Digital Blog # D : Chapter 5

21st-Century Literacies is the first section of Chapter 5 that I want to discuss today. This section talks about how over the past few decades, the work force has done a complete turn-around, favoring critical thinkers over physical laborers. This radical new way of life has given birth to a variety of sub-changes in our society. It has particularly changed the way teachers and students behave and perform in a classroom (not to mention outside of the classroom for doing homework, research, lesson plans, and more).
According to our textbook, "The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has issued its own definition of the skill students will need in the future, called 21st-century literacies (2007, 2008b)" (Maloy). This set of skills does not dismiss the old favorites of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but rather includes how completely and correctly a student is able to use technology. When thinking about this section, I am reminded of an amusing story from just a few years back... My youngest son's school had finally installed Smartboards into the majority of its classrooms. My son's third grade teacher was one of the lucky teachers who received a Smartboard. I was very good friends with my son's teacher so naturally the topic of the changes to the classroom came up. When I raved about how wonderful I thought it was that the school was modernizing its classrooms, she replied with a scowl and a snap. She said that she was frustrated with the "nonsense" tutorial the teachers had been forced to go through, admitted to being "afraid" of the device, and went as far as to tell me that she most likely would not even use it in her instruction! A few months later, while doing volunteer work at the school, I looked in on her. She was using the Smartboard to show Youtube videos to her students. She admitted to "warming up" to the Smartboard, although confessed to me that the majority of the time, it was a student in her class who actually operated it.

Photo Credit to John Krzensinski on flickr

Photo Credit to popofatticus on Flickr

In the following paragraphs of Chapter 5 just below the heading of 21st-century literacies, we see statistics on time spent reading either online or books. As a future Language Arts teacher, I find it very interesting that even something so fundamentally basic as reading and writing can be so heavily influenced by technology. My first "computer" was an electronic word processor. I admit that I never learned how to perform every function that it was capable of. For me, it was merely a typewriter with an attached printer. Today, children have laptops and phones, not to mention Kindles to use for research and for reading and writing. With so much to chose from, it saddens me that the statistics in our book seem to point to children not reading as much as they had before all these devices existed.

 Wikipedia : An Online Encyclopedia is a section that I feel is important to discuss, especially because of the controversy students experience from one teacher to the next when using Wikipedia. In our own college, Florida Southwestern State, many professors have told me that Wikipedia cannot be used in essays and research papers because it is too abundant with false information, while other professors accept Wikipedia as a viable source of knowledge. Prior to college, I never felt one way or the other about Wikipedia; I used it as a source for leisurely reading or to gain knowledge from a quick summary of an event. Because "...Wikipedia is dynamic; its information is updated and changed all the time..." (Maloy), I believe that the site is an experiment in an ever changing world and therefore appropriate for use in academic writing if (and only if) the sources cited at the bottom of the article are quality sources. Like all things, information changes as we develop new ways of doing things or uncover more facts for a situation. Wikipedia demonstrates the growth of our society, ever changing and updating itself. As a future educator however, I will not allow Wikipedia to be used as a stand alone source for a paper, but rather as an idea builder or as a source for finding other reliable sources on a subject.
I think it is also important to point out that because Wikipedia allows people to submit fact grievances, they should be thought of as more of a learning site and less as an authority. This, in itself, is a wonderful thing. Teachers can use a Wikipedia article to give their students practice on fact checking and authenticating information. Steven Bell of Temple University seems to agree with my stance on using Wikipedia in this way. More information about Wikipedia's accuracy and the interview with Steven Bell can be found here: Scott Jaschik's Article, "A Stand Against Wikipedia"



Avoiding Problems with Plagiarism is a section that I find very important as a student and a future educator. The specific part of this section that I want to highlight is "Misassumptions by students" under the Causes of Plagiarism sub-heading. When I began college, I did not know that plagiarism was more than exact copying. I had a general idea of what paraphrasing was, but I had never been taught to cite paraphrased work until I was in a college class. In fact, I had a very hard time grasping the concept of "original idea" and "plagiarized idea". To me, mainly because of the way I was taught in elementary school, there were no such things as purely original ideas. Anything that a person could think of had been thought of at least once before by another person before them. To properly cite an idea took practice and critical thinking. The worry and stress of this could have been avoided if I had been taught early on what plagiarism really is and what it is not. The below chart represents a snapshot of my feelings as a first year college student wrestling with plagiarism:

Photo Credit to Weeks, Nicole and magic.piktochart

According to our textbook, "Turnitin reports that it receives 40,000 papers a day, and finds about 30 percent have material that makes them "less than original" (Maloy)(Berdik, 2005, p B11). I would guess that some of that percent is accounted for by copying lesson prompts or questions directly from professors, but a staggering amount is more likely attributed to ignorance. The book also gives educators hints and tips on how to prevent plagiarism in the classroom, but overall I believe that teaching students the different kinds of plagiarism at an early age, we can alleviate any confusion that would cause misassumptions.





Resources:

Maloy, Robert, Verock-O’Loughlin,Ruth-Ellen, Edwards, Sharon A., and Woolf, Beverly Park (2013). Transforming Learning with New Technologies. 2nd Edition. Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Jaschik, S. (2007, January 26). A Stand Against Wikipedia, InsideHigherEd. Retrieved September 27, 2015, from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki