This blog post wasn’t really a ground-breaking revelation, as I think that most people are aware of the fact that you can’t take everything you read/see/hear as gospel, you need to be able to trust the source before believing it. What Rheingold brings up though, is the importance of keeping this skill in check as the access to information today is constantly growing in our society. A major source of this influx of information is due to digital media. Our need to question credibility has not changed, yet the frequency with which we do so has no doubt increased substantially. The web has allowed us access to everything under the sun at our fingertips, from weather forecasts, to illness diagnoses, to celebrity scandals, to political information, to financial advice, -- the list of things relevant to “us” goes on and on and on. It’s important that we be able to differentiate between what is “good” information from a credible source, and what is not.
Some important questions Rheingold encouraged people to ask when reading or listening to new information is: Who is the author? What do other people say about that author? Who are these people saying things about this author? What is the author’s agenda? Is there a bias? Does the author provide sources? How credible do these sources appear?
As educators and parents, our job is to extend this skill of “crap detection” to our students and children, teaching them how to look at information under a detective’s lens. Teaching children this makes THEM active explorers or active detectives… empowering! We should work to create a culture of collaborative inquiry, versus what many of us were raised with, a culture of trusting what you were presented. How many of us were ever told: “Trust me on this one”, or “Because I said so”. Rheingold expressed this shift in the way we present subject material to students; We need to move from giving them info or showing them where the info is, to showing them how to question info and sources and derive meaning from that. Going from:
“Here’s the subject, here’s what you need to know about it.”
to:
“Here’s the subject, what are the questions you need to ask?”
to:
“Here’s the subject, what are the questions you need to ask?”
We were just having a discussion at supper about the ability to photoshop any pictures, and you couldn't trust any picture on the web anymore. Remember how you would believe something if you saw a picture of it..then it was real! Not anymore.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what parameters we should give our students when we let them decide on the questions to ask. Or shouldn't we give them any? Is this just as swing on the pendulum again to "whole language"...just spell it however it sounds right to you?? I wonder...
What are these "skills" we are supposed to be teaching that will help students weed out the 'crap' from the 'non-crap'? When a student wants an answer to a question they pretty much want the first one they find. They may look at a few, but chances are the answers are very similar so they use it. I think it is similar to the idea of expecting kids to practice their spelling and to know how to spell, when their thinking is, "why learn to spell when I have spellcheck". Why search out for information when there are a million hits of information on the first page?
ReplyDeleteI understand the reason why we want to sort through the information, but how do I get my students to understand it? As an adult I am just beginning to sift through the 'crap' myself!