What do children need to know?
While working on regularly updating the P2P Learning pages, one of the more developed topical areas of our P2P Foundation wiki, I always had in the back of my mind the necessity to define the new generation of skills needed to participate in the new networked learning environment.
So it is with great interest that I was alerted (by Trebor Scholz), to the New Media Literacy project, which tackles precisely this new area.
Here’s an excerpt listing the new skills:
WHAT SKILLS DO KIDS NEED IN ORDER TO BE FULL PARTICIPANTS
Emerging Skills:
Play — a process of exploration and experimentation.
Performance– trying on and playing different identities.
Navigation — the ability to move across the media landscape in a purposeful manner, choosing the media that best serves a specific purpose or need, or which might best provide the
information needed to serve a particular task.
Resourcefulness — the ability to identify and capitalize on existing resources.
Networking — the ability to identify a community of others who share common goals and interests.
Negotiation — the ability to communicate across differences as you move through a multicultural and global media landscape.
Synthesis — pulling together information from multiple sources, evaluating its reliability and use value, constructing a new picture of the world.
Sampling — mastering and transforming existing media content for the purposes of self and collective expression.
Collaboration — sharing information, pooling knowledge, comparing notes, evaluating evidence, and solving large scale problem.
Teamwork — the ability to identify specific functions for each member of the team based on their expertise and then to interact with the team members in an appropriate fashion.
Judgment — the ability to make aesthetic and ethical evaluations of media practices and to reflect on your own choices and their consequences.
Discernment — the ability to assess the accuracy and appropriateness of available information.
These skills each lie at the intersection between the self and others. These are cultural skills and not individual skills. The goal is communication and participation, not simply
self-expression, and that requires an understanding of the impact of one’s ideas on others. Any ethical framework we develop should emerge from this understanding that media may have
been personalized in the early 1990s but it is now collaborative and communal in an era of networked and mobile communications technologies.”
