Do a personal 24- to 48-hour news audit in which you record all the news you get now, where it comes from, and how well it meets your needs and interests.
This short course reminded me of the power of experiential, inquiry-based learning. As I am redesigning a media literacy course for teacher candidates, I am thinking that one of these types of brief activities each week could be incredibly useful, so I will return to them again in the future.
Exploring the Craft of Digital Writing, Grades 2–8
A Complimentary Webinar with Dr. Troy Hicks and the Center for the Collaborative Classroom.
Join us for an hour of inspiration and learning with Dr. Troy Hicks as he leads us in an exploration of the craft of digital writing. More and more, our students encounter a daily dose of digital texts, ranging from websites to social-media messages, from class assignments to YouTube videos. As they encounter these texts, what are the strategies that they need to be close, critical readers and viewers? Moreover, as students craft their own digital writing, what do they need to be able to do as writers, producers, and designers? Join Dr. Troy Hicks as he shares insights about the craft of digital writing and its implications for our students, grades 2–8.
Please note: This webinar will be recorded. If you are unable to attend the live session, register to receive a link to the recorded webinar. The recording will be made available 5–7 business days after the live session.
Delia DeCourcy and I prepare for the panel discussion at Sylvan’s owners’ meeting.
Earlier this morning, I was invited to speak with my colleague Delia DeCourcy, Executive Director for Digital Teaching & Learning, Chatham County Schools, on an educational panel for Sylvan Learning during one of their annual owner meetings in Houston, TX.
The topic was the current state of educational technology, and I was able to share some insights and resources on the questions below. In particular, they are in the process of updating their Sylvan Sync digital learning platform, and they wanted to glean ideas about what they could be doing with this tool, in particular, as well as with broader initiatives related to digital literacy and citizenship.
In interest of full disclosure, please know that I was invited to speak at this event by Sylvan’s Vice President for Education, and my travel costs have been covered. I received no honorarium, nor do I have a financial interest in Sylvan Learning.
That said, here are some thoughts and resources.
Question 1 – How has ed tech changed the way students learn today?
On one level, we could say that learning is more personalized, that students can get immediate feedback through automated scoring, and that they are able to make better decisions about their own learning. We have many great technologies that will help — especially with some of the more mundane aspects of memorization and ensuring comprehension — and there are ways to use those, within reason, and for purposeful learning.
At a deeper level, however, I would encourage us to think about the approach to learning — and the assumption about what “good” learning is — that underlies these practices. What is it, exactly, that we are asking our students to do with technology, and asking the technology to do with and for our students? In this case, we need to look at the pedagogical assumptions underlying the tool, the website, the program.
As it relates to the way that many educational technologies are packaged, I would want us to think more about the ways in which we can use technology to help students do more than consume, to answer questions that fall on the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Instead, we need to teach them both how to be conscientious consumers of technology and media as well as how to be creative producers of their own products. They need opportunities to represent their learning in many ways, with many forms of media from the written word, to an audio recording, to recording themselves solving a problem with a digital whiteboard demonstration recorded as a screencast.
Question 2 – What is your experience with students as “digital natives”? Are there any assumptions that need to be rethought?
First, we should remember that the term “digital native,” used as shorthand to describe kids who have grown up with persistent and ubiquitous technology, was long ago dismissed by the ed tech community. There is a great article that pushed back on this phrase from both a cultural and intellectual standpoint.
That said, yes, that are quite a few assumptions that we need to consider who millennial students are, what they value, and how they learn. There are technical, social, and academic aspects.
From the technical standpoint, millennial may be on their devices all the time and have exceptional proficiency with a number of apps, websites, games, operating systems, and so forth, yet is safe to say that the vast majority of them still need explicit instruction with technology when we consider higher-level thinking, communication, and problem solving tasks. For instance, I seriously doubt that most students know how to use more than 10-20 basic features in a word processor, most of those having to do with font selection, size, and color. We talked about the use of Ctrl+F for find/replace as a basic tool, but also an opportunity for editing and revision.
We need to acknowledge the social context in which these texts are situated. If you are writing an academic paper for a college course, you better not use spaces to indent. You need to learn how to use tabs. If you are producing a flyer that will be distributed on social media, you better understand the effects of warm and cool colors on a reader/viewer.
