> "The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn."
This concept seems to be becoming closer to reality. Especially as every kid now has a smartphone.
The cliche path to illiteracy in America in recent years has been kids forced to attend 'dropout factory' public schools because they live in a particular neighbourhood and got assigned to it. Ideally the problem can be narrowed down to "the person without the parenting or cultural environment that promotes learning". Rather than not having a choice.
Agree so much. However I want to add that motivation plays a factor here as well. I know too many people who think that once high school is over, reading is over. As someone who spends 1-2 hours per day reading, not counting software blogs, I am horrified by that attitude. And how many people goofed off in school? (I admit I did that a bit too much back then)
"the person without the parenting or cultural environment that promotes learning"
Exactly. I saw a program a few years ago in Milwaukee. Basically they assigned mentors to struggling schools to help the kids work through the problems that were distracting them. The results were solid double digit improvements in both the percentage of kids passing, and reducing the number of disciplinary incidents. I wish I could recall the name, I have searched for it before. This needs to be in every struggling school.
Europeana is an EU initiative to bring together digital collections of museums, archives, etc from around the EU and make them accessible, findable etc. While they try to encourage everyone to use CC it depends on the organisation that is putting the stuff online, their own rights to it (eg art is often loaned) and how it's put online (commercial photographer or similar might offer to put them for free online in order to be able to sell reuse licenses). So it's a mixed back but last time i checked most seemed to be free to use and share.
This concept seems to be becoming closer to reality. Especially as every kid now has a smartphone.
The cliche path to illiteracy in America in recent years has been kids forced to attend 'dropout factory' public schools because they live in a particular neighbourhood and got assigned to it. Ideally the problem can be narrowed down to "the person without the parenting or cultural environment that promotes learning". Rather than not having a choice.