve been doing some serious investigation into how we are preparing children to live in the 21st century. There’s been a shift in focus in public schools from traditional literacy to “digital literacy”. This is definitely to be commended. But, unfortunately, when I did some research into curriculum and lesson plans that are available on the Internet, they all seem to focus on teaching kids how to use Microsoft Word to write a resume, Excel to do a spreadsheet, PowerPoint to do a presentation, and maybe how to build a web page or send an e-mail, and, frankly, little else.

Though, learning how to use MS office is not necessarily a bad thing, I personally don’t believe that something schools should focus on. For a number of reasons, I think the time the kids are in classes studying digital literacy should be spent on other subjects. These include how to find information on the Internet and then verify its validity, How to handle the vast array of information that they will be facing them sift through it in order to find what is important, of course, how to be safe online, and, in some ways most importantly,  how to use the 21st-century skills they already have and adapt them for use in the education system and in dealing with those who are not as proficient.

My hope is that in the course of this blog, I’ll focus on some of the areas that I think we need to emphasize more in our effort to help develop digital literacy in children.

Something that is common to everything I write is the emphasis I place on modern kids, digital natives as some call them, and how they have a natural understanding of the technologies in our world. When it comes to the tools that are at the heart of digital literacy, kids do just fine. In fact, I personally believe we be better using them as mentors to the 20th century teachers who are actually teaching them.

In my personal opinion there’s been far too much focus on the problems with our education system.  With a particular emphasis on rooting out BAD teachers (and killing off the unions that protect them), school “reformers” proclaim that they can fix what ails our current school system by getting rid of all those lazy, awful teachers.  Out with the bad…and viola.  We’ll rise back to the top of list when it comes to quality education systems.

Of course, if you want to take the approach of trying to find out what’s BAD in the American education system, you can’t stop with just teachers.  What about the BAD parents who don’t take the time to support their kids and make sure they are doing their homework?  Or, BAD school administrators who would rather protect their own jobs than support their schools and teachers.  Or, BAD kids that refuse to learn and show no respect for teachers no matter how hard they try.  Or, BAD politicians who make great promises when running for office and proclaim themselves the “Education Candidate” but are the first to vote to cut school funding when the budget gets tight.  Or, BAD voters who refuse to support any school bond issue because THEY shouldn’t have to spend their hard earned money to help somebody else’s brat. Or BAD media companies that could create exciting, engaging programming (that would earn the ratings) that could also educate.   The list goes on and on.  In fact, if you really want to know who is to blame for our bad school system…GO LOOK IN THE MIRROR.  We are ALL to blame.

But, what does finding somebody to blame do to really help find a solution to the problems we face?   Americans have a nasty habit of disregarding warnings, waiting until something goes wrong, and then looking for some hapless soul to point at and say…”yes, they are the reason things are so screwed up”.

I sincerely believe the solution to our education dilemma is to focus on SOLUTIONS and not problems.  There are teachers who are doing a great job.  And parents who support their kids, and wonderful pupils who not only do their work, but help others.  And politicians, school administrators, media companies, voters and on and on that are doing wonderful things.  Maybe, instead of taking a punitive approach, we pay those teachers who have figured out how to do it better, to help develop programs to help other teachers do the same thing.  Or, get those parents involved with the PTA, or give those kids encouragement to become teachers.  By focusing on rooting out the GOOD and then applying it into schools and the world kids grow up in, I feel we’d make much more headway than this fascination with finding somebody to blame.

There’s been a lot of press lately on the school in Rhode Island that fired it’s entire teaching staff.  Even the president stepped in and agreed with the move.   But, I personally believe that though there may be a few teachers that could do a better job, the solution to the education crisis in the US involves everybody from politicians who will honestly back education and not just use it to help get them re-elected to office then cut, cut, cut when they need to balance the budget; or administrators who are educators and not polticians; or voters who will support a school bond even though they don’t have any children; or media producers who are willing to explore adding learning content to their product because it can make them more entertaining if done right.

But no one key component of the process of raising children is so important as the parent. They are key to the future of their children.  Yet, all too often they are struggling to keep up with their kids and their kids “tech”.

Take a look at a typical teenager today and you’ll find a walking advertisement for best buy.   Armed with iPods, iPhones, laptops, all jacked in to networks that give them access to twitter, facebook, texting, phone messaging, World of Warcraft, Second Life, Wikipedia and the vast array of content that is the internet they are easily the most connected generation in history.  At home, many have Xbox 360s, PS3s, Wiis, and any rang of sophisticated game platforms, often hooked up to high def TVs.  Even their conversations can be a blend of texting shortcuts, typical teen slang, and rap tunes.

