Technology Literacy Inside Higher Ed reports today that the California State system will begin testing students for technology literacy. The article gives no specifics about what the test will cover, but it's being developed with the ETS which already has an ICT (Information and Communication Technology) test. The ETS gives some details about what their test covers. It's a short test (only 75 minutes), but covers everything from sorting email to conducting library research.

What is technology literacy, really, though? As Diana Oblinger points out in the article, technology changes so rapidly, it's difficult to assess what skills one needs. Two years ago, for example, no one really needed to know about podcasts. Now you do. In the comments on the article, there's a debate about the depth of technology students need to know with some commenters suggesting that students need to know how to program. Side note: I don't know much about programming and I have a job in technology. Most of what technology literacy involves, it seems to me, is about learning to manipulate information in various ways. As Dave Warlick puts it, information should be considered raw material as opposed to traditional views of information as end product:

We still teach too much as if information is the end product. We teach it, you learn it, we test it. Instead, we need to present information as a raw material. You access it, and then you do something with it, that adds value in some way.

Looking at it this way, we can begin to think about what students need to know in order to manipulate information better. First, as most librarians will attest, they need to be able to find and evaluate information. For that, they need to know how to search databases, web sites, blogs, and wikis. They need to know how to compare sources for credibility. They need to be able to use that information, add their own information or knowledge to it and create something new out of it. Doing so might involve word processing, using a spreadsheet, creating graphs, shooting and producing video or recording audio. All of these applications have basic functionality that everyone should know and advanced functionality that separates the adept from the merely functional. There's also something missing here about the connectedness of information, how that information is connected, the politics behind the connections (if any) and also the rapid change of information and the tools used to manipulate it. I think any functioning as a knowledge worker today (and most of our college graduates will be) need to have a deep appreciation of change and learn to deal with it.

But can and should any of this be tested? I would agree with Jeff at Yellow Dog. No, we can't and shouldn't. That doesn't mean, however, that we should continue to incorporate aspects of technology literacy into our curricula. I think perhaps we need to leverage what students already do with information--writing on blogs, in Facebook, MySpace, posting to YouTube, PhotoBucket and Flickr--and help them be critical of what they're doing and help them expand what they're already doing in ways that are more profound. We might think about the connections that can be made between what such web 2.0 applications allow and the information we work with in our classes. And we might also think about what applications we might need to accomplish goals for a given class or curriculum. But most of that can't be tested on some kind of standardized test. Still, if we think information and technology literacy is important, what do we do about it? Is what we're doing enough?

Labels: technology literacy

¶ 9:10 AM, posted by Laura