Skip to main content

Home/ Critical Thinking/ Group items tagged youth

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
David McGavock

How's Your Bullshit Detector? | The Smirking Chimp - 2 views

smirkingchimp.com/8863

shared by David McGavock on 22 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • the phrase, "crap-detecting," originated with Ernest Hemingway who when asked if there were one quality needed, above all others, to be a good writer, replied, "Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector."
  • As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit
  • There are so many varieties of bullshit I couldn't hope to mention but a few, and elaborate on even fewer. I will, therefore, select those varieties that have some transcendent significance.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Pomposity:
  • plenty of people who are daily victimized by pomposity in that they are made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies.
  • Fanaticism:
  • The essence of fanaticism is that it has almost no tolerance for any data that do not confirm its own point of view.
  • Inanity:
  • The press and air waves are filled with the featured and prime-time statements from people who are in no position to render informed judgments on what they are talking about and yet render them with elan and, above all, sincerity. Inanity, then, is ignorance presented in the cloak of sincerity.
  • Superstition:
  • Superstition is ignorance presented in the cloak of authority. A superstition is a belief, usually expressed in authoritative terms for which there is no factual or scientific basis.
  • you can't identify bullshit the way you identify phonemes. That is why I have called crap-detecting an art. Although subjects like semantics, rhetoric, or logic seem to provide techniques for crap-detecting, we are not dealing here, for the most part, with a technical problem.
  • if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values.
  • So any teacher who is interested in crap-detecting must acknowledge that one man's bullshit is another man's catechism. Students should be taught to learn how to recognize bullshit, including their own.
  • Postman's Third Law: "At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself."
  • The reason for this is explained in Postman's Fourth Law, which is; "Almost nothing is about what you think it is about--including you."
  • An idealist usually cannot acknowledge his own bullshit, because it is in the nature of his "ism" that he must pretend it does not exist. In fact, I should say that anyone who is devoted to an "ism"--Fascism, Communism, Capital-ism--probably has a seriously defective crap-detector
  • Sensitivity to the phony uses of language requires, to some extent, knowledge of how to ask questions, how to validate answers, and certainly, how to assess meanings.
  • You, therefore, probably assume that I know something about now to achieve this. Well, I don't. At least not very much. I know that our present curricula do not even touch on the matter. Neither do our present methods of training teachers. I am not even sure that classrooms and schools can be reformed enough so that critical and lively people can be nurtured there. Nonetheless, I persist in believing that it is not beyond your profession to invent ways to educate youth along these lines. (Because) there is no more precious environment than our language environment. And even if you know you will be dead soon, that's worth protecting.
  • David McGavock on 22 Dec 11
     
    ""Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection" by Neil Postman (Delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)"
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.)
David McGavock

Why Technology Innovation Needs Critical Thinking | HASTAC - 2 views

www.hastac.org/...vation-needs-critical-thinking

technology critical thinking skills youth perspective

shared by David McGavock on 11 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 11 Mar 11
     
    "I kept hearing this "critical thinking" over and over, so I asked one of the young artists, "What do you mean by 'critical thinking'?" She didn't even pause, "It means being able to see where I am standing and also where you are. It means having enough knowledge and research and discipline not to over-react if you disagree with me or if you dislike me or disrespect me but to pause, and think about who you are, and then help bridge the gap between us." "
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page