Howard Gardner, who has made a lucrative career labeling skills and talents like musical ability and athleticism “intelligences,” is now doing the same for literacy. In an essay in the Washington Post, the Harvard professor is untroubled by dire reports of declining literacy because — what else? — “an ensemble of literacies — will continue to thrive, but in forms and formats we can’t yet envision.”
Thankfully, Gardner observes that “even in the new digital media, it’s essential to be able to read and write fluently and, if you want to capture people’s attention, to write well.” He doesn’t foresee books disappearing, although the printed word bound up at length between covers may lose its most-favored format status.
“But whatever our digital future brings, we need to overcome the perils of dualistic thinking, the notion that what lies ahead is either a utopia or a dystopia,” Gardner concludes. “If we’re going to make sense of what’s happening with literacy in our culture, we need to be able to triangulate: to bear in mind our needs and desires, the media as they once were and currently are, and the media as they’re continually transforming. It’s not easy to do. But maybe there’s a technology, just waiting to be invented, that will help us acquire this invaluable cognitive power.”
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Patrick Welsh, a 30-year veteran English teacher, goes to work every morning at one off the most expensive school buildings ever constructed. Opened last September, the $98 million T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia has “a cafeteria that looks like something out of an upscale mall” and its classrooms are packed with every technological gadget a teacher could imagine.
“So you’d think T.C. teachers would be ecstatic,” writes Welsh in the Washington Post. “But it’s just the opposite — faculty morale is the lowest and cynicism the highest I’ve seen in years. The problem? What a former Alexandria school superintendent calls ‘technolust’ — a disorder affecting publicity-obsessed school administrators nationwide that manifests itself in an insatiable need to acquire the latest, fastest, most exotic computer gadgets, whether teachers and students need them or want them. Technolust is in its advanced stages at T.C., where our administrators have made such a fetish of technology that some of my colleagues are referring to us as “Gizmo High.”
Welsh wonders whether all the gadgetry is actually getting in the way. “The big question isn’t whether teachers like spending their time learning one new gizmo after another,” he writes, “but whether a parade of new technologies will help kids learn. From what I can see, that’s not the case.”
One of the favorite ed shibboleths is the one about how it’s futile to teach content because the store of human knowledge increases too quickly. The goal of education should be to think critically and “learn how to learn.” Content is just data with a short shelf-life in the era of Google.
A study by University College London for the British Library makes that case a little harder to make. The “Google Generation” are certainly more comfortable with technology, but knowing how to search and being good at it are not the same. Indeed, the report labels as ” a dangerous myth” the notion that kids born after 1993 are expert searchers. “A careful look at the literature over the past 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills,” says the report. “The information literacy of young people, has not improved with the widening access to technology. In fact, their apparent facility with computers disguises some worrying problems.” Among them…
- Speed kills: “Young people’s web searching means that little time is spent in evaluating information, either for relevance, accuracy or authority.”
- Info glut: “Faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented.”
- Kids don’t know what they don’t know: “The problem here is that they simply do not recognize that they have a problem: there is a big gap between their actual performance in information literacy tests and their self-estimates of information skill.”
Whether or not our young people really have lower levels of traditional information skills than before, we are simply not in a position to know,” the report concludes. “However, the stakes are much higher now in an educational setting where ‘self-directed learning’ is the norm. We urgently need to find out.”
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