Information and Communication Technology for Teachers (ICT4TE)
Communication constantly changes so exploration and discovery are necessary. Literacy teachers must embrace the notion of change because we must understand that even print would not be, without technology. Copyright (c)2002-2021 Happy e-trails to you. -Karen E. Smith, PhD, Blog Administrator
Does history shape current digital literacy or do we currently have the power to shape our new histories or digital literacy? This is a bit of a chicken and egg question but worth thinking about in terms of our power over the inventions of tomorrow.
Today I am beginning this post and will add to it later as I shape my new year's ideas for digital literacy. I have found that it is critically important to start with a vision of historical perspectives and this message on learning is useful. Happy New Year to all!
The coding message I've been trying to get out there since my own experience with it in 1979 is finally out there. I have always seen digital literacy as the new literacy (aka New Literacy Studies, NLS, 1996) including the reading and writing of the computer code.
As a literacy researcher, I have used a variety of research techniques to demonstrate this phenomenon but the best way has always been, learn by doing. Before I was a researcher at university, I taught in schools for 23 years. In one of those schools I started a computer club and the elementary students that joined the computer club all learned to code. That was in 1993. Now, exactly 20 years later I see that those students are more literate than others. Why? ... because they know how to read and write. Yes, that is what I meant. How to read and write. Literacy has changed. Today it is more of a digital/physical world.
As we come together globally with online relearning and reforming our collective ideas, memes, concepts, and creation of the future, I would like to remind everyone of how important the notion of virtue is in this forming mix of global identity. More on this later ... as I develop this post. In the meantime listen to this story on how a teen has used the power of the internet for a virtuous cause.
Yes, we are using the machine and we are training the machine to develop on its own. As new experiments in robots emerge, we all see a brave new world emerging where we will need to find our individual places in the source of virtue. I've often thought that the source of virtue is our thinking about the mirror of godliness but perhaps we need to go back and re-read some of Isaac Asimov's work and think about our emerging technologically connected world. How are we shaping it? What can we learn from watching how the machine is evolving versus how we are evolving in the midst of the machine evolution. When we look at how robots can now be programmed to have some sort of self awareness, we can think about our own self awareness. http://www.ted.com/talks/hod_lipson_builds_self_aware_robots.html
