I enjoyed our guest speaker last week, Dr. Joan Rhoades- I felt she really took the role of moderator and let us students do some good ol' fashion debating on digital literacies in the 21st century. One of the more important pieces of our talk however (at least I felt so) was determining how one can go about information synthesizing information (knowing WHAT to pay attention to).
Long gone are the days of going home to a reading assignment that came from a hardback/paperback book with a few follow up questions at the end of the chapter. Classrooms are flipped, lessons are flipped- the internet is integrated into every aspect of education. When I was going through grade school, reading with purpose meant making sure I had adequate lighting and a quiet room for concentration. Today, students are using the internet in addition to their standard texts to gain different viewpoints and perspectives on learning. As mentioned in the Coiro article, students today are long removed from the text bound world their elders came from- new technologies give them far greater power to think independently. How can we teach these students to take in this information without being sucked in by the digital techniques employed by many websites to attract the student's attention? The new school methods of teaching/learning obviously call for fluency strategies that are taught in isolation (offline reading and online reading).
This is a great point, Jason! I think that teaching students to be critical thinkers helps them sort the digital wheat from the chaff, so to speak. We all know that any goofball with an internet connection can write whatever they want, so it means that we have to make sure that we are able to think critically and do the research necessary to make sure that we don't believe every crackpot thing we read ON THE INTARWEBS.
ReplyDeleteJason and Caitlin, I completely agree with both of you. I am kind of old school, so personally I greatly prefer reading books to looking for sources on the internet. When I try to do internet research, I become really distracted and confused, whereas when I sit in a library and actually read a book, I can do so for hours. The internet makes is harder to concentrate, and I can easily be lead down the rabbit-hole. However, I never really used computers that much until I was in high school so maybe that's why. In school we learned computer skills, but we never really learned how to filter what we were reading (or the school's parental controls did it for us). I think that education in this area needs to be more intentional and go beyond just how to use the computer.
ReplyDeleteJason,
ReplyDeleteI agree with Catlin’s comment about “teaching students to be critical thinkers helps them sort the digital wheat from the chaff,” and Rachel’s comment about that fact that in school they “never really learned how to filter what we were reading ……. I think that education in this area needs to be more intentional and go beyond just how to use the computer.” My response to your blog and their comments is the term “information literacy.”
As defined by the library science personnel at Penn State University http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/lls/info_literacy.html , information literacy is composed of four interconnected components:
1.Knowledge of information sources, the organization of information, and the nature of knowing — the attributes of scholarly knowledge.
2.Skills in finding, evaluating, using, and effectively communicating information.
3.Generalization of knowledge and skills to various applied settings with a positive disposition toward the use of new and extant information sources and information technologies.
4.Social context for the use of information, equal access to information, and the dissemination of knowledge.
The webpage goes on to elaborate in detail exactly what these components mean with respect to knowledge and skills --- with the understanding that “…. the retrieval and analysis of information and data are not sufficient to produce an educated adult. It is the relationship between information and knowledge, and the applications of knowledge in the service of humanity that continue to be the prime foci of the academic learning environment.”
I hope my response helps to answer your question “How can we teach these students to take in this information without being sucked in by the digital techniques employed by many websites to attract the student's attention?” It appears that at least Penn State acknowledges the need to instill “information literacy” into its students.
I love all the ZPD that goes on in this blog. wooohoooo! In Dr. Rhodes' class, doe you all discuss fluency as flipped too? In the non-digital world, fluency had to do with how many words your can read (and understand) in a fixed amount of time. Now, fluency is about how many extraneous websites you can skip. And then, when we get to the important stuff, fluency is about how well we can slow down and read slowly. (I know you guys talked about this last class...but isn't it fascinating????) :)
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