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?”
