Bombarded by Information

Bombard--verb

to assail vigorously

(Dictionary.com)

Information bombards us on a quanta (smallest unit of time) basis (PhysLink). As intelligent adults, we all must do our very best to wade through this information and determine what is truthful. After utilizing our critical thinking skills, we are left with the basis for what we can learn and think of as the Truth.
  

Information has grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, according to information from the video InfoWhelm and Information Fluency, (2010) information output has increased 10,000% in six years. This was only five short years ago, and I wonder just how much this figure is now. The last figure presented in this video indicated that in 2009 the information output was 500 Exabytes (or 500,000,000,000 gigabytes).

Two striking idea in this video should easily become the thoughts behind the future of education in America.  

1. Can we truly be experts in any discipline?

2. Why is education still focused on memorization and regurgitation of information?

Given that we are constantly bombarded with information outputs how do we wade through this information in order to become experts. Bryan Alexander's post-My Daily Info-Wrangling Routine provides a great starting point for wading through the information that bombards us on a daily basis. Alexander establishes a great framework for personal knowledge management, whereby, he will seek information (through various sources such as Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, podcasts, and email resources) then reflect on the given information (searching for patterns, signals, and futures while reflecting on his own experience) and then share through various mediums such as blogs or social media.

As consumers of information, how can we impact the lives of our students? In Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning Tina Barseghian establishes that educators should be flexible by stating "the less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students' voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning" (2013 para 3). As someone who has not been employed within the educational environment, and having virtually no experience as a teacher, the educational arena has always seemed to be inflexible and very rigidly designed.

I was particularly struck by information from Diana Laufenberg's TED Talk: How to Learn? From Mistakes where she stated "...learning has to include an amount of failure because failure is instructional in the process."

Given that students are so bombarded with information, it is essential that we as teachers and Media Specialists provide our students with an effective framework to become digitally fluent. In The Journey from Digital Literacy to Digital Fluency Karen Lirenman established that teachers and learning professionals should integrate new technologies balanced with their well-established teaching practices. Ms. Lirenman provided great definitions of both digitally literate and digitally fluent. Digitally literate being able to utilize technologies in a variety of ways for a variety of purposes sharing this information in a variety of ways (Lirenman, 2012 para 3 and 4). Also, Lirenman established that digital fluency is thinking in a new way and "...using the tools of technology to do things completely differently than...ever done before. It is less about using technology to make a routine task more exciting, and more about transforming how I think about teaching and learning with technology and how it applies to my students" (para 7, 8, and 9).

My takeaways from this week's blogging resources are:

1. We are constantly bombarded with information. There is more information output than could ever be stored on hard drives, therefore, we must become fluent in how to understand the cloud.

2. We must have a grasp on how to process this information. Personally, I appreciate Alexander's framework of wrangling information and will try to adapt this routine to my personal daily information consumption.

3. I will not be afraid to fail or afraid to let my potential students fail. I will also take several steps to become more digitally fluent. This started by having a good working grasp on the topic of digital literacy, which was provided by Ms. Lirenman's posting. I will work to become much more digitally fluent in order to provide the best information possible to my future students.