".. knowing how to effectively participate in this environment is essential for careers, personal life activities, and civic engagement in the 21st Century."
In schools today, "Information Literacy" focuses on inquiry based learning and student-to-student collaboration for learning. Integration of new technologies is a given. Students need to know how to use the tools available to them to work effectively and efficiently. Many of the newest tools, such as wikis and tagging, provide for collaborative work. School library media specialists are strategically positioned to lead learning communities in the responsible uses of technology for learning.
What are these new literacy skills?The new literacies almost all involve social skills developed through collaboration and networking.These skills build on the foundation of traditional literacy, research skills, technical skills, and critical analysis skills taught in the classroom. The new skills include:
Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
Networking— the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.
Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 2006)
These two day "Tech Camp" sessions are designed to help school library media specialists gain a comfort level with some of the 2.0 technologies. Sessions will be informal and collaborative. Strategies for integration into the curriculum will be offered and shared. Topics covered will include: blogs and wikis, tagging, de.lic.ious, flickr and more. If you are unfamiliar with any of these topics, this is the opportunity to get on-board.
More reasons to learn about these new technologies:
Your students are already using many of these tools for collaboration and communication. You can help them use the tools most efficiently and effectively in a learning environment. To do that you need to take the time to play with the tools and see how they work.
And there are plenty of people who aren't using these tools yet. You can help them learn their value in gathering and using information.
These tools can help you be more productive and efficient. But you need to learn more about them to see how they fit into your workflow.
Our profession continues to grow and change, technology is here to stay and will continue to change. We all need to keep up or risk being left behind.
Positive Uses of Social Networking (pdf) During October 2006, YALSA bloggers posted 30 short examples of positive uses of social networking tools in schools and libraries.
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