"Top Rationality Blogs " Blogs are organized by category. Some of them are:
Skeptic Zoners
Sorting out Science
Skeptico
Fallacy Files
Science-Based Pharmacy
Bad Science
PLNs -- which she calls "passionate learning networks" and defines simply as "the people you choose to connect with and learn from."
Shelly has a list of resources for educators who want to use Skype and videoskype to go global with their classrooms.
"I get them to start with blogs, show them how to participate by commenting. They see how the conversation evolves. After they get comfortable, I encourage them to begin looking at other tools. Like our students, teachers evolve at different paces...You have to participate to build community.
Asking for help is important -- just as we teach our students every day. It opens a conversation. Be willing to listen. Be willing to let the conversation take you where it's going to take you, because often it takes you to a completely different place than you originally imagined.”
When I started using social media in the classroom, I looked for and began to learn from more experienced educators. First, I read and then tried to comment usefully on their blog posts and tweets. When I began to understand who knew what in the world of social media in education, I narrowed my focus to the most knowledgeable and adventurous among them. I paid attention to the people the savviest social media educators paid attention to. I added and subtracted voices from my attention network, listened and followed, then commented and opened conversations. When I found something I thought would interest the friends and strangers I was learning from, I passed along my own learning through my blogs and Twitterstream. I asked questions, asked for help, and eventually started providing answers and assistance to those who seemed to know less than I. The teachers I had been learning from had a name for what I was doing -- "growing a personal learning network." So I started looking for and learning from people who talked about HOW to grow a "PLN" as the enthusiasts called them. Learning innovator Will Richardson led me to Shelly Terrell, who genuinely lives out her "collaborate for change" maxim.
Personal Learning Networks can be important in helping you find authorities in a field. A collection of professionals, a network of enthusiasts on a subject, can provide checks on opinion and fact.
Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media.
Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard.
Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices."
The News Literacy Project (NLP) is a national educational program that taps experienced journalists to help middle and high school students "sort fact from fiction in the digital age."
According to its website, the project teaches students critical-thinking skills that will help them become smarter consumers and creators of information across all types of media. It shows students "how to distinguish verified information from spin, opinion, and misinformation-whether they are using search engines to find websites with information about specific topics, assessing a viral eMail, viewing a video on YouTube, watching television news, or reading a newspaper or a blog post."
Working with educators, students, and journalists, NLP says it has developed original curriculum materials "based on engaging activities and student projects that build and reflect understanding of the program's essential questions. The curriculum includes material on a variety of topics … that is presented through hands-on exercises, games, videos, and the journalists' own compelling stories."
"I'd like to briefly take a look at using critical thinking specifically for reading blogs and tweets (although this method could apply to just about anything). While there isn't an official formula for doing this, I'd like to suggest using "The Five W's" that we learn in elementary school as guidelines for inquiry; they include Who?, What?, Where?, When?, Why?, and (sometimes) How?.
Instead of using the Five W's for developing content (they're the basics for writing a successful news piece), use the Five W's to analyze any post/piece of writing. Here's how to get started:
Science News
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Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And
Analysis?
ScienceDaily (Jan. 29, 2009) - As technology
has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and
analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to
research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and
director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.
See also:
Mind &
Brain
Intelligence
Educational Psychology
Computers &
Math
Video
Games
Computer Graphics
Science &
Society
Popular
Culture
Educational Policy
Reference
Computing power
everywhere
Webcast
Computer-generated imagery
Aptitude
Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says
Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology,
including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and
video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.
Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent
decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual
media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.
How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as
reading and classroom discussion?
"No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to
develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has
costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."
S
"Videatives come to you in five ways
Streaming Video, Instant Downloads, CDs, eCourses, Bi-weekly Blog
The word videative [vid´-é-ã-tive] refers to the combination of text and video segments to create an integrated viewing experience (video + narrative = videative). The text explains the video and the video exemplifies the text. Use videatives to see how children think, to see how to support their learning, and to see how to prepare environments that engage children in rich problem solving. Use videatives to add authenticity to your lectures or clarity to your training sessions. Share videatives with parents to help them understand the value of play and the subtle ways a teacher can help children reflect on their own experiences."
How to Disagree
The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do-in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.
The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face.
There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume
There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume
The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don’t care about.
at about the blogs where one in five or one in 10 posts are relevant for you?
the real magic is in filtering.
My favorite filtering tool is Yahoo Pipes
which lets me filter an RSS feed using various criteria: URL, author, date, content and more.
and my some blogs filtered for just the best posts using PostRank.
The best thing about PostRank is that you can get an RSS feed of just the best posts from a particular publisher, and that feed then includes the PostRank score,
you can do even more hacking on the PostRank RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes.
Another technique that helps me to consume information more efficiently is to modify the format of many of my RSS feeds
By bringing more details into the title, I can avoid spending time clicking to get more information.
