Today’s 'technological literacy’ is mostly sleight of hand

As a boy, I was a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt. How could a competitive, not-very-athletic New York City kid like myself help but admire a scrawny New Yorker who transformed himself into a college boxer and a Rough Rider? So it’s no big surprise that my seven-year-old son has taken a similar shine to T. R. Last night, Sasha and I searched Google, looking for photos of the former president. After much trial and error, we were delighted when we finally figured out how to import some of those images into the “book” that Sasha is writing… which brings me to the whole matter of No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB) technology standard.

The current president’s education plan mandates that by 2014 “every student [will be] technologically literate by the time the student finishes the eighth grade.” But what does “technologically literate” mean? Sasha will turn 14 in 2014, and by then, I’m sure he’ll be a whiz at online searching and downloading. He’ll be able to import all sorts of digital media into his schoolwork effortlessly. Does that mean he’ll be technologically literate? Of course not. In the same way that reading literacy requires more than just memorizing the alphabet, there’s more to technological literacy than merely moving a digital image from one place to another. When you do that, you’re not creating anything new or communicating information in an innovative way—you’re just shifting stuff around.

As you may know, I have a blog called “Nonfiction Matters” on SLJ’s Web site. When I looked at the site’s other blogs, such as Elizabeth Bird’s “A Fuse #8 Production,” I was struck by how all of us have created a new form of narration, which involves text, images, and links, and how our entries are crafted to give visitors a satisfying nugget of information in every paragraph. Now that’s technological literacy. Blogs have given us an opportunity to create and explore a new form of narration, perhaps even a new form of thinking.

Over the years, my wife has taught at many colleges and universities. At the start of each semester, she always gives her students a lecture about online plagiarism. She has discovered that some students don’t see how cutting and pasting text from Google into their reports constitutes plagiarism. “After all,” they reason, “we did our own online search, didn’t we? Isn’t that enough?” These students have the skills to locate things on the Internet, but they’re, in fact, technologically illiterate. They precisely do not know how to read—how to make sense of, digest, assimilate, and respond to—the information they find. They can collage together reports, but they can’t write them.

As we prepare students for 2014, we need to treat technological literacy as a two-part challenge. Our first task is to make sure kids have the basic technological skills they need. This is one place where money matters, because almost any child who has access to a wired computer—and the time to use it—will have a good running start. The second part of the challenge, though, requires more from each of us. We have to figure out how to prepare young people for the thinking, the habit of mind, the creative intelligence it takes to take advantage of the information and the interconnectedness that the latest technology makes possible.

As in every other area of education, “literacy” is synonymous with “thinking”—not just “functioning.” If we just let kids cut and paste stuff into their reports, we’re simply preparing them to create glossy nothings. But if technological literacy means they are stretching their minds in new ways, then 2014 should be a very good year indeed.