Continuing with my thoughts from the previous post….

There has been a radical shift in the information landscape in the past decade yet this shift is not mirrored in most schools. The shift has occurred and continues to occur in business where many feel the need to be “cutting edge”, to be competitive. But, in the bureaucracy that is education very little fundamental change has occurred. In fact schools today are not much different then schools of the past two centuries. Testing is still testing though the forms may have changed. Classrooms have white boards instead of black boards. Most students still sit in rows with the teacher lecturing in the front of the room. The general roles of all the principle players remain little changed.

But the truth of the matter is that people now have greater access to information outside of school then in school. Schools and teachers are no longer the gateway to information. In the past books were expensive and limited in availability, to have access one must go to school, and then on to university were the wealth of knowledge was stored. Now one just needs access to the internet, where almost everything you wanted to know can be found, and certainly some things you wish you never knew. What we have now is a world with access to all information. But do we have an educated thought full consumer of that information? This, I believe, is the very critical and future role of education, to prepare our students to be responsible consumers and producers of information. To teach them to use and interpret this vast amount of information. To help them determine what they need to know, and how to find reliable relevant information. We can do this by concurrently teaching 21st century literacy skills and the curricular content. We must support both teachers and students as they learn these new skills in this very fast moving and changing landscape.