Hi there.
My name is Don Leu.
I hold the Neag Endowed Chair in Literacy and Technology here at
the University of Connecticut and direct the New Literacies Research Lab.
We do work in new literacies in school classrooms K-12 here
in the US anyway from about ages 5 through 18 internationally.
And so the issue then is what are these new literacies,
and why are they so important?
Well, I guess the take we make on this is that the Internet is really
a literacy issue, using information, reading and writing and
communicating, and so forth, is really a literacy issue.
And we see these as new literacies that are somewhat different from traditional
reading and writing skills.
Because new tools, new technologies, new social practices are all involved in them.
And in addition to that, it's not just that they're new today.
They're new every single day of our lives because things keep changing on
the Internet.
And this notion of change is central to our work,
both in the theories we've been developing, as well as in the research and
in the instructional practices that we have.
It's a real challenge from a theoretical and research point of view, for example,
that the thing that we study keeps changing on us.
That is literacy today is different from
what it's gonna be tomorrow because there'll be a new tool,
a new technology that will be available for us for reading and writing.
So what are these new literacies?
Well to us, these new literacies are the skills,
the strategies, the social practices,
the dispositions that are required to use online information effectively to learn.
Now there are many different definitions of what new literacies are, but to us,
we're concerned about learning.
And we're concerned about preparing our youngsters for these skills, strategies,
social practices, and dispositions that will enable them to use online information
to learn new things about the world around them.
We focus on one particular aspect of new literacies,
in what we refer to as online research and comprehension.
And what we mean by that is students' ability to conduct independent and
collaborative research to learn new things on the Internet.
We see it as comprised of several different elements, locating skills,
evaluating skills,
evaluating the reliability of information that you find on the Internet.
Synthesizing skills or putting together information from multiple sources, and
then communication skills which includes all kinds of new technologies that
are required to pick people's brains, see what they know, look for ideas.
And then, also finally to communicate what you've learned with other people.
So we've been spending the last five years developing a performance-based
assessment on a large federal research grant called The Online Research and
Comprehension Assessment or ORCAs.
And so we've developed about 24 different ORCAs,
performance-based assessments, that give students a problem to solve online.
And then we evaluate their ability at every step of the way, takes place in
a simulation the Internet with a search engine and web pages and wikis and emails.
And it's driven by an avatar that text messages into the student to
sort of direct them and ask them different questions and
engage them in the research project and so forth.
So anyway, we've developed these assessments that are highly reliable and
valid, but they're also performance-based.
They're not multiple choice.
And so they actually ask students to do a research project, and now we're looking at
a lot of the data we've collected in two states, a laptop state main, and
a non laptop state and evaluating students abilities in this area.
So what have we found in the work that we've been doing?
Well, a number of things, one
important concern that we have in one of our studies between a wealthy and
an economically challenged school districts is that kids in the two
districts appear to manifest a separate and
independent achievement gap in the ability to conduct online research.
Separate and independent from reading and writing skills, traditional reading and
writing skills which we've controlled, and
found a separate achievement gap on the ability to conduct online research.
Largely because the schools in the poor school districts are so constrained
by state assessments, assessments that have none of these skills on them.
So those schools are under great pressure to raise test scores, and
that's what they teach.
They teach none of these new online reading and writing skills.
Whereas in wealthier districts, they have many more degrees of freedom and
flexibility about what they're going to teach.
They certainly feel the press of state assessment and test scores,
but they experiment and include a lot more innovative practices, and
as a result, their kids get opportunities.
Kids get opportunities also differently at home, of course, but in schools,
it's a very clear difference between the two.
We've also found that students, and
we tend to look at seventh graders, middle school students.
The weakest area for them is critical evaluation.
They don't think very critically about the information they read.
And as a result, they tend to believe much of what they read.
They tend to only go to a single source and not question the author.
And they don't have skills that would allow them to carefully evaluate
the reliability and expertise of an author.
Communication is also a problem at this level.
That is skills such as writing in a wiki, writing in a blog,
writing a summary of what they found in an email message and so forth.
Those kinds of skills are second most difficult for our students.
They tend to do better in synthesis which is really related to their offline skills
of summarizing that they've learned.
And then finally, they do reasonably well on locating,
but a lot of them are clickers and lookers.
And what we mean by that is that when they get a set of search engine results,
they start at the top, click and look to see what it appears like.
And then they work their way down the list rather than reading search engine results
critically and picking on the first click, the best choice for them.
We've done other research as well in terms of instructional models.
And so previously, we worked and developed an instructional model in
one-to-one laptop classrooms called IRT, Internet Reciprocal Teaching.
There's a really interesting problem that you face when you're trying to teach in
one-to-one laptop classrooms.
And that is that you have about 15 seconds of attention, and after that,
the kids are off on their own.
And so we tried to figure out how are we gonna teach some of these critical
evaluation, these locating skills, the synthesis skills,
these communication skills in a classroom when we have 15 seconds?
And the answer we came up with that works pretty well is that instead of teaching,
you give students a problem to solve, and in that problem,
you embed the skill you want to teach.
And then when you see a student manifesting that skill,
that student teaches the rest of the class.
And if you don't see a student manifesting that skill that you've embedded in
the problem that's important to solve it,
then you work with one of your weaker performing students.
