But I note
Note: writing and verbal communication are key skills underneath connecting. If I were to be hiring someone today, I’d want to see them read and write under pressure.

Much more than technology, this is the heart of the digital divide.

As a teacher educator working in an NGO in South Africa, should I be spending my time inhabiting Web2.0, or should I be finding better ways to teach chidlren to read and write?

But you say, the two are not mutually exclusive.
But I say, I have limited skills and energy, and it’s a question of how much time I spend where.
The two hours that I have spent this morning working through your website (which is excellent, and I can see that you’re getting to the heart of things here – and it’s all high quality)
could have been spent on the school down the road, with children who don’t have breakfast, with an excellent principal who struggles to pay her staff, with a teacher who painstakingly makes her teaching aids with cardboard and sticky tape, and has real conversations with her pupils about abuse and HIV /AIDS.

What worries me is that more and more energy of highly skilled, sensitive, talented people is being sucked into a largely decontextualised virtual world, with no clear benefit for ordinary people. In South Africa, the top 10% of learners achieve in literacy and numeracy at internationally comparable levels, and the rest achieve worse and worse. The statistics are frightening.

THe virtual world is a threat to the real world. Inhabiting it makes us oblivious to the cries of the poor. The only worthwhile activity for the intelligent and privileged is to work towards decreasing the inequalities in society and responding compassionately and creatively to human suffering – not only because it is the right thing to do, but because the survival of the world as we know it depends on this.

So the real challenge is not information management in a digital environment or skills for learning professionals in virtual environments. The real challenge is living in real communities.

I find myself digging deeper and deeper into this sense that it may be silly to even classify all these things we are offering as skills for the learning professional. They are skills for living in the 21st century, no?