Another dot in the blogosphere?

No wonder parents and teachers sometimes distrust current forms of ICT! That was my reaction when I read two different accounts of an opera that will be crowdsourced and written via Twitter.

Yahoo! News [archive] reported the event in what I thought was a neutral tone.

On the other hand, one of the highlights of a Straits Times online/Reuters [archive] report was: “The first few lines of the opera show the difficulty of stringing together the submissions into a coherent story”. Of course it’s difficult! But the difficulty is not doing this Twitter-style but in creating a complex performance. Do this in any other medium and the same difficulties will emerge. This report attempted to put pass opinion as fact and this resulted in the propagation of misinformation.

ST does feature stories about technology use in schools occasionally. But I question the knowledge of some of their reporters. For example, Second Life is commonly thought of as an online gaming environment when it is not. ST and DigitalLife have featured articles about it in the past and they do not always correct this misconception. They have a responsibility to inform.

The news articles on ICT in schools so far have mostly featured the technology and not necessarily how teaching and learning have become more meaningful. Technology in schools gets reported as good-to-have options or enhancements. The public does not get to read how technology enables learning. It does not get to see how technology is increasingly relevant and important in classrooms and how essential it is to integrate technology seamlessly into curricula. If you look at the depth of most Washington Post or NYTimes articles on education, you will see what I mean about providing balanced information.

Thankfully students know better than to listen to hype. They are already using these tools and preparing themselves for their future. But they do not have the benefit of experience and they do not have many teachers who know how to take advantage of this. I do not need the press to give me this information nor am I going to wait for the system to catch up. I am going to make current information available to my trainees and they can make their own minds up!