For tonights reading, was especially drawn to pg. 151 about "Thinking to the New Literacy Skills"where the book asks if the new literacy skills are of the twenty-first century or new wine in old bottles. After reading and considering each of the points, my belief is that all of these are just old wine in new bottles with the partial exception of #1, but only because it adds the word "media" to look technological. There is no difference in this report to one twenty years ago, and if they think what makes it different is adding a technological aspect, then what are they going to do in ten more years when better technology emerges, besides add yet another one word phrase to make it look different. The three types all deal with processing information, communicating, and accountability to one's self and a group. These skills have worked for a long time, and are great sources for spreading literacy, but nothing here is considered new.
As for the Pre-Cal Blog........WOW! I looked through the collaboration and was thrilled to see so much mathematics being done on such a wide scale. I even found some basic Algebra that I teach in my class about functions and relations! I find it fascinating that so many people are interested in commenting on math throughout the web and sharing their ideas about problems and solutions.
3 comments:
I'm really intrigued by thinking of this as old wine in new bottles... I think that the literacy skills have changed in that new media (i.e., blogs or wikis) have opened up new ways of communicating with new audiences - and though we've used multimodal means in the past, it's entirely different for everyone to now have access to layered writing tools (like digital video editors for digital storytelling, or blogs for multimodal writing). I don't think that these literacies subsume those that came before - but I think that they introduce new things. (i.e., I'm wondering now if communicating in a blog through posting comments is different from what one contributes in a class discussion - or the "old school" activity of passing a paper around the room for "silent" writing and comments). Have you see the work of the Partnership of 21st Century Skills? There might be something of interest to you there. You might also want to look at a recent report called "Tough Choices or Tough Times" that came out last winter which is STRONGLY influencing how KY is thinking about these literacies across content areas.
Another thought, John - this could be a really solid readers/writers project topic -- searching to find if there really are new literacies or if we're simply talking about things we've been doing for some time...
After reading your post I wonder what are some of your thoughts on educating students in the 20th century.
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