Not Just Words and Numbers

NetSmart covers five new types of literacy: Attention, Crap Detection, Participation. Collaboration, Network Smarts. In it, Howard Rheingold gives specific aspects of these literacies and how they should we should improve upon these skills.

This means that we as educators need to recognize our own literacies and work to improve them. Even more, it means that we need to consciously teach these literacies just as we would with written literacy and numeric literacy.

One thing that interested me was how much the skills under Attention overlapped with some of the specific skills I do already teach my students. Every week we practice “Concentration” as a skill that can be improved by playing a game that focuses on ignoring distractions outside of our control. We, as a school, have also incorporated Mindfulness into our curriculum and have had coaches come in to talk about Attention and noticing things in the world around us.

I’ve actually made some intentional changes to my own participation after reading this book. I’ve played a game with a rather small community for quite a while now. Like most games, they have forums where players discuss game elements but also other things going on in life.  After reading, I made a concerted effort to participate in the forums for that game posting in various sections at least a few times a week.

For collaboration, we have our large end of year project the Global Awareness Technology Project. I plan to include several mini-lessons that focus on how to work with group members and target shared goals over personal interests.

Am I Going to Go to Jail for This?

I’ve always been an “Ask for forgiveness instead of permission” teacher. As such, I’ve used information pretty much non discriminatorily for whatever educational purpose I needed at the time without giving it too much thought.  I assumed copyright laws were strict, but as long as I didn’t have any students whose parents worked for Disney I considered it a pretty low-risk rule breaking versus the benefit of any educational outcomes I would achieve by using it.

After reading Copyright Clarity, it turns out the way I was using information actually fitted within current copyright laws.  

Under copyright law you can use otherwise copyrighted material under “Fair Use” if you consider the following categories:

1. Is the work being transformed?
2. Does my use of it impact the creator and the creator’s use?
3. Is the work being used for a different purpose than its originator used it?

When I reflect back to the works I used, they definitely met these criteria, however I lacked the information to think through the process before reading. Going forward, I will be able to better evaluate my use of material prior to using it.

Another big impact is how I work with students.  We use Google Images a lot in creating presentations and representations of topics. By helping them understand copyright laws, I can free them to use materials in a way that’s going to promote their learning while also challenge them to evaluate how they’re using these materials in a transformative way.