Are you smarter than a 9-year-old?

Lankshear and Knobel (2003) discuss a variety of new literacies, such as scenario planning, culture and news jamming (cool!), blogging, and website and user rating systems. They argue the importance of doing research on these new literacies to be able to use them in education to their fullest potential.

My favorite part of the article was the description of the 9-year-olds who offered professional development on technological applications to school principals – this is exactly what I was just talking about in my previous post – making the discrepancy between teacher knowledge of technology and student knowledge of technology into a good thing. Lankshear and Knobel’s acknowledgment of the tendency of schools to try to “schoolify” social practices goes along with the discussions we’ve had in class recently about finding ways to capitalize on students’ literacies from outside of the classroom without remaking them as school assignments. This authentic task of teaching the principals is such a cool way to do that, not to mention demonstrate respect for and confidence in the students and their abilities.