Locked in an Irrelevant System? Network Building and the New Literacy

The majority of educators today are locked in a system that prepares students for a world that has long since passed, instead of a future that is already here. While the world continues to change rapidly, the ability to react to those changes is stymied by age old beliefs about what education should be, increasingly irrelevant expectations and mandatory assessments, and their own lack of understanding as to how these tools and these technologies fundamentally change the way they learn. Challenge as educators right now is to begin to reenvision their classrooms and their practice in order to help their students leverage these new connections and networks and, to put it bluntly, to stay relevant in their learning lives. This requires thinking deeply about the types of skills and literacies that 21st century learners will need in order to be as successful as they can be. More and more, the skills that their students need to take with them are those that will provide a strong foundation for their own lifelong learning, ones that help them navigate a much more complex and changing landscape of information.