One hundred percent of my family is technologically literate. No, really. I’ve got the numbers to back that up.
Here’s how I would report that to the Department of Education:
Number of members of my family: 4
Number who are technologicaly literate: 4.
If you know me or my family at all, I suspect that you would challenge my numbers. Why? Because two of the four members of my immediate family are children. Young children. One’s three. The other’s a ten-month-old. How in the world are they technologically literate?
See, what I did back there, and what most folks who collect statistics do all the time, is that I got to define my terms. For the purposes of this data reporting, I have defined technologically literacy as the ability to turn the TV in our living room off with the remote control. Everyone in my family has accomplished this action - although not all of them deliberately so.
I was reminded today, as I sat through a conversation about data reporting now and data reporting to come, that reporting a number in a column or a data field seems like such a simple thing. How many computers do you have? (Easy to answer - you can count.) How many 8th graders do you have? (Easy to answer.) How many of them are technologically literate? (Um. Well. That one’s harder.)
That last one all depends on how you’re defining technological literacy. And how to assess it. And we’re not all in agreement about the best way(s) to do that. The devil continues to be in the details. (Oh, and while we’re kind of on the subject, here’s an analysis of many of the different definitions of 21st Century Skills, which Nancy White happened to tweet along while I was in the other conversation. We’ve got lots of definitions, and now definitions of the definitions, but we still don’t know how to teach the blasted things. Nuts.)
When you see a statistic, I hope that you are looking past the number and seeking the definitions and the methodology. I hope you’re teaching your students to do so, too. I continue to be worried that, for all the data we’ve got, it isn’t any good.