So, there are many assumptions that need to be thought, including those that we — as adults and educators — have, including the fact that (though we may not know everything about technology) we do have many experiences as readers, writers, and thinkers that we can reference and build on as we teach students to be thoughtful, productive users of technology.
Question 3 – Has technology created a set of new fundamental skills? What are they? Whose role is it to make sure students have these skills?
Yes, technology has created a new set of fundamental skills, both technical ones (like how to use a device, install a program, and operate software) as well as social ones (such as being a good digital citizen who uses social media in a responsible manner, treats intellectual property in an ethical manner, and engages with technology in a critical, yet creative manner).
Depending on who you ask, that particular set of skills can be very granular — knowing how to keyboard efficiently, being able to operate XYZ program — or they can be quite broad like, as noted here, being a “good digital citizen” which includes many technical and social skills.
We all play a role in teaching students these skills. Of course, parents are their children’s first teachers, so modeling an effective approach to using technology across a variety of contexts, managing one’s own screen time, and setting expectations for children about their use of technology and media is important. Then, yes, the responsibility will fall squarely on the shoulders of educators, as it so often does for all other “wrap around” elements of our work in terms of emotional, financial, health, and other elements of a child’s whole self and education.
Question 4 – What should our centers be doing to make sure we continue to support students with technology expectations of schools and ultimately the job market?
At a minimum, we should be teaching students how to evaluate their own uses of media and technology, to help them be metacognitive about the decisions they are making, both in and out of school. At the next level, I think that we should be teaching them how to explore, evaluate, and employ digital tools and information in creative, academically-appropriate ways. Then, we need to teach them how to collaborate effectively with one another, as well as with others (peers and adults) outside the walls of school.
Open Q & A with Audience
What advice would you give teachers who want to help students identify real news from fake?
What writing types/formats provide the best digital literacy practice for students prepping to enter college or the workforce?
First, let me begin by saying that, just as I would want for my own children, I want all kids to learn how to read and write, both with pencil and paper, as well as with smartphones and laptops. These are tools. So, let’s not confuse the tool with the task.
That said, I would also want for all children, including my own, the opportunity to write in many different genres, for a variety of audiences, and a whole continuum of purposes. So, we know from research on best practices that students need models, they need practice, and they need feedback. They need all of these things, all the time.
Check out Traci Gardner’s list from chapter 4 of her Designing Writing Assignments book: “Defining New Tasks for Standard Writing Activities”
Is informal language (text speak) ever okay in school writing assignments?
Yes. Depending, of course, on the assignment.
For instance, in writing an essay on text speak, you would certainly want to include examples. If you were writing a story. Even in informal writing assignments (quick writes).
But, as has always been the case with grammar, when we get our writing to a point that it will be made (more) public, we want to make sure that we are using an appropriate tone, with appropriate vocabulary. Context matters.
We also tossed out a number of other ideas/tools in various parts of the conversation, including:
There are, I’m sure, more… but this is what I could recall from the conversation this morning. My hope is that the conversation was useful for those at the event, and that this round up is useful for my readers.
Based on the book that I wrote with Kristen Hawley Turner, Argument in the Real World, one of the tools/strategies that I have been sharing in workshops this past year is the “MINDFUL” heuristic for readers and writers as they engage in academic arguments with, through, and about social media.
When we were wrapping up the book in early 2016, even before “fake news” and “alternative facts” became a phenomenon, Kristen and I designed this heuristic to fill in the gaps that we felt existing website evaluation checklists were missing.
In short, those checklists and other tools were created in the early days of the web when we – as educators and information consumers – generally placed the onus of responsibility on the creator for being accurate. This, of course, was a holdover from our view of the printed word having gone through extensive review and editing in order to be published. The power of books, periodicals, encyclopedias and similar sources came from the fact that they were curated by experts.
Yet, with the abundance of material emerging on the information superhighway, educators, especially librarians, knew that careful editing and peer review weren’t happening all the time. We needed to create a way for students to understand that some creators were thoughtful and accurate, while others were misleading or creating an outright hoax. So, we held those creators to task by engaging with such checklists as readers so we could bring a critical eye to what we were reading/viewing. We also encouraged students to never trust a blog, or Wikipedia, or other sources that were not well-vetted. (Of course, we have since changed our tune. A bit).
