A response to what gets tested: guest post by Mary M

My good friend and colleague, Mary Mehsikomer from Region One up in Morehead, MN. sent this thoughtful reply of my blog entry, "BFTP: What gets tested, gets taught." She has kindly agreed to let me use her comment as a guest post. (Funny how I get more responses from my guest blogs than from what I write. I try not to take it personally.)

I too have struggled a lot with whether information literacy skills should be taught separately or be integrated within the curriculum content areas. Having worked with a couple of standards revision committees, trying to integrate these skills is no easy task, yet to have the skills be authentically mastered, shouldn't they be part of the content areas? When students go to postsecondary education or into the work force they are going to be expected to have these skills and use them as part of academic mastery or accomplishing the tasks required of them by their employer.

And, you are absolutely right - teachers have to focus on what they will assess as part of their teaching.

At this point, I would argue for a separate curriculum, preferably to be taught be a licensed school library media specialist. Here's why:

1. Information literacy is not being effectively taught to students in the content areas now. Yes, there are some teachers who have embraced the need for these skills and work very hard to build them into their instruction, but this is not a widespread practice.
2. Classroom teachers in other content areas have enough trouble getting through the curriculum assigned to them to teach and meet all the standards. It is really difficult for them to build time in to master information/technology literacy in along with everything else.
3. Classroom teachers aren't always confident in their own technology skills nor have they been provided the training to teach these skills themselves. A school librarian should have had the training necessary to do this.
4. The school librarian is supporting all the content areas so he or she may be better positioned to design content-based learning activities within their own curriculum that build the information literacy skills the students need throughout their school day. The school librarian is hopefully clued into the curriculum to do this.
5. Most classrooms still do not have enough technology to make information literacy a regular part of the learning day. At least in most schools there is a lab or some other type of set-up that provides the students with some access to technology in the media center or somewhere else in the building where the librarian can access it.

Of course, we have the problem that we are losing our school librarians to budget cuts, retirements, and other catastrophes - but if administrators were really cognizant about the types of 21st century skills students need to succeed in higher education and today's workforce, and if they really understood the role of a school library media specialist, they would be either hiring highly qualified school library media specialists or insisting that those still employed in their schools be building these skills for their students.

BFTP: CPVP

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post January 24, 2006. Here's a follow-up column: Filtering Follies.

The Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) is the official name of the religious police in Saudi Arabia. I rather like the name itself (where can I get a t-shirt?), but I wouldn't want to be in charge of such an organization in my school. Unfortunately, the propagation of virtue and prevention of vice are roles that some tech departments have assigned themselves. Heaven knows why.

Wes Fryer, the IT Guy at TechLEARNING.com gets it partially right on his personal blog writing mySpace and iSafety. Bless his heart, Wes does advocate for a least-restrictive environment as the best place to teach kids how to use the Internet. As Carol Simpson likes to say, teaching kids Internet safety in an over-filtered environment is like teaching kids to cross the street by never letting them out of the basement.

But what Wes alludes to, but does not address is who, in the end, makes the decision to block or not bock mySpace or any site on the Internet? He only says:

Whether or not the final decision of the district is to block in-school student access to MySpace.com, these issues must be raised and publicly addressed. 

How?

Some readers may know this is a real pet project of mine - getting every district, with the help of our professional associations, to have formal processes in place to determine what web resources are blocked and which are not. And such a process IS workable. We folks on the tech side, need to quickly determine a means of establishing a process for making choices about whether resources should or should not be blocked - or we are in for a world of hurt. And here's why..

• Today a teacher asks that a game site is blocked. The IT department complies.
• Tomorrow a parent asks that a site on gay marriage, dinosaurs, or a right-wing Christian fundamentalist be blocked.
• The day after that, another parent or teacher asks that those sites be unblocked.

Who is left in the middle?  If we have established a past practice of blocking (or unblocking) any request,  we will always have to block (or unblock) every request AND we will probably be spending an inordinate amount of time doing so. 

The decision of whether to block or not block should be done formally, openly, and in the same way any other material challenge is handled in a school district. Period.

IT folks, you really don't want to be considered  your school's Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Don't we have more important jobs to do?

Taylorism and education

As I slowly work my way throught Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, I ran across this passage from the chapter on Google: (reformatted slightly.)

In his 1993 book Technopoly, Neil Postman distilled the main tenets of Taylor’s scientific management.* Taylorsim, he wrote, is founded on six assumptions:

“that the primary, if not the only goal of human labor and thought is efficiency;

that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment;

that, in fact, human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity;

that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking;

that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value;

and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.”

Fredrick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911.

Carr uses the passage to ask if Google is trying to "Taylorize" information acquisition. But what struck me is that our 2011 national and state school improvement efforts seemed to be based on this 1911 model of productivity.

Too bad our kids aren't just little Model Ts rolling off the assembly line.

Oh, Carr's book is one of the best I've read for awhile. Gets bogged down slugs and brain research a little, but overall a thoughtful and fascinating read.