21st Century Literacy

An Old Curmudgeon Looks at 21st Century Literacy

A review of Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century (2004) by David Warlick

The last time that the Technology and Learning Conference came to town was November 2005. The T + L conference, as it is known, is put on by the National School Board Association, in conjunction with their annual conference, and is truly one of the big-time educational technology events of the year. It is a long week touting the wonders of technology to raise student achievement, enhance school-wide communication, and make teachers’ and administrators’ lives more efficient and meaningful. Keynote speakers, full rounds of specialized seminars, roundtable discussions, and, of course, every technology vendor in the country hawking their wares leaves little wonder that education is on the cusp of a sea change once the will and monetary resources are routed in that direction.

One could hardly miss references to David Warlick and his recently published book, Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, at the conference. His ideas seemed to capture the spirit of much of what was said, and references to him were pervasive in the seminars and sessions that I attended. His was the voice that gave credence to much of the new approach to education that lay just over the horizon. With the proliferation of technologies that have escalated since then, especially those that seem to fit under the Web 2.0 banner, his ideas seem even more prescient two and a half years later. Judging from his own blog (2¢ Worth: Teaching and Learning in the Education Landscape) and by references to him in other blogs, he still seems at the center of an expanding group of educators who have grabbed hold of Web 2.0 technologies as a means of communication and learning that will finally begin to deliver on the promise of technology to liberate education from the factory model and help each student reach his or her full potential.

Forgive me, for I overreach a bit. But on revisiting Redefining Literacy a couple of years later, that’s the conclusion that I have come to reach.

Warlick begins with the basic premise that our students are growing up with powerful information and communication technologies that change the nature of education. "We should seek to retool our classrooms by redefining literacy." (p. x, intro) "If all our children learn to do is read, they will not be literate." (p. 21) The heart of the book then contains rationale and strategies for expanding the three R’s (reading, writing, ‘rithmetic) to include the 3 E’s: Exposing knowledge, Employing information, Expressing ideas, plus a 4th E: Ethics and context.

In the chapter devoted to exposing knowledge, Warlick includes finding information, decoding and evaluating what is found, and then organizing that information into personal libraries. He suggests a number of strategies to help teachers and students apply these skills, such as keeping search logs, using evaluation forms, and storing book marks in publicly accessible folders. He also suggests that personal information networks--although he doesn’t use that label yet--may be very effective in locating valuable information and ideas. Under the second E, employing information, Warlick looks at different ways of manipulating text, numbers, images, audio, and video with a number of applications. He also suggests that writing, the traditional way of employing ideas, will have less importance as a skill and a craft than reassembling ideas and information. Students will spend more time "adding value" to information that already exists. (Its certainly seems to be the idea that drives many of the social bookmarking and blog sites today.) I’m not sure that I understand the distinction between those skills and the third E: expressing ideas compellingly. There, Warlick tosses out a number of suggestions for formating text and images as well as using animation, video, web publishing, and programming to convey the message that students want to express. At this juncture, Warlick sounds like an old "writing process" teacher, "Students should produce authentic information products, aimed at real audiences with meaningful goals in mind," (65) and spends some time in explaining how to design "authentic assignments." Finally, Warlick looks at the ethics of using and sharing this information. He suggests that "teaching students how to produce information may lead them to becoming more responsible consumers of information." (94) To this end, Warlick suggests that authentic assignments based on students’ information needs and addressed to real audiences might cause them to feel ownership in their own products and so to "creatively eliminate the desire in people to cause mayhem in cyberspace." (92) Here he includes a code of ethics for teachers and students adapted from the Society for Professional Journalists:

• Seek truth and express it

• Minimize harm

• Be accountable

• Respect information and its infrastructure.

The bottom line is that we must begin educating and graduating students who can teach themselves. We are preparing them for a future that is unknown to us and that will look quite different from what we’ve known in the past--or in the present. Warlick quotes the chief economist from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Michael Cox, who told students that they would hold "at least five jobs after [they] graduate, four of which have not been invented yet." (10) Educators need to learn to be mentors, facilitators, or consultants, then, rather than purveyors of knowledge and wisdom as we help our students grapple toward this unknown future.

It seems to me that I’ve heard all this before, many times over. I suppose we could look for antecedents in John Dewey--and probably even earlier once we know where to look. These ideas, even down to the online technology and use of personal information libraries, underlie much of George Leonard’s 1968 classic Education and Ecstasy. In a different context, the emphasis on authentic assignments and the ethical use of information fostered by student ownership of ideas and information drove much of the push toward writing process, conceptual objectives, and application level assessments in the mid to late 80’s. These are all ideas in which I have invested heavily. So why is it that Warlick sets off all kinds of red flags for me and triggers my naturally skeptical attitude? Why have I annotated my copy of Redefining Literacy with so many questioning comments and observations that I almost seem cynical of the prospect of education going anywhere much different from where it has been in the past?

My distrust really begins with the first chapter: "Setting the Stage: A Future Fiction," in which Warlick envisions a classroom of tomorrow where middle school students seamlessly communicate with their teachers and each other while constructing rich, thoughtful, meaningful presentations on issues of global importance. My comments take a skeptical tack, however: "this is purely wishful thinking," "these people do not talk like any real teachers I know," or "this scenario just doesn’t ring true to my experience." This future fiction, then, doesn’t just tout the wonders of technologies; it gives a picture of students and their motivation, transformed by this technology, that seems unreal.