And you sort of scaffold their learning until they get the idea,
and then they teach the class to do this.
So an example would be, if you're trying to teach critical evaluation a source,
you give the students a problem like here's a three-part problem for you today.
I want you to find the height of Mount Fuji, we've been reading about Japan.
After you do that, that's an easy one,
then find a different answer to the same question.
So find somebody else who says, no, it's a different height.
Then the third part of the question is who's right and why?
And so we give students that problem to work collaboratively in small groups.
And then we monitor them in a little software tool which
puts thumbnails of every student's laptop on your laptop.
So you can watch what they're doing, and when you see somebody evaluating source,
that is clicking on a link that says who we are, or doing a search for
the site, the name of the site to see what people are saying about it.
Then we ask that student to take over, and
we project their laptop screen up on the smart board.
And then have them tell everybody else what they were doing as they solved
the really key part of that problem, which is who's right and why.
So Internet Reciprocal Teaching, or IRT, is really a three-phase model.
And I described the second phase of developing these
strategies that are important for online research and comprehension.
The first phase is a nuts and
bolts phase, where you just go through some of the mechanical things.
What's a wiki, what's a blog, how those work, how different search engines work,
locating skills, if your students need them?
Only the skills that are really required in your classroom, of course.
And then the third phase, once the kids have developed a pretty sophisticated
understanding of the skills that are required for
online research and comprehension.
Then we take them into the final phase,
which is conducting an online collaborative project with at least one
other student in another part of the world, related to the problem,
related to the curriculum that makes the world a better place.
Those are the criteria we have.
We build these up to this point, by the way, by having collaborative
classroom projects throughout the phase one and phase two.
We tend to use ePals,
a wonderful tool for connecting classrooms from around the world.
You can quickly find teachers in many parts of the world that are interested
in collaborating with you.
But there are other tools as well.
And so they practice this collaboration as a whole class.
So then when we get to phase three, when they're ready to do online research,
they've developed a network of friends in other parts of the world.
And so they have to come up with a project and get it approved by the teacher,
but here's an example of one.
So these students in Connecticut shared the problem they had with other
kids around the world on their list of friends in an email message and
said, look, we've got to do this project.
Do you have any ideas?
And a student of South Africa actually popped up and said, yeah,
why don't you create a web page about Gary Paulsen?
We're reading about Gary Paulsen, author at that age, and
put a web page together with links to all of the resources you can find online.
And then you'll have a research site for
kids who want to do research on Gary Paulsen in their school.
And that'll make the world a better place, and that's related to the English language
arts, the class that you're taking right now.
So why don't we do that?
And then a bunch of other kids chimed in and said, yeah, yeah, let's do that,
let's do that.
And said, I can help, we'll send you the links.
And these two students in Connecticut said, okay, we know how to make a web
page, our teacher showed us how to do that, so send us the links.
And so they built a web page about Gary Paulsen, and so
that's an example of an online collaborative project.
But there are many, many different types of projects.
We just think that it should be something that connects the skills that students
have been learning into a global context because that's exactly where kids
are going to be working when they're adults.
They'll be working in environments where they'll have to collaborate and
problem solve and work with many other people from other cultural contexts from
other countries and to solve whatever problem they face in their work place.
So let me talk a little bit about school leadership in this area.
It's probably one of the most important areas
as we think about the changing nature of literacy and
learning in the school classrooms with the Internet for several reasons.
First of all, everything we know about the research on school leadership is that
school leaders drive change.
That is, change doesn't happen unless there's a school leader with a vision for
the change that's needed.
So school leaders have to have this vision,
they have to understand what's going on in the changing nature of things.
But it's also constrained right now at least in the US by
Common Core State Standards.
Because you can look at those Common Core State Standards with the lens
to the past that most of us have and only see what we've been doing in
school classrooms, or you can look at Common Core State Standards.
A few people are starting to look at it with a lens to the future.
And understanding each of those standards in terms of what it really means to learn
and communicate, read and write in online context.
So let me give you an example of what I mean by a lens to the past and
a lens to the future.
So the first anchor standard, it's close reading, that is we want our kids,
I'm going to summarize it here.
We want our kids to be able to read carefully, closely, with the information
but also to make inferences about the information that they encounter.
So traditionally, we've taught that in reading comprehension,
through discussion, through levels of comprehension questions, and so forth.
And that's one way of implementing close reading but with a lens to the past.
But if you take a lens to the future, you would see that
reading search engine results is really one of the best examples of close reading.
Because there, kids have to read, very carefully,
make inferences about what those short little segments are telling them
about the information they're gonna find behind that link.
And make an inference about whether or not that source is the best source for
them given their particular needs.
So to me, close reading really involves helping students read carefully and
make inferences about search engine results.
So that they can be more efficient when they're trying to locate information.
And that's what we have to do is we look at these Common Core State Standards.
Each one of them can be looked at with a lens to the past and a lens to the future.
And it's really important that all of us look at those standards with a lens
to the future.
And think about how does this Common Core State Standards
really play itself out when we're reading and learning and communicating online.
And that's a real key as we think about leadership.
If you can see that, then you're in a position to really help your teachers and
help your students prepare for their future.