Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger writes with surprising brevity, “Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.” While we may speak and write of a distinct past, present, and future, when we stop and think about how we experience time, a glimmer of possibility, an opening appears. As we look to tomorrow, we hold expectations of what will happen based on what is occurring around us right now and also based on what has happened to us before. Heidegger’s insight is the singularity in our experience of time.

I am most interested in sponsoring thoughtful and inclusive conversations to help me answer a simple question: Do online and collaborative technologies transform how we teach and how students learn? I want to use the clearing this question opens to challenge claims that we should be preparing students for a “21st Century” or for jobs in an “uncertain economy.” Even if these aims of education were legitimate, they are founded on some troubling assumptions, namely that education is under the sway of technology.