Who's job is it to teach Technology and Information Literacy?

So I am concerned, concerned that we are even asking this question. We started a new COETAIL course today so I'll have to answer it!

Let's be honest, technology is now so embedded in western society that it is in reality, quite impossible to escape it within education. Technology is here to stay and it will continue to expand and blow our minds by the advances it makes. If we chose to ignore technology as teachers we are turning a blind eye to the world that our students are growing up in and in fact, we are doing our student population a crime by not given them the skills necessary to succeed in a technologically driven economy and society. It is a disservice to not give our children an opportunity to master the skills needed to live in a such a society

The question that is raised is how do we teach these skills? One option is by creating a set of learning standards to ensure that all students are engaged in technology. The NETS are one example of a set of standards that can be adopted by schools. These standards are devised by the 'International Society for Technology in Education' (ISTE), which is actually an American based society (the 'N' in NETS represents 'National'... rather ironic considering it is an international society). The NETS are divided into key learning areas/strands/standards (depending on where you come from) as follows:

1. Creativity and Innovation
2. Communication and Collaboration
3. Research and Information Fluency
4. Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
5. Digital Citizenship
6. Technology Operations and Concepts

As you can see from the above standards only the last two standards are overtly descriptive in their title as 'technology' focused (I use this term broadly). The first four standards are skills that I feel are embedded in other curricula areas within a school, it is only when you read the descriptors of standards 1-4 that there is a reference to these standards being taught through a 'technology focused environment' or using 'technology tools'.

Another set of standards that could be used for ensuring schools teach technology within their curriculum are the AASL standards (AASL: American Association of School Librarians). These are much broader (as they are primarily for librarians), but are also set out much more effectively as they are broken into Skills, Dispositions in Action, Responsibilities and Self-Assessment Strategies within the four standards:

1. Inquire, think critically and gain knowledge
2. Draw conclusions, make informed decisions, apply to knowledge to new situations, and create new knowledge
3. Share knowledge participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society
4. Pursue personal and aesthetic growth

Once again, many of the standards are very broad educational goals that many schools already include within their 'School Vision', 'ESLR's -Expected Schoolwide Learning Results', 'Essential Skills' or whatever the school policy is called which lays home to it's primary educational goals.

So, as many of the standards themselves are embedded in other curricula areas and school policy documents why do we even need a set of standards? Does the creation of a set of standards lead us to ask the question 'Who's job is it to teach IT'?

Personally I struggle with this and see an adoption of a 'set of standards' as another bunch of boxes to tick, another hoop to jump through. Let's just look at standard five from the NETS... 'Digital Citizenship'. In reality most schools in western society promote 'citizenship' or 'global citizenship' as an educational aim, which in a modern world one would now argue is inclusive of digital citizenship... the two are connected, not disconnected, or should I say more broadly, information is connected in our learning, not disconnected.

The teaching of Information technology is embedded in what we do, it cannot be separate, sure we need to teach the skill of a program to ensure the students are up to speed, just like we teach a science student 'how to use a microscope' or a PE student 'how to use a heart rate monitor'. The key is this is not the key learning we are after... the technology provides access to something deeper... the cell structure... the workings of your own human heart. It is when we access the deeper stuff the we learn. Technology itself is a tool, a tool is used to create, to discover, to lever us into understandings we couldn't achieve before.

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The key point is...

...the tool (I.T.) is embedded within learning, it has to be taught within each subject. We therefore share the responsible for ensuring our students are equipped to succeed in an evolving technologically landscape.