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Teaching students to contribute and collaborate online in ways that are both safe and appropriate requires instruction and modeling, not simply crossing our fingers and hoping for the best when they go home and do it on their own.

"Now more than ever, students need teachers who can help them sort through choices, apply technology well, and tell their stories clearly and with humanity."

Among our authors' guidelines for promoting the skills crucial to using social media well: Value reading and writing more than ever; Blend digital, art, oral, and written literacies; and Teach students to search, evaluate, summarize, interpret, and think and write clearly.

what the future may hold for IT.

Higher education has to get faster, faster, faster in adopting new technologies

respond to the market forces by essentially blowing up our undergraduate curriculum.

In collaboration with several content area organizations, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills developed a series of ICT Literacy Maps illustrating the intersection between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy and core academic subjects including English, mathematics, science and social studies (civics/government, geography, economics, history). The maps enable educators to gain concrete examples of how ICT Literacy can be integrated into core subjects, while making the teaching and learning of core subjects more relevant to the demands of the 21st century.

At first glance, this evolution might seem to be simply a shift in agency, from publication by a few to collective contribution by many. But in fact, the implications of Web 2.0 go much deeper: the tacit epistemologies that underlie its activities differ dramatically from what I will call here the “Classical” perspective—the historic views of knowledge, expertise, and learning on which formal education is based.

In contrast, the Web 2.0 definition of “knowledge” is collective agreement about a description that may combine facts with other dimensions of human experience, such as opinions, values, and spiritual beliefs. As an illustration, the Wikipedia entry on “social effect of evolutionary theory” wrestles with constructing a point of view that most readers would consider reasonable, accurate, and unbiased without derogating religious precepts some might hold. In contrast to articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia articles are either undisputed (tacitly considered accurate) or disputed (still resolving through collective argumentation), and Wikipedia articles cover topics that are not central to academic disciplines or to a wide audience (e.g., the cartoon dog Scooby-Doo).