Literacy for a New Era

This is the starting line as I began a period of independent thought and study.

In past generations, students received most of their information from teachers, school books, and libraries. Once receiving information, students initially had to learn, understand and remember the facts. Higher levels of education called for analysis, application, synthesis and evaluation – all steps on Bloom’s Taxonomy in the cognitive realm.

These skills are still needed in an increasingly global world.

But now that the access to information is virtually unbarred, students must develop an additional, almost pre-requisite skill set. For past generations, data was static – now much of the data students can access is dynamic and ever-evolving.

For example, when I was in the 4th grade, the social studies curriculum was New York state. I could read the textbook, listen to the teacher, watch a filmstrip in class, and pull information from a library book or encyclopedia to learn about the topic. My knowledge base was almost identical to that of my older brothers, and that of my younger brothers – little changed over the decade we spanned.

Today? A basic search on the www would yield more information than I could process in a lifetime. In six months, the same search terms typed into the same search engine might lead me in a dozens of new directions. Not only am I no longer limited to my textbook, teacher, and the library for information, but I have more data than those sources could ever provide for me.

So . . . where does this go? My preliminary thought is that there are initially three literacy skills that jump out at me as being particularly critical. They are:
• Accessing information (can I find the data I want?)
• Evaluating sources (how reputable are my sources?)
• Pre-synthesis (can I pull sources together in such a way that I can begin to understand them?)

This is the starting line . . . where the course leads will continue to evolve.