As I read Rheingold’s article and watched his vlog post, I found myself agreeing with many of his points; we need to equip ourselves and our students with 21st century literacy skills, and we need to move towards a culture of collaborative inquiry. At the end of the article, I found myself thinking, “So who is this Howard Rheingold guy again and what makes him a leading expert on crap detection?” I guess the case he made for thinking critically about the information you consume really hit home; I quickly took a glance at his bio and website, and saw that he has diverse experience and background as an author, editor and professor.
By encouraging students to ask questions and think like detectives, we can begin to develop students’ abilities and habits to critically filter the information they find online; the challenging part is to make this really matter to them. Do the nine-year olds in my Grade 4 class really care if their research on John Cabot is entirely accurate, or would they rather just find an answer, any answer, to their research questions? Perhaps I could use a site like martinlutherking.org, mentioned by Rheingold, to design an initial introductory assignment on crap detection 101.
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