At any rate, website evaluation checklists worked okay, for a while at least.
However, this was before the vast majority of us became content creators in the Web 2.0 era. Blogs, wikis, and other forms of media were being created at a constant pace and, unfortunately, with different audiences, purposes, and degrees of veracity.
More recently, through social media, we are all creators, curators and circulators. Our roles as writers have changed. The role of the reader – as someone with agency and perspective in the online reading and writing process – also needed to take responsibility for the types of arguments being created and perpetuated.
What Kristen and I wanted to do, then, was to rethink this instructional strategy of website evaluation. We came from the stance of helping students –as both readers and writers of social media – to recognize that (borrowing from Lunsford, Ruszkiewicz, and Walters’ book title) everything is, indeed, an argument.
Retweets and likes are, despite the disclaimers, endorsements. And, by extension, arguments. The way that we see evidence presented in social media matters because it will inform our own stance, as well as the perspectives of others with whom we engage. We create arguments through the act of liking, retweeting, reblogging, or otherwise endorsing, let alone when we create our own updates, tweets, or blog posts.
Rethinking the traditional website evaluation tool meant that we need to consider the challenges that new media, new epistemologies, and new perspectives all bring. In other words, it was no longer enough to simply read the “about” page, do a WHOIS lookup, or even try to understand more about the language/discourse being used on the page/post.
We needed something different. Hence, MINDFUL.
We wanted to help teachers, in turn, help their students slow down just a bit – even a nano second before retweeting, or a few moments when crafting an entire post – and to think about how arguments in digital spaces are constructed, circulated, and perpetuated.
I think that MINDFUL is helpful in doing just that. Below, you will find slides that I have been using over the past few months as well as links to additional resources I discuss in the presentation.
Monitoring our own reading and writing means that we must be aware of and account for Confirmation Bias. Of course, helping students (and ourselves) to do that requires a number of strategies, which are outlined in the rest of the heuristic.
Identifying the claim means that we must separate the opinions that someone offers from the facts that may (or may not) support the claim. A refresher on Fact vs Opinion from Cub Reporters is a useful place to begin, even for adults.
Noting the type of evidence and how it supports the claim is useful. As a way to think through different types of evidence – In the claims they can support – it is worth taking a look at the Mathematica Policy Research Report “Understanding Types of Evidence: A Guide for Educators“
Focusing on the facts requires us to check and double check in the ways that researchers and journalists would. Despite claims to the contrary from those on the fringes, sites like Snopes, Politifact, and FactCheck are generally considered to be neutral and present evidence in an objective manner. Also, there are lots of objective datasets and reports from Pew Research.
Understanding the counterargument is more than just seeing someone else’s perspective and empathizing/disagreeing. We need to help students understand that arguments may not even be constructed on the same concept of information/evidence and in fact some of it could be one of the 7 Types of Mis- and Disinformation from First Draft News.
Finally, leveraging one’s own response is critical. Understanding the way that fake news and other propaganda is constructed and circulated will help us make sure that we do not fall into the same traps as writers WNYC’s On the Media provides a Breaking News Consumers Handbook for Fake News that is, of course, helpful for us as readers and viewers, but could also be a guide for what not to do as a writer.
My hope is that these websites/resources are helpful for teachers and students as they continue to be mindful readers and writers of social media.
In the session slides, Andy and Rachel share the ways that he taught the Connecting Evidence to Claims mini-unit. In particular, they described the ways in which students engaged in dialogue, a point that I tried to summarize… and captured quite well by Jen Ward:
“Argumentative writing is not about winning. It’s about creating a dialogue.” via @hickstro at #MCTE17
Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to lead a workshop for teacher consultants at the Oregon Writing Project at SOU. Fall in Oregon is beautiful, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to be here.
Like all the workshops I do, it was a unique experience in the sense that I begin with some idea of a plan and, as I interact with the teachers, I make moves from one topic and activity to the next based on their needs and interests. I’ve used this model for nearly all of the workshops that I have done in the past ten years. Call it flexibility, call it intuition. I am not sure. I just can’t plan out, minute-by-minute, a workshop that will be “delivered” to an unwitting audience. I want to be a professor who teaches, not just one who professes.
