Information society – educational view

As I said in an earlier post; we live in the Information society. An important activity is to create, distribute and handle information. Technology and computers are our tools in this work. We use the internet to search for new information and to communicate with our friends and family; we use the net bank to pay our bills; we post our letters and applications; we may shop shoes and hats, and we educate through this channel. I’m talking about all our daily activities. This implicates that everybody in today’s community needs to be digital.

Before I go on with the educational implications I want you to watch this fabel for Teachers made by Margaret and Susan Meijers. It's called "New Literacies for a New Age".

Does this mean anything for teachers today?

I don’t think we need to teach our students how to play games or how to participate in social networks on the internet. They know how to download music, videos, images etc., and they know how to upload and publish. I thought there was a great need for education about ethics and moral in networks and I thought that our children were irresponsible and immoral in their behavior on the Internet.

A research done by the Norwegian Media Authority shows that Norwegian children mainly use internet for three tings; entertainment, communication and getting information. It also tell us that our children are conscious about what they publish about themselves and friends on the internet and the research report says that today’s students have learned a lot about how to use the Internet safely. That tells us that there has been done something right in our community for the last years and 60% of the children in this research tell that the school has been teaching about safety on internet and about what’s illegal to do.

Anyway… we still got big challenges.

Today’s pupils are more or less extremely technical, compared to most of their teachers. But their brain is less developed than grownups and they don’t always know how to use their digitalism. A common problem in primary school is lack of critical reading and knowledge about how to use resources. Students today need education for Media Literacy to be able to analyse, evaluate and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres and forms. The report from the Norwegian media Authority confirms that searching information is one of the most common activities on the internet. And also the only internet activity we allow our children to do at school.Our student’s google themes they work with and get thousands of matches they don’t know how to use. They are young, maybe naive and got little experience in reading resources. Our job is to teach them how to search more detailed, to tell them what a good resource is and to teach them how to use their recourses legal and critical. This has got to less focus in Norwegian school in my opinion. Our students hardly know what a plagiarism is and they have no idea about when their own texts actually are copies of other peoples work.

Now you may think that this is not a new phenomena and not a product of us being a part of the information society because using resources working out our tasks has always been done. And that’s right! But the big challenge in our ICT world is the enormous quantity of resources, the easy opportunity to just copy a text into our own document and the problem linked to discovering plagiarism when texts are written in the computer and the resources are countless.

In my opinion this is an important implication for our school today. Maybe you think it’s an old problem, but I still think it’s one of the most challenging areas working with infants today, and it’s important to gain critical and adult children! And finally; it's important that students learn how to use the resources of our age.

The report from the research called “Children and digital media 2010” is large, but I suggest you take a look if you are able to read and understand norwegian:)