The "unholy trinity" - really?

In a recent Dangerously Irrelevant post, my buddy Scott McLeod wrote:

The unholy trinity of student classroom technology usage

1. Taking notes / word processing  (look, we’re using computers!)
2. Looking up stuff  (Google and Wikipedia reign supreme)
3. Making PowerPoints  (and they’re not even good ones)

Really?

I think I could make the case that these might be the "holy" trinity of student technology use, if technology use has so grown in importance that one's eternal salvation or damnation may depend upon it:

1. Word processing: process writing (brainstorming, revising, peer review, publishing) strengthens student communication abilities. I would argue that good writing skills will be an important skill for at least a couple more years ;-)
2. Research. The ability to locate, evaluate, use, and communicate information in digital formats, as I recall, is a part of about every "21st century" skill set I've seen.
3. Communicating in graphic formats. Yup, there are bad slideshows just as there are bad poems, bad videos, and bad debates, but it's format bigotry to toss out an entire medium or tool because of its abuse. Good slideshows give students an opportunity to show design sense, creativity, organization, and a host of other skills that enhance communications.

I can show positive uses for Scott's unholy trinity of classroom teacher use as well - interactive whiteboards (as a tool for gamification), clickers (checks for understanding, opinion polls, discussion starters), and viewing pre-recorded video (increased understanding of content).

I am not sure what the purpose of such a diatribe serves. To embarrass teachers? Yes, any technology can be used badly and it's not hard to find examples of such use in education - at any level. 

But how about a positive contribution to the question you ask "Can we do better (a lot better) than just this?" What might that better look like? 

Scott, I think YOU can do better. These shallow little rants serve no purpose except to make those who are using technology with kids feel inadequate. 

See also Ryan Bretag's Metanoia post "Tools are for making"

Getting your End of the Year report read

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?
Henry David Thoreau

I've long advised that a good communications plan is key to a vital library program and that a good annual report is part of that plan.

Examples of comprehensive and inventive annual reports that I encourage people to examine include:

• Joyce Valenza's Springfield HS End of Year Report 
• Jennifer LaGuarde's Annual Report advice and example (Jennifer has a great blog post on this topic here: School Library Annual Reports: Connecting the Dots Between Your Library and Student Learning. 
• Buffy Hamilton's video and print report

But Jeri Hurd in Rethinking the Library Annual Report (Part 1) challenges this assumption by stating "Annual Reports are a COMPLETE waste of time." She qualifies this statement, but she has a valid point - any report that goes unread, no matter how lovingly crafted, how amazingly complete, or how stunningly designed, is a waste of the librarian's time. 

The key to a successful report lies not in its clarity or composition or medium, but in its direct correlation to the school's goals. Ms LaGuarde suggests this when she writes "I tried to focus on data they [administrators] would actually care about." And just what do administrators care about?

In the column "Who Doesn't Get It?", I suggested:

... most people get “it” [our message about libraries' value] just fine - they just have a different reality that makes our “it” less important to them than to us. 

 As librarians, we can offer the very best hammer in the world, but if your principal, your teachers or your parents really need and want a wrench, a screwdriver or a hacksaw, having a hammer, no matter how wonderful, is simply immaterial. They get “it” that you have a great hammer - it just isn’t relevant or important to them. Even if you think it darned well should be.

That is secret to a powerful year end report - the alignment of our "it" to their "it." Not graphics. Not succinctness. Not reams of data. Show how your program helps meet your building's goals.

And if your building doesn't have goals? Then I would certainly find ways to learn what challenges my principal, teachers, parents, and students face and use those challenges as the basis of my library program goals.

A document that shows how I helped you solve your problems just might be of interest.

Transilliterate

Education and librarianship have a bias toward print. This communication/ information format has served civilization well for a couple millennia. Most professionals now demonstrate high levels of proficiency in print literacy skills and they can be expected to defend the necessity of such skills vociferously. Most of my fellow professionals are in the same straights that I find myself - a competent reader, writer, and print analyst but neophyte video, audio, and graphic producer, consumer, and critic. And it is human nature to be dismissive of those competencies that we ourselves lack.

But I would argue that postliteracy is a return to more natural forms of multi-sensory communication - speaking, storytelling, dialogue, drawing, debate, and dramatization. It is just now that these modes can be captured and stored digitally as easily as writing. Information, emotion, and persuasion may be even more powerfully conveyed in multi-media formats. Libraries for a Post-Literate Society Multimedia & Internet @ Schools, July/August 2009

By any traditional measure, I am considered a literate person. I can read, speak, and write. I do it well enough that others will pay me for using these skills. Being literate has served me well both professionally and personally. I would say this assessment also applies to 99% of all educators I've known.

Yet I am increasingly feeling "trans-illiterate." I lack the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary needed to create a professional looking video, podcast, graphic, or game. I also feel I lack the analytic skills to deconstruct these media as I would a poem, novel, or essay. 

So I need to carefully consider how much my own transilliteracy impacts my answer to this month's ISTE Leading & Learning Point/Counterpoint question: "Should transliteracy replace language arts?" Is "language arts ... due for an update to encompass literacy in all the media that students must navigate in our mediacentric society" is the wicked question. 

Not being transliterate myself, I have a difficult time determining if traditional print literacy is a prerequisite to other literacies. Do I need to be able to write well if I am going created a quality video, for example? My approach to creating a video would be to write a script first, so I would consider traditional literacy foundational to transliteracy. But that's me. 

This feels like a classic "and" not "or" situation. It shouldn't be tradtional language arts or digital literacy but traditional language arts and digital literacy. And I would argue the class should be core at every grade level - required by all students. 

So who would we find among our current generation of teachers and librarians who could teach these fundamental skills for a post-literated society?