From this fiction, Warlick moves into a discussion of preparing students for the 21st century workplace. "It is essential in this time of rapid change that we add futurist to the job description of teacher." (9) That’s when my natural sense of irony kicked in. We have futurists galore in the St. Vrain Valley. We have technology fairs and we have virtual campus and we have technology directors that gush effusively on the wonders of Web 2.0. But we don’t seem to be able to keep our servers up and running, to keep our parents informed on their children’s progress in a timely matter, or to even maintain a reliable electronic gradebook. We made the transition to a new student information management system this year, and being closely identified with it, I can say that the change has been an unmitigated disaster. Perhaps had we spent less time looking to the future and more time taking care of the present, we could have averted a major hardware/software calamity.

Warlick goes on to suggest that a teacher’s use of technology be incorporated into his or her evaluation. This is a widespread idea amongst administrators that I’ve heard over and over again. And yet we have trouble getting enough access for teachers to get their classes into our computing labs now. Frankly, give me a teacher who cares about her students and helps them to become better readers, writers, speakers, and thinkers, and I’ll help her make use of the appropriate technology. Teaching at the high school level still depends primarily on person-to-person interaction, and technology is just an adjunct to it. Any displacement of the human contact is misguided. How many so-called innovations have we seen come into the classroom, been made a part of a teacher’s evaluation, and then disappear when it could no longer be implemented, supported or shown to really contribute to our students’ achievement or well-being?

Then we run into the issue of technology support. Once again, I have to ask how many times that I have witnessed our district--and others--embrace a new technology and then watch its use fade away over time as it becomes obsolete, or broken, or really, just too inconvenient to implement. The resources needed to keep a classroom, a school, or a school district current in technology is pretty astounding, when you get down to it, especially when the new, new thing becomes last year’s--or last decade’s--model over time. We embraced our Macintosh G3 computers when they were placed on each teacher’s desk and connected to the district wide area network, but we were none too sorry to finally see them replaced this last year after nine years of service. The money was just not in the district budget for replacement. It’s all going to come back to political and financial support from the community, and the voters are going to want to see substantial bang for their tax buck. We’re going to have to show the community that technology really does increase the bottom line of achievement. But where are the studies that actually say so? I haven’t been able to find them. And in a world of competition for resources, should we be spending more money on technology or on teacher salaries?

Warlick also claims that digital information can help our students to dig deeper into information, especially as they can use hyperlinked resources to more thoroughly explore a subject before beginning to put their own findings together. "By clicking through words, phrases, and images, they are able to dig into the information, moving deeper into greater understanding." (22) This has not been my experience in working with students. I see students who jump from idea to idea without really digesting the meaning, copying whole passages or even essays with little understanding of what they say or how the information fits into the ideas the students are trying to convey. When Warlick asks, "How much will our evolving tools for processing text change the rules of how we assemble our information products?" (51) wondering if writing as a skill and a craft will have less importance than new ways of reassembling ideas and information, I have to question if that is really the direction we want to move our students. The products that I’ve seen from students, whether poster projects, powerpoint slide shows or video productions, seem to be shallower in understanding of ideas rather than deeper. Students often spend a lot more time on "how it looks" than on "what it says." I’ve seen student after student copy and paste some text, add a few images, and then spend a much greater portion of their time working on the slide transitions and animations. There are no shortcuts to understanding, to thinking, to creating. It’s damn hard work--and boring, too--that we often gloss past when we wax eloquently about a new method, a new technique, a new technology for teaching and learning. If we think that we can make it any easier--or less boring--with technology, we are fooling ourselves. Too often, the technology itself becomes a distraction that leads our students away from the hard cognitive work that is involved in understanding, thinking, and creating. It’s a whole lot easier to follow up a random thought online or work at some presentation glitch than sitting down and doing the hard task at hand which takes us out of our comfort zone and into the stress zone where learning and adaptation take place.

Finally, do the new tools and information formats really call for a redefinition of literacy? Perhaps we should focus more on essential skills rather than seeking to expand our goals and roles. If our students really are moving toward a future that neither we nor they can know or predict, perhaps we are better served by focusing on core skills that will allow them to adapt to new conditions. If we can promote clearer thinking and deeper understanding through traditional reading and writing, let us move in that direction. If a judicious and guarded use of some technological tools will help us achieve those goals, then that’s great, too. As one techno-savvy parent put it, "Teach my children to read, to write, to think, to communicate. The technology will take care of itself after that." Our students will pick up, learn, and adapt the tools that they need when the time comes.

Overall, David Warlick’s book gives me the feel of a person who has been out of the realities of the classroom too long. I certainly don’t get the sense of a person who is having his nose rubbed in the hard realities of classroom teaching on a regular basis, a world where cell phones and text messaging are a distraction, where classroom portals are seen more as another imposition from above than a means of communication, where servers, software, networks and computers crash on a too frequent basis, and where an increase in the numbers and kinds of resources often leads to short-circuiting rather than increasing processing depth. So while I can agree whole heartedly with Warlick’s assertion that "the crucial part of education…is that students learn to teach themselves," (99) I don’t know that the new powerful information and communication tools really do change the nature of education. Perhaps, in this case, less could lead to more.