Week 1 Blog #1

I read the article The New Faces of Learning : The Internet Breaks School Walls Down by Will Richardson, located in Edutopia.org. In the article he describes himself as a nomadic learner in the Web world; a place where ' I graze on knowledge. I find what I need when I need it. There is no curriculum to my learning, no formal structure other than the tools I use to connect to the people and sources that point me to what I need to know and learn, the same tools I use to then give back what I have discovered. I have become, at long last, that lifelong learner my teachers always hoped I would become' (p. 2)
Nomadic Learner? Interesting way to describe oneself; I like it. Talking about learning; when I was 25 years old, my mother decided, suddenly, to get her master's degree in business administration; two years later, she was done, and had graduated top of her class. At the age of 70, my grandmother took a seamstress course, and created the most beautiful pattern and wedding dress of her class; we were there for her graduation!
Why am I sharing this with you? Because we are all learners; no matter what age. The only difference is that now, Web 2.0 has provided a way, as Richardson expresses, 'to learn anything, anywhere, anytime' hence, the nomadic learner. My mother and grandmother did not have the opportunity to use the web; it did not exist at the time, obviously. But, I would like to think they would have used it to learn about anything, whenever they felt like it, if it had existed then.
I think that, as a nomadic learner, or life-long nomadic learner, it would be in my best interest to learn the new Web 2.0 literacy, and share that learning with my students. The new literacy, as Marc Prensky states in his article Programming Is the New Literacy 'the ability to make digital technology do whatever, within the possible one wants it to do--to bend digital technology to one's needs, purposes, and will, just as in the present we bend words and images' (p.2)
I never thought of programming as a component of the new 21st literacy. Prensky gives the reader examples of programming literacy such as setting up our remotes, downloading a ringtone, customizing our mobile phones or desktop, Web searching, peer-to-peer social networking technologies, creating a document in Word, or creating an avatar. Literacy, is not only the mastery of words and multi-media, but the use of a variety of powerful, expressive human-machine interactions (Prensky)