E-flections

charlie beckett, the director of Polis has written a new book called SuperMedia: Saving Journalism So It Can Save The World and in a blog entry related to it writes

‘“What are we supposed to tell our newsrooms when they tell us they don’t have time to do anything special for the Web?” Or put it another way: “What should news organizations stop doing, today, immediately, to make more time for innovation?”

It’s easiest to say what news organisations should do. They should work through their web-based journalism rather than see it as an add-on. That in itself would save time and resources.

But accepting the challenge of the zero-sum hypothesis, what should we lose in our newspapers and TV’

this got me thinking what happens when we ask the same question of education – what do we have to lose in order to gain? How do we shift out of the ‘e-pocket’ into a ‘e-culture’ where technology is embedded in what we do , not an extra add on?

Charlie gives one possible answer, ‘New media technology is like a Tardis. It turns a small space with limited time (the newsroom) into a large space (the online network) that can travel through time.’

This applies to education as well as to journalism. We have to accept that our students can access vast amounts of ’stuff’, some of it massively powerful and some of it massively irrelevant, and we as educators have to enable them with the critical framework with which to analyse and understand for the rest of their lives. That is an end result that for me is worth far more than just cramming them with information that we supply. We have to help them understand how to find their own information, and then turn it into knowledge for themselves.