At any rate, their site director, Margaret Perrow, and I had time to talk on Thursday night, and I had shared my strategy for leading workshops. We talked about flexibility, especially as it relates to using digital tools. She then told me how each teacher in their summer institute will often choose a guiding metaphor to describe themselves, and how they will carry their metaphor throughout the SI and into their writing.
Her metaphor, for me, became “the hyperlink.”
In all the best ways, that gave me pause to think. And I kept thinking about it all day yesterday and into this morning.
Unlike many workshops that I do, this one (on the west coast) didn’t require me to rush off yesterday afternoon to catch a plane (because the flights home didn’t go that late!), so I was able to stay another day. I’ve had some time to think, and I have continued to ponder this guiding metaphor over the past 24 hours.
Immediately, I thought of Bud Hunt’s “Teaching Blogging Not Blogs,” which has been a seminal piece in my thinking about what it means to teach and learn digital writing, and I am spending my few minutes at the airport to reread his work and think about it even more.
Despite Bud’s concern that he is aging (hey, aren’t we all), I think that his post has, indeed, aged well. Written in 2010 as a summary of ideas about blogging (and hyperlinking) from 2005 forward, here are some of the relevant quotes for me as I reflect on what occurred in yesterday’s workshop and, metaphorically, think of myself as the hyperlink.
Blogging is that set of skills that he [Will Richardson] talks about. It’s the reason why I want the students that I work with to use blogs — in the end. But I don’t think that many of them will start with that skill.
Bud’s point here — that students need to experience how we, as writers, use blogs — resonates with the broader philosophy of the National Writing Project: teachers must be writers themselves. In this case, he is talking about how teachers can be digital writers and think about using links in strategic ways. In turn, when I lead a workshop, I want teachers to see me model the kinds of teaching that I want them to do. Without being trite, I want to be the change in the world (of teaching with digital writing tools). When teachers can see a model for digital writing and learning in my workshops, my hope is that they, like students, will begin to build their own skills. Linking requires us to stretch in these new directions.
Digital texts have the potential to make a big, juicy mess of a linear experience. Or to turn a so-so piece of writing into a masterful collection of references, linktributions, and pointers to other good stuff. My hunch, a rough one, but one I’ve held for a while, is that reading and writing that way makes you (ultimately) a better reader and writer. I just don’t really think I know how to teach that way yet, or at least, I don’t know how to teach other people to think about teaching that way.
This is a quote that I’ve cited before, and I agree with Bud’s hunch. Reading and writing (in a digital space) has the potential to make you a better reader and writer overall. As the news media and some sensationalist scholars would have us believe, it has the potential to make things (much) worse, too. I suppose that the jury is still out on that.
Anyway, during my workshops, I am usually faced with a question. Many versions of the question abound, but one teacher I worked with yesterday asked it pretty bluntly: why should we be asking our students to do this (digital reading and writing) work?
I am not entirely sure how I answered: modeling and mentoring are important, it’s the world in which we live, it’s part of the standards and digital literacies. Something along those lines.
But, at the core, I want teachers and students to be smarter, more productive readers and writers. Being the hyperlink — connecting them to new visions for teaching practice — is, indeed, what I hope I am doing.
Blogging as experimenting. Want us to try out a tool or a lesson or an activity? Post it here along with some instructions and, perhaps, a question or two to guide our exploration/experimentation.
Experimenting is risky, and doing so in front of an audience is even more so. I want the teachers with whom I work to experience risk by trying out new tools and practices, so I need to risk, too. Without a doubt, there will be a link that doesn’t work, a question I can’t answer, or a tool that won’t load on someone’s machine. That is risky, and it causes many teachers to feel (at least) a small degree of panic. I want to model for them how I handle that stress, how I problem solve, how I adapt and move on. Hyperlinks take us from one place to the next. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.
But, you have to keep clicking, keep linking.
Again, being the metaphorical hyperlink is something that I can aspire to. Thank you to Margaret for the metaphor, to Bud for your reflections, and to the entire NWP network for continued opportunities that amaze and enlighten me.
Best Practices in Writing: Integrating Digital Tools
Register Now!
