The recent T.H.E. Journal article 20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have has already bounced around the blogs I scan, many with some strong opinions about the value or lack value in such a list. The Edtech Posse Podcast #3 gave it a thorough roundup, and I concur with their skepticism about such lists which are narrowly focused on tools rather than the craft.

I am not writing strictly about the list but cannot resist a few barks… When it first passed through my feed reader I passed up looking deeper– Come on, is it truly essential to know how to use a Zip disk? I have a whole drawer full of dusty zips. Much of the “skills” listed are going to have a shelf life of maybe another year or two.

What is more important are the skills in being able to re-skill oneself or to move away from “mastery” to knowing where to find fellow practitioners. There was a gaping hole in terms of the social networking tools, the personal creation tools, the information consumption skills that are to me much more important, much more relevant now than how to create a spreadsheet to average numbers.

Holding back no barb, John Dvorak is a self proclaimed Creative Commons Humbug: Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford? Dubbed Creative Commons, this system is some sort of secondary copyright license that, as far as I can tell, does absolutely nothing but threaten […]