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The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.

When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

The relentless gaze on high-stakes tests and the culture spawned by No Child Left Behind is blinding us to the educational demands of the 21st century.

But first we need a national conversation on what the 21st century will require of our ever more diverse student population. There’s no doubt that an education that promotes life-long cognitive, behavioral and relational engagement with a complex and interconnected world is key. This means we’ll need intellectually curious and cognitively flexible workers comfortable with ambiguity, able to synthesize knowledge within and across disciplines and work collaboratively in diverse groups.

Moving forward, we need to go beyond the mastery of facts and rules. Instead, we should nurture interpersonal sensibilities in children and teenagers so that they learn to work in groups, within and across disciplines and cultures. In short, we need to educate, not test.

gets, the more the debate will stir and positive things can come of all this.

9 Gail Desler California I look forward to following this discussion! Currently many school districts have the same keyboarding + MS Office requirement for tech proficiency shared above by Interested Parent. I think to continue with that model well into the 21st century is really the train wreck waiting to happen. I've read through the NAEP draft. as well as some of their referenced documents from ISTE, http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/ DOT , and the http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/2 DOT 1stcentdefinition and am hopeful that the NAEP framework will promote the integration of technology literacy across the curriculum. Thanks for starting the conversation.

Wed, Sep 9, 2009 Dick Schutz http://ssrn.com/author=1199505 The framework defines technology as "any modification of the natural or designed world done to fulfill human needs or desires." I can't think of any human action that wouldn't fall under that definition The definition of technological literacy is "the capacity to use, understand, and evaluate technology as well as to apply concepts and processes to solve problems and reach one’s goals. It encompasses the three areas of Technology and Society, Design and Systems, and Information and Communications Technology." That's pretty much universal expertise. This is to be measured with a 50 minute test starting at Grade 4. The specs for the tests at Grades 8 and 12 merely get more detailed and more abstract. By the time this gets run through the Item Response Theory wringer we'll have results that are sensitive to racial/SES differences but not to instructional differences. I'll look forward to your forthcoming explanations of how this came to happen.