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David McGavock

How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's - Howard Rheingold -... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...256898

thinking information_literacy crap detection Net Smart critical_thinking resources skills Howard Rheingold

shared by David McGavock on 10 May 12 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 10 May 12
     
    Editor's note: The following essay has been adapted from Howard Rheingold's new book Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which offers Rheingold's insights on how to find quality information on the web, and then how to piece that information together "intelligently, humanely, and above all mindfully." The book was published in April by MIT Press.
David McGavock

There Is No Digital Divide - Technology Review - 1 views

www.technologyreview.com/...there-is-no-digital-divide

digital divide technology Jessica Daniels rheingold

shared by David McGavock on 05 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • I think we've all sort of accepted the "digital divide" framework, but there are some real problems with that.  First of all, saying there is a "digital divide" presumes a shared understanding of that term and there's not one.
  • Given that in the original research, the middle- and upper-classes, whites, and men were more likelyt to have access to technology, those sorts of questions about the characteristics of the "have-nots" just point us to old ways of thinking about class, about race, and about gender."
  • My research finds that Black/Latina/o LGBT youth who are homeless - in other words, the very people who should be on the "other side" of so-called the "digital divide," are in fact, quite adept at technology and most have smart phones. They use this technology to survive - to find work, social services, avoid police or report police misconduct.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Instead of "digital divide," other scholars have talked about "digital fluency," or even "digital entitlements" which I like better.
  • I found that while they were very adept at some things (opening multiple browser windows, locating things online quickly), they weren't very good at some other, important tasks. For example, they weren't good at deciphering "cloaked" sites from legitimate ones. 
  • I'd point to the work of my friend Howard Rheingold and his new book "Net Smart," which is an excellent guide for how to be a digitally fluent user of all the technologies we have available to us now.  It's an excellent book and I think the FCC should include it in their plan for training the digital educators going into schools!
  • David McGavock on 05 Jun 12
     
    a recent New York Times piece, "Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era" (or, as Gawker put it, "Poor People Are Wasting Time on the Internet!") asserts that while all kids are spending more time with media, those with lower socio-economic status were spending even more of it, and on activities like Facebook that aren't exactly conducive to learning. In other words: even when you give poor people access to technology, they don't know what to do with it! Might as well give a paleolithic tribe access to a chip fab, pffft. Jessie Daniels, Associate Professor of urban public health at Hunter College and CUNY and author of a forthcoming book on Internet propaganda, tweeted her displeasure at the piece. (There's even a Storify of all her comments on it.)
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