Network Literacy: What does literacy mean in the web 2.0 age?

I've been tossing around in my head what it means for a child to be literate in the modern world. In my last post I talked about the need for students to understand the conventions of visual media texts, such as television, film and advertising. To have a true and useful literacy, children must be empowered to be intelligent and critical consumers of a full range of media texts, not just the printed word.

But where does this line of thinking take us when we reach the digital world? Will Richardson (weblogg-ed.com) talks about the idea of 'Network Literacy'. That is, he raises the question: what does literacy look like in light of the web 2.0 networks that our children are so much a part of?

To give an example of this, publishing used to be the end point of the writing process, in the web 2.0 world it is actually somewhere near the middle of the process. Once something is published on the web it can be commented upon, and then it could be changed or added to by the author in light of these comments. Or, in a wiki situation, once something is published it can be edited or changed by anyone that reads it. A published work becomes a collaborative process among people that could be 1000s of kms apart.

Therefore, literacy is not just about being an intelligent consumer of information anymore. Students need to be intelligent editors and contributors of information as well.

Last year I took a year 6 Australian History class. As it was the 150th year of Australian football I decided that we'd investigate the history of how the game was invented. It's a fairly contentious history, and so it proved to be a rich topic for the students to investigate, discuss and debate. I had planned for the class to create a shared piece of writing that explained the origins of Australian Rules Football and to enter it onto the Simple English Wikipedia site under 'Australian Rules Football: History'. I had checked the site before the unit began and there was no entry on the history of Aussie Rules, so we were all very excited that our piece of writing would be put up as the official entry on the subject in Wikipedia!

I was so busy thinking I was the greatest teacher ever coming up with such an up to date, ICT rich history lesson, that I failed to realise that I was thinking about this unit of work in a very linear, 20th century type way. I was still thinking in terms of litecacy being about consuming information and then re-producing it in a final published form.

I was soon jolted out of that perspective when it came time for us to enter our piece of writing into Wikipedia. You see, by the time I'd planned the lessons and delivered them, someone, somewhere, had already written an entry for the history of Australian Rules Football!

So here we were as a class with a piece of writing and nowhere to put it! That's when my History class took an inspired turn for the better. Instead of writing into a blank space and publishing our work (as my very 20th century brain had planned!), we used our collective knowledge to edit and improve the piece of writing that was already on the site.

This proved to be a far more valuable and life appropriate experience for my students. My students had looked at Wikipedia as an authoritative source, just as I had viewed 'proper' printed and bound encyclopedias when I was growing up. Never before had someone said what I said to them that day about a published source, which was simply: is this correct? Do you agree with what is written here? And even more powerfully: if not, let's change it! You guys should know this history just as well as whoever wrote this because we've just been studying it.

This was a revolutionary thought for a class of 12 year olds. All at once they sat up a bit straighter and keenly began to read what was on the screen.

Sure enough, within moments someone in the class had spotted a factual error in the text. The class filled with life again as we changed what was written to make it more accurate and then read on to find other small things that needed more detail or qualification. Of course, just as with any other good history writing, we had to state our sources for each major point.

You could sense that it almost felt rebellious to them, and as such was very exciting. Purely by accident I'd given my students a great lesson on being literate in the digital age. Of being editors of information, not just consumers.

Our temptation as teachers is to give our students the 'correct' information and ask them to
learn from it. Once they have learned the information, they reproduce it in some sort of publication of their own. Then we mark it based on how much it reflects what they've taken in from the original information that was provided.

But this model does not reflect how our kids will learn in their lives. It doesn't reflect the fact that in the real world our students will go straight to Google, or to a forum, or wiki, or social networking site to find out the information they need to know. And if we as teachers are still teaching in our 20th century way, who is teaching them how to do this in an intelligent and critical way? Who is teaching our students their 'network literacy'?