Tech Task #1: Curation
The Internet is a firehose blasting you in the face.
Sorry, what? Oh, right, uh, in terms of taking in information, the Internet is like a firehose blasting you in the face. There's so much, and it comes at you so fast, you can't really deal with it, and then your face goes numb because of all the water hitting it and this analogy has really run out of gas.
The point is that you need SOME way of corralling all that information into a manage and fact-checkable space so you can actually work with it.
This goes triple for teachers, who are in the information business and have a professional mandate to make sure that their students have the skills to use information effectively. It's kind of the whole point of teaching, actually, and in the age of ubiquitous Internet access, these skills are becoming harder to teach just as they become more important to teach.
If you have effective curation skills, you can impart them to your students so that they aren't totally lost in the modern world. The basic media skills of researching, fact-checking, and critical thinking are really all you need, but they aren't things you learn in one day (especially the last one).
Technology has been developed to curate information for us, such as the algorithms that decide what shows up in your social media feeds. However, there is no substitute for critical thinking and common sense, and any teacher who is preparing students for the Information Fire Hose had better have a good grasp as to how to teach those.
Sorry, what? Oh, right, uh, in terms of taking in information, the Internet is like a firehose blasting you in the face. There's so much, and it comes at you so fast, you can't really deal with it, and then your face goes numb because of all the water hitting it and this analogy has really run out of gas.
The point is that you need SOME way of corralling all that information into a manage and fact-checkable space so you can actually work with it.
This goes triple for teachers, who are in the information business and have a professional mandate to make sure that their students have the skills to use information effectively. It's kind of the whole point of teaching, actually, and in the age of ubiquitous Internet access, these skills are becoming harder to teach just as they become more important to teach.
If you have effective curation skills, you can impart them to your students so that they aren't totally lost in the modern world. The basic media skills of researching, fact-checking, and critical thinking are really all you need, but they aren't things you learn in one day (especially the last one).
Technology has been developed to curate information for us, such as the algorithms that decide what shows up in your social media feeds. However, there is no substitute for critical thinking and common sense, and any teacher who is preparing students for the Information Fire Hose had better have a good grasp as to how to teach those.
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