TechIntersect

This morning just after waking I was greeted by an excited 7 year old, bursting at the seams with enthusiasm. Are you ready, Daddy? she asked. Still groggy, I rubbed my eyes and asked, Ready for What? Video! was her enthusiastic reply.

Oh yeah, the night before when we were watching her hermit crab pets, I mentioned we should make a video of them and put it on her new blog. So this morning at 6:30 am, she wanted to get going on it.

Emily, you’ve only been a blogger girl for one day. Can I at least get a cup of coffee?

This is a perfect example of the power of 21st century literacy. Writing is still important, but only part of the equation. So what is the difference between the literacy of today and the literacy of the past?

As a technology guy, I am always intrigued by the gadgets & tools that technology offers. But I always try keep in mind that the technology is not the end, but only the means.

Contrary to what some may think, 21st century literacy is not about technology, it’s about relationships. It’s about conversations. It’s about connectedness. The new technologies are just enabling the connectedness, the conversations and the relationships to happen in real-time without regard to place.

In one day, Emily discovered this idea and was hooked. Admittedly, I gave her a jump-start when I mentioned it on Twitter and a number of people from around the world visited and commented on her new blog. It appears that she may even soon have an 8 yr old e-pal in Australia who is also a girl blogger, thanks to an online conversation between her mother and I. She is also invited to work online with an elementary math class in Virginia.

The seeds for all of this were planted last year during the Summer Olympics. Both of my kids were amazed to learn that it is nighttime in China when it is daytime here. A few days ago, Emily asked me again about time zones, and about how in some places it is winter and other places it is summer. I thought the best answer might be to correspond with someone in Australia, where it is both opposite time of day and opposite season.

So I put out a tweet on Twitter about my daughter’s interest in learning more, and within a few minutes I had a reply from a teacher in Victoria, Australia with an 8 year old daughter who has a blog. After chatting back and forth for little while, we thought if Emily also had a blog, the pair could easily correspond back and forth.

When I showed Emily her new blog, she took to it like a duck to water. Certainly the immediate feedback she received helped to motivate her. But I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her working so hard on composing sentences and  sounding out words to spell.

My wife Wendy also noticed how hard Emily was working, and asked me why all schools don’t use blogging to teach writing. Why indeed? It is an excellent question that all of the teachers who do use blogging are wondering.

There are a number of reasons why they don’t, ranging from simply not being aware of the possibilities, to a fear of the unknown. Parents and educators who didn’t grow up in a digital world are understandably uncomfortable with all of this. But as a technology professional, I can honestly say I am less comfortable with putting my daughter on a school bus each morning for her eight mile commute than I am with her sitting down at a computer and writing about her Webkinz animals on her blog.

For some reason people think there is some sort of bogeyman out there waiting to harm kids if they go online, but honestly I can only think of the Florida cheerleader MySpace incident where online activities were related to a problem in real life. I’m sure their are more, but the incidents are rare.

There are certainly a lot of things that threaten the well-being of our kids in this world. I would no more let my kids have unsupervised free access to the Internet than I would turn them loose to roam the streets of a large city alone. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take them along with me for a visit. There are plenty of cool things to see and do in a city, just as there are on the Internet. If there is any real threat to our kids today, it is the threat of being left behind as the world moves ahead without them.

Instead of banning cell phones, iPods and social networking tools, schools should be finding ways to leverage the digital communications tools the students are already using. For example, a school can invest hundreds of dollars on electronic “clickers” used to record class surveys in real time, or they can use free online services to record text messages sent by cell phones that do the same things. Schools can (and have) invested thousands to bring internet access into the classrooms, but many students bring their own wireless internet access each day on their phones and are simply told to put it away.

Projects like the Washington County kids visit to Washington DC for the inauguration gives me some hope. They were sent with a mission to not only witness history, but to report about it to the folks back home. Unfortunately for the project, the wireless access was clogged in D.C. limiting the amount of information flowing back home, but the concept was sound. I know a number of people in this area began testing the waters of Web 2.0 as a direct result of this initiative.

Of all people, I fully understand that it takes time to implement change in school systems. I would just like to encourage parents and educators to learn more about 21st century literacy skills. (A good place to start is the 2009 International Student Blogging Challenge) As we learn about powerful learning tools such as blogging, my hope is that we will start to see a whole new approach to how we do education. By the way, we finally did get the hermit crab video posted today!

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