Group items tagged

As for the teaching of history, Ms. Ravitch argues, the sort of censorship being practiced today by textbook publishers can result in all manner of distortions and simplifications. For instance, to insist that depictions of women as nurses, elementary-school teachers, clerks, secretaries, tellers and librarians perpetuate demeaning stereotypes is to minimize ''the barriers that women faced,'' and to pretend ''that the gender equality of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was a customary condition in the past.''

And don't swallow the myth of the digital native. Just because your teens Facebook, IM, and Youtube, don't assume they know the rhetoric of blogging, collective knowledge gathering techniques of taggers and social bookmarkers, collaborative norms of wiki work, how to tune and feed a Twitter network, the art of multimedia argumentation - and, by far most importantly, online crap detection.

I teach courses today on social media issues at Stanford and Berkeley.

The most important critical uncertainty today is how many of us learn to use digital media and networks effectively, reasonably, credibly, collaboratively, civilly, humanely.