To me, the issue of information literacy could be even more important than the
health or education of some individuals. Fundamental aspects of democracy,
economic production, the discovery and use of knowledge might be at stake. Some
of the biggest problems facing the world today seem to be far beyond the ability
of any individual or community, or even the whole human race, to tackle.
Includes an extensive list of websites which can be used for teaching the concept of critical thinking and evaluating the information we find on the Internet. Based on a presentation by Howard Rheingold.
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.