The final trick is to use Web APIs to gather additional data
There is more information available in the world than any one person could hope to consume (hundreds of exabytes of data),
but most of that information is uninteresting, out of date, inaccurate, or not relevant for you.
The key to reducing information overload is to more efficiently find the data you want among the information that you don't care about.
"The ability to think critically is one skill separating innovators from followers. Critical thinking reduces the power of advertisers, the unscrupulous and the pretentious, and can neutralize the sway of an unsupported argument. This is a skill most students enjoy learning because they see immediately that it gives them more control."
I remember exactly when I decided to stop reading Mashable.
You can’t see a single word from the actual article without scrolling. It reminded me of a comment that Merlin Mann recently made in his typically funny and obnoxious style:
we seem to be in this bizarre race to the intellectual bottom to write the most generic article in the world so that everyone with an Internet connection will click through. And the only purpose seems to be to keep the advertising monster fed, fat, and happy.
I’m worried that all the noise makes it increasingly difficult for quality content[1] to be seen. Worse, I’m worried that it’s discouraging the creation of quality content because what’s successful (i.e. what gets the most clicks) is mostly lowest-common-denominator blog post titles that either start with a number or end with a question mark.
The problem is not that people don’t have enough time, it’s that people don’t have enough attention.
The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.
"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you're smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing (and to do it without selling your soul in the process). "
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.
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!
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.)
Mathematically proficient students can apply the mathematics they know to solve problems arising in everyday life, society, and the workplace.” But I wonder if we often try too hard to create real-world problems when, if all we did were look around and ask “what do you wonder?” and “what do you notice?”, we would find that math problems are everywhere.
“I know that teachers are asking, “Are there any questions?” and “Do you understand?”; however, I’m not sure how many teachers are asking, “What do you notice?” or “What do you wonder?” So many times, teachers will ask if there are any questions, or whether students understand, only to be met with blank stares. This leads to nobody’s “needs” being met.”
“Asking good questions is key to any well-functioning classroom. The CCSS include students’ ability to communicate mathematically. Asking good questions gets conversations started. Simply by asking students what they notice and/or what they wonder, students will begin to communicate mathematically. Asking them what they notice and what they wonder puts the ownership back on the student, encouraging them to think and communicate about math.”
" * A differing opinion, by itself, is no evidence of asshattery. That is basically what the principle of reciprocity says.
* But, a violation of the principle of reciprocity is evidence of asshattery.
* Therefore, when I call someone an asshat for violating the principle of reciprocity, I am not violating the principle of reciprocity myself, since my opinion is evidence-based.
It's reassuring to know I can be a good critical thinker and still be allowed to call someone an asshat on occasion."
In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I've developed this "Taxonomy of Reflection." - modeled on Bloom's approach. It's posted in four installments:
1. A Taxonomy of Reflection
2. The Reflective Student
3. The Reflective Teacher
4. The Reflective Principal
I also have developed a Prezi version of the Taxonomy
"Professor Michael Eisenberg Talks Critical Thinking Today
Betsynote: I first ran into Professor Michael Eisenberg last fall when he was introduced to me by multiple folks - the MacArthur Foundation, local Seattle educators, and the NCCE conference organizers. When I chatted with him in his office (yes, I got lost, even though it was Mary Gates Hall as a landmark) I realized he had a long history of working with Internet literacy and critical thinking, and his pro-library/reference stance provided another insight into the discussion. He has his hand in many projects - university academia, educational research, his own company that creates educational resources, and a startup. Here's what he has to say on various issues around search and critical thinking….
Tell us a little about yourself and what you do now.
I am currently Professor at the Information School of the University of Washington. I am the founding dean of the School, having stepped aside in 2006. I keep pretty busy these days-teaching (grads and undergrads); being principal investigator on 2 funded research projects - Project Information Literacy (funded by ProQuest and MacArthur), a large-scale study of the information habits of college students and Virtual Information Behavior Environments (funded by the MacArthur Foundation), studying information problem-solving in virtual worlds; giving numerous workshops and keynote presentations on information literacy, technology, and the information field; advising a number of doctoral students; and hanging out with my family, especially my 2 grandkids - ages 5 and 7."
"The Big6™
Developed by Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz, the Big6 is the most widely known and widely used approach to teaching information and technology skills in the world. Used in thousands of K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and corporate and adult training programs, the Big6 information problem-solving model is applicable whenever people need and use information. The Big6 integrates information search and use skills along with technology tools in a systematic process to find, use, apply, and evaluate information for specific needs and tasks."
"One solution to the information problem-the one that seems to be most often adopted in schools (as well as in business and society in general)-is to speed things up. We try to pack in more and more content, to work faster to get more done. But, this is a losing proposition. Speeding things up can only work for so long. Instead, we need to think about helping students to work smarter, not faster. There is an alternative to speeding things up. It's the smarter solution-one that helps students develop the skills and understandings they need to find, process, and use information effectively. This smarter solution focuses on process as well as content. Some people call this smarter solution information literacy or information skills instruction. We call it the Big6."