apcampbell

Dave Warlick posts a fictitious, but certainly not unrealistic letter from a principal to the parents of his school’s students. In it, he writes:

Your child is receiving the best writing instruction in the region, but our children are not being taught to communicate. The future will demand people who can express themselves effectively with images, animation, sound, and video, but our students are not learning these skills in our school. Character education remains one of the major focuses here, but we are doing little to understand and teach about the new ethics of information.

Skillful communication with people through digital media is already a must in today’s global society, yet many teachers are still entrenched in outdated modes of asking for paper essays to be submitted after reflection on lecture notes and reading material. While that is unarguably a valuable exercise, it should, if possible, be enhanced with institutionally encouraged conversation and dialogue via the internet, with people from different cultural and geographic locales, both for the purposes of gaining wider perspectives on any given particular issue, and for mastering communication using digital media - something that will be necessary for their success in whatever livelihood they choose to pursue.

And I think it goes without saying that, as with any other educational pursuit, issues of correct moral action should always be present in discourses concerning learning and the use of digital media. I think Dave is right: for institutions of learning to ignore the changing nature of information and technology is a failure. I just wonder how many schools are embracing these technological changes and how many are resisting?