So, it’s little wonder that those who grew up in the shadow of one media type, whether it be television or radio, or even first generation Mac’s sometimes have a difficult time really understanding these “Digital Natives’ as they come to be known.  And not the least mystified is often their parents.

Though a parent might be a definite blackberry addict (often called “crackberry”), have a facebook account, and actually be at level 70 on World of Warcraft, they must realize these kids are on a whole different level.  A key goal of this site is to attempt to help decode the world modern children live in and help parents better understand and so play an active role in their children’s growth and learning.  Especially now with the severe budget cuts that school districts all over the US are facing, the importance of parents being involved in supporting their children and their learning can not be underemphasized.

So hang on, as I set out to help you 20th century raise 21st century kids1

Kids in school love to complain about how boring so many subjects they have to study are.  “Why do I have to learn Trigonometry anyway???  It’s so BOOOORING!”   Or, “our physics teacher was going on and on about gravity and I just don’t get it.”

Yet, ask them about the latest video game they are playing and their whole mood will change as they start going on and on about how many zombies they were able to kill in Left 4 Dead, or how they built this amazing house in Sims 3 and wished they could really live there.   The two might appear to have nothing in common but you’d be suprised.

Take a look at the typical video game boys in particular like to play and you’ll find a real world complete with many of the same  properties a real world has, INCLUDING GRAVITY.  In fact, there is a game known as Garry’s Mod which is called a “physics sandbox”.  It’s basically an environment where the laws of physic exist and you can create things that are influence by this.  A walking house; a tank you can drive around, an whole army that you can control, even electrical circuits that control specific machines.  Imagine a virtual place where children can build anything they can imagine and then operate it as if it’s in the real world.  The potential of this program in an educational environment is immense.

The possibilities go on and on.  If this is something that excites you, the best place to start is read James Paul Gee’s work “What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Second Edition: Revised and Updated Edition“

You might think I am a typical “EdTech” evangelist who believes that technology is the “Holy Grail” of  our education system.  Transforming every classroom into a digital nirvana of state of the art computers with high speed Internet access,  handing out iPads instead of textbooks, requiring all teachers to put their curriculum online are all things I should be a advocate for claiming they will turn around the problems we face our schools.   But, you may be shocked to learn that I don’t believe anything of the sort.  Yes, I do NOT believe that technology is the answer to the United State’s long suffering education system.

Now, before you brand me as some kind of a Luddite who wants to take schools back to the days of one room school houses with blackboards and school marms (though I did like the idea of a one room school house…more on that some other time).  I DO believe that technology, and the tools it represents, is a KEY part of solving our problems.  It’s just that it alone won’t necessarily help.

To better explain this, let’s take a trip back to the 1990′s when the dot com revolution was raging and everybody believed that the Internet was the future.  A group of very dedicated network experts and technologists started a program called “Net Day”.  I had several friends who were a part of this.  The goal of Net Day was to bring together technology experts to wire public schools with high speed internet access using fiber optic cable, the latest in networking technologies, and a whole bunch of volunteers who worked in schools all across the country.  It wasn’t a bad idea.  It was a very good one.  But, in the end many of those high speed lines just made teacher’s lives harder than easier and teaching more difficult that effective.  A lot of the reason was  whether teachers were trained in just what to do with all this data they had access.  Certainly, there were those who had a good understanding of the internet and were able to see a dramatic improvement in their student learning with the connectivity that Net Day brought.  But, there were many more who ended up having to shut off the computers and even unplug them as kids started doing what kids do when they get around computers.  They’d start trying to visit web sites they shouldn’t, and they’d play games.  In the end, some rooms even had the computer removed and how have these weird connectors in the corner where the fiber optic cable came in.  Don’t get me wrong, Net Day was definitely not a flop.  It actually did a lot of good.  In fact, link to Project Tomorrow and you’ll see it’s still going strong.  But, there’s a tendency to embrace a technology just because you are caught up in the excitement about it without really thinking out how it is going to be used and making sure the teacher using it knows what to do with it.

So, there are many wonderful technologies that could improve learning in our schools.  From hand held devices such as iPads to video games to blogs, there are an amazing array of wonderful things out there that we should give serious thought to using.   And, in this blog I’ll talk about a lot of them.  We just must make sure we don’t forget the teachers who will be using it, and ignore the potential downsides so that we can prevent these from hurting their very real potential.

In the end, heck yes I am pro-educational technology.  But, I’m also pro knowing what do, how do it RIGHT and what the results will be before you commit to it.