DAY 2 – Pam Berger Keynote

Phoebe Bechir in SL – www.infosearcher.com

Learning and Literacy in a Digital World

Last night she went to animoto and made a music video-style presentation on yesterday's session! Fun!

Internet as transformative technology. What is digital literacy? What does it mean to be a learner in a digital environment? What are some of the key survival skills learners need?

Native or immigrant? I was yes to 7 of 8 questions.
Y, Y, Y, N, Y, Y, Y, Y

Today's student: They would answer 8 of 8

Tells a story about a modern-day student and how she uses technology in her life. Very integrated into all her life – connected 24/7. They're collaborative. They share. They connect. The internet has become the computer. 55% of online teens have social profiles but only 20% of adults.

OMG – all I can think about is a class I took about the Bloomsbury group – EM Forster's quote “only connect” seems to have actually happened! Musings on the anxiety of technological change on society...

Paul Gilster's book Digital Literacy: 1997 “ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of sources when presented via computers.” Kathleen Tyner's book Literacy in a Digital World – two literacies: tool literacies and literacies of representation.

Ppl. Are required to use a growing variety of technical, cognitive and social skills... literacy advances the ability to effectively and creatively use and communicate information. But it's always CHANGING.

We come to Web 2.0... now memory is less of an issue as the programs and platforms reside “on the web” - the idea of collective intelligence. Can get and create content. Web 2.0 characteristics: Interactivity, user participation, collective intelligence, self service, convergence of media.

Matches what we want to see in schools. Collaborative, active, independent learners. Indeed!

Graphic literacy: being able to “Read” graphical displays so that they can function at a high level – photo-visual literacy. Navigation next – need to construct knowledge from large quantities of non-linear information. A new sort of spatial orientation!

Kids 7-12 worked on the International Children's Digital Library: designed the interface to orient the reader. The question of finding and presenting information stymied the adults. Kids voted to search for the color of the book too!

Students need to develop a sense of context so that they can use information in intelligent ways.

Focus: digital environments tend to fragment the attention. Encouraging reflection and deep thinking. Learning to organize information to facilitate quick retrieval. Tagging will encourage this process-- folksonomy may be more personally relevant.

My observation: Tagging evolution follows this order: confusion/randomosity, epiphany, folksonomy. I want to incorporate this into the cyber 6 wiki!!!

Diigo is one of her favorites. She started a best practices web 2.0 tools tag

Confronting the Challenge of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21^st Century – Henry Jenkins is a must read.

Developing these new literacies requires passion on a personal level – and a ton of these skills are learned outside of the traditional school system. It's not about web 2.0 – it's about giving students the tools they need to learn. The services they need to make it happen – and the platform for Inquiry 2.0 = student learning.

New IST standards released at NECC: moving towards habits of mind rather than concrete skills: OERCommons.org