From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Building New Learning Environments for New Media Environments - Sponsored by Oracle, An EDUCAUSE Gold Partner

The new media environment can be disruptive to our current teaching methods and philosophies. As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information and knowledge. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. This "knowledge-ability" is not simply a skill set as implied by the "21st-century skills" movement but a way of being-in-the-world in which people recognize and actively examine, question, and even re-create the (increasingly digital) structures that shape our world. Knowledge-ability must begin with the recognition that new media are not "just tools" but new ways of relating to one another that entail disruptive changes in economic, social, and political structures. This presentation will explore what knowledge-ability needs to be, why it is important, and how education can and must change to foster the forms of knowledge building, epistemology, and self-understanding we need.