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April 4, 2007
Talkin' tech (take 1)Every once in awhile, BoardBuzz likes to mix it up. Recently, we talked with David Warlick, a leading thinker about kids and technology, and what he said so intrigued us that we had to share it with you. Warlick is the director of The Landmark Project, a web development, consulting, and innovations firm in Raleigh, N.C. His web site, Landmarks for Schools, gets more than six million visits a month. He is the author of three books on instructional technology and 21st century literacy, and has spoken to audiences here and abroad.
In this three-part series, Warlick reflects on what he calls 21st century literacy and what it means for public education and school board members in particular. Here's the first installment.
We often ask, “What do students need to know and be able to do?” On the flip side, what’s your perspective as to what school board members need to know and be able to do (with regards to 21st century literacy)?
Warlick: One thing that school boards need to understand and to make part of every decision is that we are preparing our children for a world that is vastly different from the one we were taught about. We should think about this from three different perspectives. First, from a world perspective, thinking about a marketplace that has changed – an increasingly global marketplace. I was in Shanghai a few weeks ago and saw what has been achieved there in the course of about a dozen years – and it concerns me that we’re still preparing our children for the job down the street in the mill, rather than preparing them to work in a rich and cooperative global economy.
The second perspective is our children. Most of them are growing up within an information experience that is incredibly rich and compelling, and rendering what happens in their classrooms as almost irrelevant. What they experience on a daily basis would have seemed impossible when I was young -- when most school board members were young. Information is an entirely different material to these children. To us, information was something to be consumed. For our children, information is a raw material, something to be worked with, mixed and remixed, and built into something new and valuable.
And finally, the information landscape itself has changed dramatically in the last dozen years. Information is digital, networked, and it is overwhelming, and each of these qualities impacts directly on what it means to be literate. Our notions of the basic skills must expand to reflect the information environment that our children are growing up in.
Board members must also understand how critical the creative arts are (art, music, drama). We do need to invest more in science, math, and technology, but it is just as important to invest in the arts. Think about it – when our children are investing in video games and game systems, they aren’t buying the technology. They are buying the story, the images, the sounds, the plot that they will participate in. They’re buying what the creative arts people have contributed. When we go out and buy an HDTV, we aren’t investing in the technology. We’re investing in a better story, a better picture, better sound, a better aesthetic experience.
Finally, school board members should be part of the effort to keep creative people in their communities. There are parts of the country where creative and skilled graduates are moving out of communities that desperately need to keep those skills. It’s a problem that we need to solve and school board members are in a unique position to do this. Your hometown can be a very good place to live regardless of how you want to make a living with your skills.
Part two of this interview will appear in tomorrow's BoardBuzz, so check back soon.
Posted April 4, 2007 5:12 PM | Education Technology
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