"A Talk with Howard Rheingold" through the PLPNetwork Ustream By Will Richardson.
Live Video streaming by Ustream
If you have about an hour, this is worth the viewing. Howard Reingold is fascinating to listen to. Will Richardson helped reveal many of the tools that are out there and the history of how the tools were developed.
Reingold indicates that there are two things that students should be able to do. He asks:
"How do you find the answer to any question on line?"
"How do you find out what you found was true?"
There was never an answer to the second question. However, I was surprised by Reingold's comment on critical thinking or "going beyond what is presented to me." I smiled when he said, "Critical Thinking is a communist plot that will never be aloud by school boards." He continues by expressing how patients a parent or teacher needs to be to encourage students to question them. He reminds us that questioning authority is always shut down. We need to do some soul searching when it comes to teaching our students to question things effectively.
How do we question the information that we find on the Internet?
How do we teach our students to question the information they find?
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Funny that when I clicked on critical thinking, it brought me to the definition on wikipedia. Not that it is funny to you.. but today after school, my colleague's were having a discussion about something very similar to the comment above. I was in our library today and it says "no googling".. and then they teach our kids not to use wikipedia. I understand how this can be.. but in a day and age of amazing knowledge, wikipedia is an amazing source. Would this hamper our "critical thinking" skills. Wouldn't it be better to teach our kids about google, how to set it to safe search mode themselves, and why people may think wikipedia is not trustworthy? Just my thoughts!
ReplyDeleteJen... AWESOME video! :) Love it. This would be wonderful to use when training teachers about the benefits of Web2.0 tools. Yeah!
ReplyDeleteKim,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comments. My school does the same thing with Google and Wikipedia. What we should be teaching our students is how to determine if information they found is reliable. The Googlephobia needs to end.