Chris Harris has put this together already, but there are some great remixes of standards popping up, most notably from John Pederson and Jeff Utecht. John substitutes “teacher” for “student” in remixing the ALA’s Information Power manifesto, and my favorite part is :

The teacher who is an independent learner is information literate and;

4) pursues information related to personal interests

5) appreciates literature and other creative expressions of information

6) strives for excellence in information seeking and knowledge generation

Jeff throws out the word “technology” and substitutes “information” with similar powerful results:

3. Information productivity tools
• Students use information tools to enhance learning, increase productivity, and promote creativity.
• Students use productivity tools to collaborate in constructing information-enhanced models, prepare publications, and produce other creative works.

Subtle, yet interesting shifts…
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I know it’s Monday of a short week, which means, of course, that all hell is breaking loose, but I decided to do some edblog surfing while eating the really “fresh” salad (with a couple of baked potato halves smothered in cafeteria cheese) that I scored for my daily, relaxing 10-minute lunch, when I clicked back to David Warlick’s post about conversations and how they’re growing out of these new technologies (which are slowly becoming transparent) and started reading through the comments and stopped cold on the one left by Jeff Utecht (who I just got a Gizmo request from and will be calling in China as soon as I can figure out the time difference) because of the almost audible connection that a few synapses made in my brain when he wrote this about the teachers he’s teaching about technology:

[A] problem I’m facing and I think the point you are making is that teachers, for the most part, just want the tool. They don’t want the conversation. My class is about the conversation and not about the tool and I keep getting teachers coming to me and saying “So why can’t we just learn how to use it?” They don’t see the need for conversation; to them it’s just another thing they can use in their classroom and not something that can, if used in such a way, revolutionize the teaching learning process. Until we realize the conversation is more important then the tool, we will be stuck in a 1.0 world.

And I swear my brain just went “zzzzzzzzzzttt” when I read that (as in sparks, not sleep, even though the potatoes were a bit heavy) because what I think most people don’t get when they pick up these tools is that to use them well they have to want to be learners, not just teachers. This isn’t like a textbook or a worksheet or a (fill in your one-dimensional outdated teaching tool here). This is a conversation, (or at least the potential for one) not a monologue or some contrived negotiation of knowledge that ultimately gets tested against what’s been written in a textbook somewhere. Teachers who use them well have to be willing to learn new truths about the material they’re teaching, and be able to contextualize those truths and make them relevant to their students. (I can hear the groans now.)

Welcome to teaching 2.0, which while a lot more fun, is also a lot more work than teaching 1.0. The question is, are we up to it?