Really? We’re Still on This?

The Gist:

• It’s not about the tools.
• We have to stop talking as though it’s about the tools.
• We need to start talking about what we want to do.

The Whole Story:

I dig the NCTE Inbox. It has lead to some pretty heated debates and it’s one of the most relevant voices I know from a professional organization. That said, yesterday’s post about the need for transformative rather than addative teaching missed the mark for me on one key point:

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we use social networking tools, or Web 2.0, to bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the social media revolution to the classroom (and not simply digitize the sage-on-stage tradition)?

Bud and Bill and I were talking about this at the NWP Digital Is… Conference. Bud summed it up nicely, “Instead of digital storytelling, let’s just call it storytelling.”

Try the paragraph this way:

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the revolution to the classroom?

One of those is something I’d like to be a part of.