Join Dr. Troy Hicks and Dr. Isabel Sawyer for a FREE(!) day of professional learning as they discuss best practices in writing instruction through the integration of digital resources sponsored by Marlene Malkin and the Center for the Collaborative Classroom.
As I mentioned earlier in the week, I had an opportunity to collaborate and learn with about 130 other teachers, librarians, and higher ed faculty at the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy. Given that this was my second go-round, I had some idea of what would happen day-to-day, and over the arc of the entire week, and again the institute met and exceeded my expectations.
First, I appreciate having had the chance to collaborate with Jill Castek on our Thursday keynote, “Deepening Assessment, Digitally.” Here are the slides, as well as many additional links.
The other key takeaway for me — which is really just a reiteration of what I have learned from my colleagues in the National Writing Project — is that relevance, relationships, and reflection are at the heart of learning, for both kids and adults. No secret here; just a gentle reminder that great learning takes all three of these elements, and those elements are fostered through sustained immersion in an intensive, sometimes disruptive, yet ultimately supportive and growth-oriented environment.
Both summers at URI have provided this for me, and in a slightly different manner than what I experience in NWP work. One protocol that we use at the end of the day, both with participants and faculty, is a group discussion of “highlights and lowlights.” Not meant to be a space for problem-solving, it is a structure that allows us all to share the best and worst part of each day in a setting where our colleagues listen empathically. While I was quite tired at the end of each day, those conversations were rich, and I am still thinking through what everyone brought to them.
So, the reminder that these elements all matter is a good one, and knowing that there are multiple paths to pursue as we lead our colleagues in professional growth is a good reminder, too. I’m heading back to Michigan with a renewed appreciation for what it takes to immerse one’s self in a digitally-rich learning experience, and that we need to take time to build those three R’s of a true twenty-first century education: relevance, relationships, and reflection.
This week, I head to Rhode Island for my second year as a faculty member in the Summer Institute in Digital Literacy in Providence. I’ve been fortunate to be part of the leadership team again, and I look forward to working with educators from a variety of contexts: K-12 teachers, librarians, higher education instructors, and more. One key portion of my work this week is to collaborate with Jill Castek (University of Arizona) to prepare a keynote session for Thursday morning, “Deepening Assessment, Digitally.”
My interests in deepening assessment have been, well, deep, for a number of years. In 2015, I published Assessing Students’ Digital Writing, a collection in which I had worked with seven National Writing Project colleagues to examine their students’ work through the use of protocols. Our discussions about their students’ work led to their individual chapters, and the collection as a whole reminds me that we can, with diligence and discernment, broaden the kinds of digital writing we ask students to do and, more importantly, the ways that we respond to their digital writing.
Since that time, I have become even more interested in how we can use various media (text, audio, and video) to respond to students’ work. Through many courses that I’ve taught, as well as presentations and workshops I’ve delivered, I’ve been meeting more and more teachers who are interested in providing, with technology, even more timely, specific, and goal-oriented feedback to their students. For instance, I am curious to know more about how we might carry on asynchronous conferences with our students using tools like Voxer or Kaizena, or how we might have students reflect on their own learning by creating screencasts in which they describe the decisions that they have made when crafting digital writing.
Thus, as I head into planning for my keynote this week, there are a few key questions driving the presentation that Jill and I will deliver.
How do you define “formative assessment?”
In what ways do we typically think about using technology for formative assessment?
How might we use technology to help students deepen meta-cognition and reflection?
We plan to have participants engage with these questions through some brief pre-writing, pair-share conversations, and by analyzing some examples of student work/reflection. For my part, I am returning to a video that my daughter and I recorded a few years ago, In it, Lexi reflects on a number of the choices that she made to craft a piece of digital writing. As I reconsider the video for this week, a few of the questions I want people to consider include:
In what ways could we prompt and encourage students to create screencasts like this in order to describe their decision-making process as digital writers? What, specifically, are the questions that we should ask of students so they can substantively engage in reflection?
If we are asking students to assess their own work in this way, how might we move beyond using rubrics as a way to provide feedback? What, specifically, would we as educators want to discuss/reply to in a student’s work at this level?
Ultimately, if we shift to deeper, more substantive assessment practices that utilize technology in new ways, what implications will this have for our curriculum and instruction as well?
