Three challenges to educators:

Three challenges facing educators wishing to fully engage their students with aspects of the information society thus enabling knowledge networking, and thereby encouraging digital innovation are:

1. The ability to look at the development of digital lives, personally, professionally and for the students I encounter in my work, beyond the techno-hype of the digerati (Lindsey, 2014). Too much concern about cyber safety by educational administrators often hampers educators’ ability to model and teach use and development of C21st skills (Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S), 2014). The high level of concern about issues of authenticity and authority is extreme when consideration is given to the fact that humanity has been living in various kinds of information ages since writing began (Floridi, 2009, p. 153). Subsequently people have learned to access, select, utilise and adapt the work of those such as Gutenberg and Turing, to apply it to their own information needs and to create new information (Floridi, 2009, p. 154)
2. The focus should be on celebrating that information is socially situated, is socially constructed, and, therefore, needs to be designed and utilised to empower people, as opposed to overwhelming them(Lindsey, 2014). The exponential growth of information in recent times has challenged the degree of subsurface root development to support the rapidly developing branches of humanities’ technological tree (Floridi, 2009, p. 154).
3. Educators have a unique and critical role to play in assisting their students to develop skills that enable them to cope with Moore’s prediction that information will double every eighteen months (Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 14).  While excitement is aroused in infoenthusiasts by this amazing amount of knowledge, students needs a means of redefining the masses of information comes to them as documents, stories, diagrams and images which convey knowledge and meaning (Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 16). Users do not consider it to be made up of “quadrillions of packets of data (Gates, cited in Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 11), they need mechanisms to sort, rework, recreate, use, and move to the solutions that such access brings, rather than focussing of the questions and issues (Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 19). Our students need to be educated to participate in this sudden burst of global information societal action for the depth of understanding, networking and collaborative problem solving to which it is so well suited (Floridi, 2009, p. 154).

References

Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S). (2014). Retrieved March 4, 2015, from Microsoft Education: http://www.microsoft.com/education/en-au/leadership/Pages/assessment.aspx

Bawden, D., & Robinson, L. (2009). The Dark Side of Information Overload, Anxiety and Other Paraxes and Pathologies. Journal of Information Science, 35(2), 180-191.

Brown, J., & Duguid, P. (2000). Limits to Information. In J. Brown, & P. Duguid, Social Life of Information (pp. 11-33). Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Floridi, L. (2009). The Information Society and Its Philosophy: An Introduction to the Special issue on “The Philosophy of Information, Its Nature, and Future developments. The Information Society: An International Journal, 25, 153-158. doi:10.1080/01972240902848583

Lindsey, J. (2014). 1.1 Information environments. Retrieved March 4, 2015, from INF532 Knowledge Networking for Educators: https://interact2.csu.edu.au/bbcswebdav/pid-289790-dt-content-rid-490057_1/courses/S-INF532_201530_W_D/S-INF532_201530_W_D_ImportedContent_20150211062159/module1/1_2_Discover_philosophy_info_digital_environ.html