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George Siemens directs us to Dr. Chris Dede’s article, “Enabling Distributed Learning Communities Via Emerging Technolies- Part One. His six assumptiona about educational improvement are right on target and should be required reading for our current President and every other government official who are in decision-making roles for education. Hear the first one….The most important challenge the U.S. education system faces is not preparing students to do well on high-stakes tests, but rather fostering 21st century skills and knowledge in learners so that they are prepared to participate in our global, knowledge-based civilization. The author gives a couple of good examples of distributed learning strategies for teacher education, induction and professional development. There will be a second part to this article in the October issue of The Journal Online. I look forward to reading it.
All of the articles were good reading but The New Literacy by Sara Armstrong and David Warlick. The authors make the point that learning to learn is an essential skill for a lifetime of self-directed learning. They say that our 3R’s have to evolve into 4 Es to define literacy in an increasingly, and soon to be exclusively, digital and networked world.
Reading -> Exposing Knowledge
Arithmetic -> Employing Information
Writing -> Expressing Ideas Compellingly
Ethics -> Ethics: Right and Wrong on the Information Highway
The authors give some action items for administrators. One that struck me was “When evaluating teacher performance, document evidence that students are learning to find, decode, evaluate inforamtion. Also document evidence that students are employing information to construct new knowledge and communicating what they have learned to authentic audiences.”
My thought here - that’s exactly what we’re trying do to with blogs. We need to start documenting this aspect. This is the piece we need to shape to prove the worth of blogging. I’ve got to think some more on this……….
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