In this piece I attempt to coalesce conversations with my own Digital Literacy Team, the voices of our companion Lead Sites, and the voices of numerous writers who have fueled my own thinking.  At this point, no real attempt at citation is being made.  My intent now is to grab hold of the ideas and see how they connect and what picture they paint; later I will formalize the document when the ideas gain real clarity.

Introduction

It is a fundamental assumption that the goal of education is to educate a populace.  While many definitions and descriptions exist concerning the notion of an educated populace, few would argue against the inclusion of literate as one appropriate descriptor.  Defining literacy, however, presents another obstacle.  Freire refers to literacy as "ways of reading the world."  While this presents an intriguing and abstract way of talking about and thinking about literacy, how does that translate into practice and how can we mediate among the various types of literacies (e.g., media literacy, information literacy, visual literacy)?

Ladi Semali believes that media literacy, information literacy, and video literacy represent "different centers of interest and how meaning is acquired, interpreted, and transmitted..."  This explanation could easily be expanded to include other kinds of literacies and perhaps suggests to use that we might want to emphasize various literacies as ways to provide teachers with different ways of thinking about entering the content and representing the learning. 

Shambaugh talks about fluency vs. literacy and this may be a useful way of talking about the outcome of learning.  Fluency, he says, connotes expertise, the ability to synthesize and to use the medium effectively.  To be fluent with information technology requires certain skills, concepts, and capabilities.  To be fluent with media literacy requires certain skills, concepts, and capabilities.  Is there a foundational set of skills, concepts, and capabilities that cut across all literacies?

In my readings about digital literacy, media literacy, and information literacy I find common ground (see chart below).  Do these represent a foundational set of skills, concepts, and capabilities to be interpreted through the differing literacy lenses?

Transformation and Change

From the literature on transformational learning and change, we know that most learning occurs through the developmental processes of assimilation and accommodation.  Learners, when confronted with new knowledge typically engage in a process called assimilation.  In assimilation, learners attempt to assimilate new knowledge into existing knowledge structures or paradigms.  They will persist in this process until the new knowledge no longer fits into their existing structures thus rendering their current paradigm obsolete.  At this point, attempts to assimilate the knowledge dissolve and learners adopt a new strategy called accommodation.  It is because the learner no longer has a working paradigm that accommodation becomes possible and even necessary.   

It follows then that teachers will use the process of assimilation when making their initial attempts at using technology within their teaching practice.  They will take new ideas about technology and attempt to fit those ideas into their existing teaching and learning paradigms.  These teachers often end up using technology to accomplish tasks that are currently being completed without technology.  Once teachers enter the accommodation stage of learning they begin to revise their paradigms, envisioning new content, new goals, and new activities.  This is transformation.

How do teachers move from assimilation to accommodation?  How can we facilitate the shift from assimilation to accommodation for our teachers?  In what ways can we facilitate the paradigmatic changes that force teachers to move from assimilation to accommodation? 

We must be ever aware that in designing our in-service opportunities we will not only be defining content, structure, and strategies for our participants, we are also providing models of content, structure, and strategies our participants can first assimilate and later accommodate into their own teaching practices (adapting, of course, for their particular context).  In addition, we want our professional development activities to be dynamic, contribute to participant growth, and to lead participants to understand or appreciate later experiences (Dewey). 

Each activity or professional development opportunity could address a discrete concept.  A series of these opportunities could represent a greater or broader concept and we want teachers to gain from individual opportunities as well as from the whole series, encouraging them to participate in the series as that represents the way in which we believe people learn and ultimately transform.

Units?

We've wanted to situate our work in function and issues, not in tools.  Here's what we came up with initially:

Questions

1. How will we assess our work?
2. What do we know about change?
3. How/where can we capture all of our questions/observations, and so forth?
4. Should we focus on developing a common set of skills?
5. How are we programming to grow leaders?
6. In what way are online communities different from face to face communities?
7. What are the critical aspects of context?
8. What does the transformation process look like?
9. What happens to the curriculum when technology becomes part of the equation?
10. What happens to literacy when technology becomes part of the equation?
11. How long does it take to develop new habits of working (thinking)?
12. Can you form a community of writers online?
13. How do online experiences impact teachers?
14. To what extent do the people we are working with have influence on others?
15. How do teachers use metaphors to talk about their teaching?
16. How do communities form?
17. Why do communities form?
18. What brings me to a community and keeps me in that community?
19. How can we start working with the administration instead of around them?
20. What model can we provide to help our colleagues describe and understand their own technology context?
21. Is there a basic toolkit in terms of hardware, software, and teacher skills?
22. How much do teachers have to know to facilitate the development of digitally literate students?
23. Can we in our training activities model the behaviors and habits of mind we want our students to have and can we make explicit what we're doing so they will do the same for their own students?
24. How can we build bridges between skills we hope teachers will acquire and the outcomes their students must demonstrate?

Posted by Karen Leigh McComas on 5/1/05; 9:35:25 AM to the ti Department
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