To post or not to post

In my limited experience in public schools, I am finding that I question the way we are working. I have questions about how well we are preparing our students for the world they are inheriting. In a world filled with looming pressures, unstable economies, and significant social questions, I find that cracking open a textbook with questions about dictionary use seems a little behind the times. In fact, on this very site if a word is highlighted a dialog box will open and provide the user with a list of the top definitions for that word and provide a link to learn about words that are associated with the highlighted word. This is a different world than the one I grew up in. It is a different world than the one that our schools are preparing students for.

With that in mind, I wanted to get my thoughts out there into the cyberverse. This is not a blog about the mundane existence of everyday life. It is a blog about what these changes mean to the people living those lives though. I hope to be able to capture some of my questions in a way that will foster dialog about the world that we are preparing our students for and the way that we are preparing them. So, with that in mind, here is a question:

Just what does it mean to be literate in the world that our students are entering?

It is clear that one needs to be able to do more than simply read and write. One needs to do more than produce egocentric comments about their daily lives. One needs to be able to do more than simply create a simple presentation.

What is not clear is just what one does need to have the skills to do. Newspapers and book manufacturers are feeling the change and are desperately trying to rework their products in order to convince people that they are still relevant in the world today. They are not sure how to make that argument though. If these types of businesses, who need to rework themselves to stay in business, are unsure of just what steps need to be taken, where does that leave the public education system that is training students to go out and work in these fields?

How do we, the educators in the system, prepare our students to be literate in a world that we can't predict and that we don't mirror as a system? Just what does it mean to be literate in the 21st century? Once we have answered that question we just might be able to start preparing ourselves for how to teach literacy to our students.