There’s been a wonderful conversation going on at Weblogg-ed about what our kids’ futures will require them to be. Miguel Guhlin has synthesized the original thoughts of Will’s with those of the commentors on the post.

I’m mulling over two of Will’s points in particular right now, though I suspect I’ll come back to all of them in the future.

Paper Training Students

The first is that although students will need to be less dependent on paper, we are still paper training them. This hits home, coming on the heels of my thoughts on teaching handwriting to secondary students. I feel that I need to “paper train” students — and do this well — because their secondary school success depends in part on their ability to write a standardized pen-and-paper test. At the same time, I want to prepare them for a conceivable future where paper is no longer the common communication medium. I feel that at times I’m working with a weird mix of tools and strategies, trying to meet both short-term and long-term learning goals.

I think that it’s going to come down to what several commentors suggested: kids need to know how to learn new skills themselves. I think of the different communication mediums I’ve been using over the past ten years — from email to instant messaging to websites, blogs, wikis, and social network sites. I didn’t learn how to use these in school, but I know how to learn how to use these. (In most cases, I talk to my brother-in-law who seems to absorb all things technological ahead of the curve, but that’s beside the point.)

Fluent in creating and consuming hyper-text

The idea here is that basic reading and writing skills will not suffice. I think of my observations of students’ online reading, and I agree: reading hypertext requires a different mindset than ‘basic’ reading. One needs to understand why a link is there, and why it may or may not be helpful to click through to it, and how to navigate back. One also needs to understand the architecture of hypertext environments. I found blogs quite confusing at first until I became familiar with their common features; I suspect that I need to take the time to help students recognize some of those common features to ease their own reading.

And then there is hypertext, where indeed, a very different writing style is needed. I feel like I’m slowly being convinced that student-owned blogs are going to be essential teaching tools in my near future.