Only if they want to. Xenophobia can extend to all borders, including the ones between technologies, between disciplines, and between literacies. It’s like cuisine. If you have been told that sushi is horrible because you have been raised on cooked meat and have been told that uncooked meat is bad for you, then you are probably not going to try sushi. You have to reason to. If you’ve been told that blogging is only for the young and hip who don’t have anything better to do, and that it’s all just public diaries and NSFW self-portraits online, and you’ve been raised to keep your life secret and think you’re too old and need to know programming, you probably will not try blogging. You have no reason to.

Who tried blogging? The same people who tried sushi and decided it wasn’t going to kill them, in fact it tasted pretty good, and then tried to make their own at home. I know people who hold those outdated beliefs, including the young and old, blue- and white-collared workers (even in 2008), regardless of the distance that blogging has travelled from online diaries to corporate mouthpieces to sole sources of income (dooce.com, for example). If someone doesn’t think it’s important, they won’t try it.

Nor, do I think, will they bother to teach it. Hasn’t all of the history of schools been about teaching kids what the adults feel is important? Certainly no one asks the kids what they want to learn (okay, special classes with open-minded teachers, but as a whole, the curriculum K-12 is decided by adults, or *shudder* the gov’t). If adults think that the web is important, they will teach it.

But the problem, IMO, isn’t really getting the adults to believe that web literacy is important for kids these days. That’s just the first step. The real problem (as Mr. Bretag suggests) is getting the adults to believe that web literacy is important IN THEIR PARTICULAR DISCIPLINE. This is going to be difficult, because right now, many people consider the web to be a stand-alone edifice, and you don’t go in unless you have specific business in there.

As you and others in your tribe realize, the web is really an elastic and organic structure, forming a WEB (duh) of interdisciplinary opportunities, stretching as far as the users will take it. The technologies made available by the web, such as blogs, rss feeds, and the like, have only the limits of benefits that we ourselves impose. As we challenge the web, it will grow.

And therein lies the rub. If you don’t want to grow, the web probably isn’t for you. With access to the web, there is no excuse for not finding information, finding people, making connections, and forming tribes. It’s not just xenophobia–it’s also complacency. And perhaps that will be the yardstick by which future teachers will be eliminated in the Darwinian rush into the Internet.

Schools have never been very good at the whole “interdisciplinary” thing. Schools are like the industrial food complex: you break things down into manageable compartments and operate under the false belief that this is an efficient system. Cows/English on this farm, Corn/Math on that farm, Chickens/Art on another farm. Sooner or later the organic qualities of the soil break down, species require more intervention to stay healthy, and it becomes unnatural (yet viewed as efficient). Polyculture farms do best, because they mimic the natural cycle of millions of years; truly interdisciplinary schools would do well, also, because one set of disciplines complement all others. [Are we reading "Jimmy Corrigan" in English classes yet? How about ethics texts in biology class?] The web needs to find its way in there somehow. But first the people who can teach it need to care, not only about the web, but about the SYSTEM. You are right, the skills are important, but people have been playing it too safe; take off the seatbelts, get out, and PUSH because for the most part, the bus ain’t goin’ nowhere.