The Great Debate: 21st Century Literacy

Throughout the edublogosphere, much has been written lately about what exactly it means to be literate in 21st Century skills. There has been a number of terrific posts that run the gamut of trying to define it, to others who are done with it.

For someone who is trying to come into his own as a fully networked teacher, this whole conversation has been an excellent learning process for myself. I made an attempt at, but was extremely frustrated with trying to follow the discussion on Twitter. Unfortunately, I missed the discussion once it moved to Eluminate. I have been following the conversation via blog posts. However, this whole process has challenged me in trying to create my own definition for what it means to be literate in the 21st Century, which I will get to later.

My initial reactions while reading through the various definitions of 21st Century Literacy was that it was all just semantics. Literacy is such a broad term and it is difficult to pin down a precise definition, especially when there are a number of school subjects that need attention and new adaptations start getting bandied about like media literacy and information literacy. Most of the early posts I read incorporated these rather recent nuances to the field of literacy definitions. I thought that these definitions paint with a large brush and leave out the individual subject areas. I have been thinking a lot lately about what Dan Meyer meant when he said that there isn't a Web2.0 tool that helps him teach math. Sometimes we get so caught up in the flood of new technologies that we forget that we still have to teach geometry.

I also have a problem with the 21st Century label because we are trying to put a definition to what skills are needed for success in this century that we are only 8% into so far. And with the rate that technology keeps changing how we do all sorts of activities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make such blanket statements.

And then I came across a post from Learning is Change about how all of us as educators need to come together and agree upon a list of tags to make the sharing of ideas, lessons, and concepts much easier.

We need to take ownership of terms like elearning and make them more specific. We also should be teaching our students to come together on terms to use so that all of their work can not only be found later, but also grouped according to topic, theme, or even skill level.

In order for us as educators to move forward and take action, we need to paint a picture with the definition of what is literacy in the 21st Century. And that brings me back to the post by Jen about taking action. Being that I am such a newbie to this Web2.0 scene, apparently, this discussion comes up quite frequently and nothing much is ever actually accomplished. This reminds me of the United States right after the Revolutionary Wars with Great Britain. There were a variety of opinions and ideas taking us in all different directions, and it was difficult initially to accomplish much. But through it all, a great nation was formed. It is my greatest hope that we can recreate that revolutionary success in the field of education.