Digital Age Competencies: Focusing and Sharing

Tom has red paint. Mary has blue paint. Neither can make purple paint unless both share their colors. Keep this notion in mind for a moment.

Much has been written about information overload. It is perhaps the most significant problem of the Digital Age. There’s simply too much information to deal with it all effectively. Consequently, an essential real-world skill that educators must learn, apply to their own work, and teach their students is how to focus attention on information that matters. Just as teachers once taught students how to use the tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries of their textbooks, today’s educators need to teach students how to use abstracts, summaries, keywords, and Internet search strategies to pinpoint information they need to find and use.

This Digital Age competency—focusing—is largely common knowledge. Less common is its counterpart: sharing. Focusing strategies tend to narrow the field of intellectual vision. As a result, information can be isolated and disconnected. Tom’s red paint, Mary’s blue. Bits-and-pieces information does not constitute knowledge acquisition that leads to deep, real-world understanding. This is like the problem teachers often cite of the student who writes well in English class but cannot seem to construct a coherent sentence for a math problem in algebra class or, conversely, the student who is good at math but cannot seem to apply mathematics in the context of a physics or chemistry class. Connections do not necessarily come naturally.

The counterpart to teaching focusing strategies is teaching sharing strategies, such as exchanging information, cooperating, and collaborating. In the Digital Age workplace—now, not in some misty future—success usually depends on teamwork. Tom and Mary need to be taught that if they share their colors, they can make a new color. This realization contradicts our American spirit of rugged independence, which has permeated school culture, but the necessity of focusing and sharing is a Digital Age reality. Education needs to shift into this mode of focusing and sharing if we are serious about preparing our young people for life in this century, rather than the past.

Standardized testing, which is fraught with problems in any case, is particularly problematic from the standpoint of focusing and sharing because most such testing proceeds from a mindset of rugged independence. Most standardized testing ought to be abandoned simply on grounds that it is outmoded and, as a result of its pervasiveness and its past-century modus operandi, is holding back educational progress toward teaching and learning this century’s Digital Age competencies.