eCROP Blog

The currently popular TPACK model separates technology knowledge from pedagogy and content, viewing technology as a set of basic operational skills with a thing or things. This might be useful if it will be seen as the insufficient perspective that it provides. It is the equivalent to saying that writing is the basic operational skill with pencils, pens, books and paper, with skill in using and safely storing and organizing the data put on them, with skill in installing and removing books and articles and switching out procedures for different writing sequences and using the postal service. Yes, we needed to know those things to think with text for the last several centuries, and we need to know basic digital skills for the 21st century but this perspective loses sight of the forest for the trees.

TPACK is a transitional digital immigrant perspective forced on education by its low socio-economic status in our culture. Education’s SES has long prevented digital technologies from becoming ubiquitous for its primary constituents (educators and students) in contrast to the way that digital utilization has evolved in every other major industry of our culture. The TPACK model is akin to someone learning that new language, a learner focused on its underlying structure, not yet fluent, not dreaming in the new language yet.

To the digital natives steeped in the new tools, literacy has been transformed by the digital page. There are two overlapping circles, not three. Digital literacy is content. It is one of the major content areas; software (not hardware) is king; information is valued for its distribution not its possession; technology is the invisible infrastructure that makes it all happen but never the focus of the scene. The new literacy is the particular content that deals with expression and problem solving in the minute-to-minute digital happenings of their lives. These “expressive arts” are the new language arts. The words language, reading and writing are now but a subset of the larger means of expression, understanding and composing.

Digital literacy is so much more than the expression of words, having made significant progress towards having a means for editing, mixing, archiving and transmitting the full range of human senses and unique capacities. The software that holds the ideas for digital understanding and composing has major categories of many variations with a rich history of practice prior to and on the Web: text, still image, video, audio, 2D animation, 3D animation, sensors/robotics, and social interaction. I take literacy to be the capacity to compose and understand what goes on a page (or frame). Arguably within a decade these fundamental elements of digital literacy made most of the former literate world illiterate or functionally illiterate with these newer means of digital expression on screens and Web pages. This takes time for cultural digestion and transition.

This cultural transition should also be seen within a much larger scene. The current economic malaise that so impacts world educational progress can also be seen as a holding action, an impasse between the forces of information and those of wealth and force. Our setting is caused in part by our current culture’s deep misunderstanding of the unique economic and cultural power of information and its current dominating digital nature (over 94% digital), which contrasts to our long practiced history with the cultural powers of wealth and physical power/force (manufacturing, military, agriculture) (Toffler, 1990). The political process of putting the digital natives in positions of significant leadership and authority is going to take some time.

Properly sifted and mixed, data becomes knowledge and occasionally wisdom. The ongoing explosion of information, represented by the graph on the left, has challenged our cultural capacity in the extreme. Your comments and reactions to a much larger article, The Knowledge Society, are encouraged.

The revolutionary struggles in the Middle East, facilitated by the social networking tools of the Web, are one more sign of the titanic struggle between the growing power of Net collaborating and the heterarchical nature of the information versus the Web and the centralized power of the hierarchical forces that President Dwight D. Eisenhower (also commander in-chief of the free-world military in WWII) saw and warned about in his closing address to the nation in 1960 in regard to the industrial-military complex (and in his 1953 Chance for Peace speech). In the United States the next election might be defined as information systems vs. money and weapons systems, the Web vs Wall Street.

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The rapid growth of information provides a constant source of change and new opportunity. Information management can be divided into 3 major divisions, each evolving at their own unique pace: storing information (reaching across time, 23% growth per year); communicating iniformation (reaching across space, 28% growth per year); and computing information (composing or processing, 58% growth per year) (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011). The impact of that growth is continually revealed in a number of cultural changes whose implications are still being analyzed. One sign of the information age transformation from 1950 to 1980 was that manufacturing goods had been eclipsed by information management as the dominant economic activity in the world. The tipping point in information storage occurred in 2002 when more information was stored digitally than in analog format. In 2000, 75% of the world's information was still in analog format (paper, videotape, etc.) but by 2007, 94% was preserved digitally (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011).

Interesting details, by why is pondering the increasing deluge of data important? See the related multimedia composition that addresses the exponential and growing gaps in information storage, analysis, composition and access (the digital divide) that cause problems for all of us. And data is just one of many exponential challenges. How should we deal with them all?

The digital divide is becoming the new "Iron Curtain" of the 21st century. That is, there is a significant group of citizens even in the United States that are walled off from access to the rapidly growing Net by lack of knowledge and wealth to the technology and software of the 21st century. They are increasingly as restricted from participation in the economically and politically viable part of world culture as those left behind the Iron Curtain in the 20th century (left photo). The new digital wall is invisible. It is not created by powerful, nationally centralized and impersonal control from individuals, but by powerful globally decentralized and impersonal networks. In democracies, our vote on policies control access. To move national and global culture forward, citizens are re-examining the nature of the universal rights of citizenship and the value of questioning and communicating that digital access promotes.

The story on What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York in the Nov 2010 issue of Wired explores 311 applications, and puts an accent on Open311. The growing set of 311 applications help citizens report problems such as open manhole covers, graffiti and broken water mains. It was discussed that they also might evolve to collect ideas for areas of need for a community and to direct citizen volunteers to assist in various projects. I see 311 type projects as one more class of question systems, but a type which provides a more substantive focus on real world solutions. Both types provide schools with a ready source of problems that can be used for real problems that can used in different curriculum content areas such as science and language arts.

Ah, the promise of Rome - no, not sparkling fountains. Sorry. The goal is an application suite for the full range of the digital palette for 21st century composition and problem solving (see graphic for elements). That would certainly make our fountains of creativity sparkle. Adobe's decided to leave the rarified air of professional design and come after the home/small business/school market with a highly integrated media suite called Rome.

Curt Hopkins wrote a neat posting titled Our Network is Alive seeking a new name for the Net or Web. Fun! The comments from responders so far have included these names: The Culture, emergence, noosphere, consciousness of Gaia, noocortex, metamind, knot, fabric, mesh, nodes, network, iweb, awakening, enlightenment, overmind, reflexive, 
intervines,
the collective,
 exchangeable,
 avastent ,
avast, 
pangeant, media maze, slice, VALIS-Vast Artificial Living Intelligence System, flambango, metaverse, global digital brain, cellular neural technical network, anti-singularity, rhizome, now-now, flutternet, thinkhammer.