There are, of course, quite a few days (very full, active days) that will assuredly cause me to think more about these questions and how to frame the talk for Thursday morning. Also, I will have time to talk with Jill, which I very much look forward to, and we will have new ideas to consider together.
Still, the core of the presentation will remain the same. Jill and I want to push participants’ thinking about both why and how they assess student work. In turn, we hope that the process will open up more opportunities for them to think about their own teaching, in their own context, and to take these types of questions and conversations back to their colleagues once the institute ends.
Having been on my “to read” list for quite some time, I was finally able to dig into an oft-mentioned book: Alvin Tofler’s 1970 look at, well, today, Future Shock.
I had not read it before, though I see one of his quotes mentioned quite often: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
Quite awhile ago, I had heard a story about the book on NPR, and was reminded that a copy still sat upon my bookshelf. Why I hadn’t cracked the cover, I am not sure. And, of course, hindsight is 20/20, so there are tributes to Toffler’s insight, as well as critiques. Prediction is a tough business, so I don’t really want to offer either. Also, I will be honest… I made it about 2/3 of the way through, and then took a fast-forward jump to Chapter 18: “Education in the Future Tense.” So, some of the quotes below are from earlier in the book and some from that section, and I need/want to finish the entire book.
So, here, I want to just pull out a few quotes that speak to the current state of debate when it comes to education, school choice, and ed tech, without offering too much additional commentary.
On education:
“Failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system.” (274)
On technology:
“Moreover, in the educational world of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important… A good deal of education will take place in the student’s own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of his own choosing… he will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep classroom.“ (275)
On individuality:
“It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety… technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices—and our freedom—exponentially.” (282)
On mass schooling:
“Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed… The inner life of the school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to industrial society. The most criticized features of education today – the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher – are precisely those that made mass public education so effective in instrument of adaptation for its place and time.” (400)
He goes on to know how progressives such as John Dewey were trying to instill ideas of “presentism,” and to push back against the ideas of the education industrial complex. I’m still not sure that we are all reading enough Dewey. At any rate, back to the quotes:
On the connection between school and work:
“In such a world, the most valued attributes of the industrial era become handicaps. The technology of tomorrow requires not millions of lightly lettered men, ready to work in unison at endlessly repetitious jobs, it requires not men who take orders in unblinking fashion, aware that the price of bread is mechanical submission to authority, but men who can make critical judgments, who can leave their way through | novel environments, who are quick to spot new relationships in the rapidly changing reality.” (402-3)
On the study of history and social issues:
“It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past. It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for this here-and-now environment will soon vanish. Johnny must learn to anticipate the directions and rate of change. He must, to put it technically, learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasingly long-range assumptions about the future. And so must Johnny’s teachers.” (403)
On the structure of schooling:
“This trend [toward a knowledge-based industry] will be sharply encouraged by improvements in computer-assisted education, electronic video recording, holography, and other technical fields. Parents and students might sign short-term “learning contracts” with the nearby school, committing them to teach-learn certain courses for course modules. Students might continue going to school for social and athletic activities or for subjects they cannot learn on their own or under the tutelage of parents or family friends. Pressures in this direction will mount as the schools grow more anachronistic, and the courts will find themselves deluged with cases attacking the present obsolete compulsory attendance laws. We may witness, in short, a limited dialectical swing back toward education in the home.” (406)
On the nature of truth as it relates to schooling:
“Given further acceleration, we can conclude that knowledge will grow increasingly perishable. Today’s “fact” becomes tomorrow’s “misinformation.” There is no argument against learning facts or data – far from it. But a society in which the individual constantly changes his job, his place of residence, his social ties and so forth, places an enormous premium on learning efficiency. Tomorrow’s schools must therefore teach not merely data, but ways to manipulate it. Students must learn how to discard old ideas, how and when to replace them. They must, in short, learn how to learn… By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to the education.” (414)
My hope is that I can find some time to read the last third of the book and, perhaps, watch the documentary.
In the meantime, I just wanted to share the quotes that I found compelling in hope that it will give me some ideas to talk about/from in the PD events I have coming up this summer. My hope is that Toffler (and his wife’s unattributed) work still resonates for you, too.
