Are you familiar with the Pacific Northwest tree octopus? Most likely not. Good thing there is a Web site on the Internet to tell you all about it!
According to the tree octopus site, www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus, this solitary cephalopod resides in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on North America's west coast. It is amphibious but lives in trees, spending only its early life in water. It has eight arms, complete with sensitive suckers, and a soft body, just like a regular octopus. It is intelligent and inquisitive. And it does not exist.
Surprised? Again, most likely not. But 25 seventh-grade, high-performing online readers, when directed to the site in a recent study by the New Literacies Research Team at the University of Connecticut, all thought the Pacific Northwest tree octopus was real.
"Knowing truth from fiction on the Internet is a huge problem," says Kenneth Eastwood, superintendent of Middletown City (N.Y.) School District. "Students might be good researchers, but they tend not to scrutinize the information."
Apparently high-performing online readers are not so high performing after all. And those 25 students were the same top students who, when first surveyed from a larger pool of 800 students in urban Connecticut school districts, said, "You can't trust everything you see online." But you can always trust a tree octopus. (Or maybe that's a mountain walrus. Check the site.)
It might seem that evaluating information online-just one form of "new literacy"-and reading a book-more of a foundational literacy-are pretty much the same thing. After all, you can't trust everything you read, either. But there are differences. And those differences, when brought into the classroom and incorporated into curricula, are enriching the educational experiences of many K12 students. Unfortunately, many administrators, although they are beginning to recognize the need to revise their districts' media skills instruction, lack the resources, and more importantly the vision, to bring the new literacies into the classroom.
21st Century Skills
Foundational or traditional literacy is about print on a page, or decoding and making sense of words, images and other content that a reader can string together and then begin to comprehend. They are the words and pictures students read and pore over that are contained in textbooks, in novels, on standardized tests, and even in comic books.
The new literacies encompass much more. Their utility lies in online reading comprehension and learning skills, or 21st century skills, required by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), including content found on wikis, blogs, video sites, audio sites and in e-mail. They require the ability not just to "read" but also to navigate the World Wide Web, locate information, evaluate it critically, synthesize it and communicate it-all skills that are becoming vital to success in this century's economy and workforce.
What complicates the situation is that there is a growing gap between what today's students do in school and what they do at home. According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, "The Digital Disconnect: The Widening Gap between Internet-Savvy Students and Their Schools," students are spending 27 hours a week online at home, compared to an average of 15 minutes per week at school. "It's hard to develop online skills in traditional classrooms when so little instructional time is online," says Susan Patrick, president of the North American Council for Online Learning. "Online learning is not this separate silo that we might need to use as a tool." Administrators should have such learning weaved into classrooms, she adds.
Today's students, the "digital natives" as they are sometimes called, are practically inseparable from their computers, video games and the Internet. Moreover, a recent study by the National School Boards Association found that 96 percent of students who have online access use the technologies for social networking such as blogging, sharing music, instant messaging, and posting their own movies. Not exactly the first thing you think of when you imagine a classroom.
And although digital natives may be tech savvy, they don't use a lot of information, or at least they don't know how to think critically about the information they use. They need guidance on how to find the best information most efficiently and determine fact from fiction.
"Technology and knowledge in general are growing at an exponential rate," says Mary Colombo, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at Hopkinton (Mass.) Public Schools. "Where do you find it? How do you gather it? How should you use it?"
Students might be good researchers, but they tend not to scrutinize the information.
-Kenneth Eastwood, superintendent, Middletown City (N.Y.) School District
New Literacies Research Lab
At the New Literacies Research Lab at the University of Connecticut, tucked amid the rolling hills of northern Connecticut, researchers are conducting studies on the state of new literacies in schools and encouraging district leaders to realize the importance of such technologies, particularly in middle school. The six-year-old research lab, with $8 million in private and federal funds for research, professional development, assessment and curriculum development, is the most widely recognized center worldwide for doing such research. And the 14-member team develops research-based evidence to prepare students in these new skills.
