Saturday, May 06, 2006

Framework?


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The man from the Strategy came to talk to our UKLA meeting in London, today. He talked about literacy teaching (a bit) - but mostly he talked about "frameworks", things being "built in", "steps", "structures" and "paths", what it was like "in the field" and so on, and it made me wonder what he thought he was constructing. Clearly he was excited about the idea of an electronic framework, yet it was difficult to see the real difference between that and a ring-binder (apart from the obvious economies of distribution) - old wine in new bottles as Colin and Michele would say. When he spoke about the renewed framework (an interesting turn of phrase) - that's the electronic one - he talked about "teachers going into it", "just clicking on", "downloading", "scrolling down now", "seeing years" and "having links". ICT, of course will be central - but what kind of technology will be used to develop what kind of literacy? That wasn't quite so clear. Will the medium be the message? It seemed to me that teachers would be subject-ed to one particular version of technoliteracy in which they would be required to passively click and download a lot (and maybe even cut and paste) but that genuine participation would be limited. What would an alternative version look like? What would a wiki literacy curriculum be, I wondered as I fought back the urge to yawn loudly?

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