It is easy to become overloaded with information these days. There are countless news stations and websites. ESPN has how many stations broadcasting sports? It has to be over a dozen (take pity on my lack of knowledge of the exact number). And I don't even want to get started on the plethora of useless cable stations and websites that convey propaganda advertising 24/7. How are we to figure out what is worthy and valid and, dare I say, beneficial to our lives?
The answer is that there is no answer. What is valid to me may not be valid to you.
Yet, I feel that it is my duty to teach my students how to muddle through it all. There are so many fantastic technology and web resources out there. I would love to teach my students about many of them but I worry that they will continue to rely on old favorites - MySpace, Facebook, Google and YouTube. What would it take to make students approach information gathering in a new way?
18 comments:
There is definitely room to expand our knowledge using new resources, and I am sure we students are eager to learn them. Of course, our favorites will be our favorites, but that does not put a limit on where we want to get information, especially if we want it to be reliable. Don't worry. Even I know that I am eager to learn about the new ways of technology that you would like to teach us, just like the blogs that you introduced us to!
I think its great that so many resources are available to the public to become informed. I'm not sure exactly how many ESPNs there are - with basic cable I get ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN radio (I know, it's a TV), and ESPN in Spanish. Although televisions and radios are flooded with extremely biased reports, it's really up to the viewers and listeners to take a story and decide for themselves whether or not what's being said is valid. Rather than hearing O'Reilly say that Democrats are Satanic or Micheal Moore is on drugs, we the people have the responsibility to weigh all sides of a news report. There's usually three sides to every story: his side, her side, and the truth.
I definitely think that you should continue to reveal different online resources to students. Before we started doing these blogs, I would obtain information via BBC, CNN, and sometimes FOX News (just for laughs).
You can only try so hard to get students informed on the world around them, because they actually have to be motivated to learn in order to truly do so.
I believe that this is a worrying issue now a days, and simply because there are so many sources from which to choose that at times we might just become overwhelmed by the ton of news appearing with every minute. Aside from this, people don't question their sources anymore, making any source credible or not. I've come to notice that with whatever topic people wish to research on, they go on the internet, and take whatever it is that they can find without question. It's a worrying matter due to the fact that, even though a source might not be even real, some people believe it to be and trust the source blindly. We must be conscious enough to realize this, and we must open our eyes to this reality to start questioning news and really digging to find out the truth.
About us, your students, I think that by introducing us into blogging, we have in a way come to realize that there is way too much information out there to just rely on one or two sources, leading us to truly dig deeper and investigate in a more thorough manner to really make a point come across. However, I think that it is, in a way, inevitable that we stop searching through sites such as google, youtube, etc. What we can do is be more cautious about what it is we read and choose to believe as true or untrue.
Not to sound like the typical student, but Facebook is a very beneficial and useful engine for people to communicate on. It allows many different people, of all ages, to keep track of friends and stories that we share and tell. Although I am certain many critics disagree with my statement pertaining to Facebook. I am curious to hear about your opinions about Facebook, what is truly so "bad" about its networking properties?
I could not agree more. There are so many sources of useless information that overwhelm me. Just today I was flipping through channels, and more than half of them were propaganda. Not only through television, but Facebook, MySpace, hi5, and many more online communities are sponsored by propaganda. Every time you visit the home page of one of those websites, around 10 different things that I never even bother to look at. Then again, like you said, what is valid to me may not be to others. Therefore, I don't believe there can ever be a filter or a method to determine at what point information becomes useless.
I guess the simple act of making it known would help a lot. Most of the websites we already use only came to us through our friends, so if there arose a new, more user friendly method of obtaining our knowledge through website we would jump on it immediately. For example I always use Google because I was told that i'm less likely to get viruses than if i used yahoo. And I'm only on myspace because it's easier than face book, and it's a quick way of learning about what is going on in my social circle without having to talk to 1000 different people over the phone.
I agree with you completely, there sre definitely to many news stations. Some of these stations don't even give you the real news. Sites like Facebook and Myspace are rarely helpful. They serve as places for people to talk with friends and show foolish pictures of themselves to others. Every once and a while someone will post a blog or bulletin about something important, but other than those rare occurences these sites are merely a waste. I would have to disagree with you though on Google. Google can be a valuable resource when it comes to finding information.You are flooded with useless and unreliable sites, but more often than not Google does give you a site that will give you the information your looking for.
I actually think that you are doing a good job of showing us, the students, good ways to use different websites. This one for example, I never even heard of Blogger.com before your class. I love this website! I think it is so cool! When I am bored I go on and look at all my peers blogs, and a lot of them have so many interesting things to say. There are some pretty cool blogs with a lot of things I didn't know, and i will probably continue to use this website or maybe even make a new blog out side of this class.
Well I could say you have done a great job at relieving my brain rom such popular websites like Myspace, Facebook and Youtube. For example the website in which we talked abbout harlem was very amazing, demonstarting the future we have with technology as such. There are many resources we aren't aware of which is unfortunante because promotioning such sites allows you to expand your knowlage and share it with fellow web users.I think its fais to say that a majority of the propaganda and comercials advertised everywhere are not beneficial and just fit-ins.
What is valid and worth listening and watching depends on each individual, unfortunantly some find is vital to know that the ugliest dog on earth died because of choking on a life-saver, but well that is each ones business.You do a great job in introducing these ways of information and technology available to us through the internet. I really appreciate it.
The thing with children and teens is that if they are not 100% interested, the chance of them paying attention decreases very significantly. To help showcase that gathering information is interesting rather than laborious, I think that teachers should incorporate more assignments that involve choice, and researching on a topic that actually interests them, not Shakespeare. Not only will this help to teach people how to look and sort through info, but it will show us that research and looking for facts is not always bad.
Of course knowledge recognizes no bound. It's limitless virtue is essental to our well being. We are all students to knowledge and experience and by this precept, ultimately open for new ideas, new experiences, and new knowledge. there is quite a bit of an overload of information, however. And mixed with the nonesensical influences of television (cartoons...tila tequila) our minds can only hold so much information and so much experience. We all have the capacity, but what I think prohibits us from learning all that we can is because of "selective memory" and "selective learning." We can remember the last episode of SpongeBob, the plot, the character names, and the date of its release; however, when asked to name the fourth president of the United States including his dates in office, it's like asking to perform surgery. Regardless, we all pick and choose. And we are all masters of our own knowledge.
Now a days there really is way to many useless channels on television. Being a sports fan I am pretty happy that there is ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN Classic, ESPN U, ESPN HD, and im probably missing 1 or 2 more. But I do agree that the mass amounts of television channels and websites is ridiculous. If we were tought to use new rescources I think that favorites such as Google, Facebook, and Youtube will always be used but I see room for the new resources. Try it out, take advantage of one day of class to teach us how to use these new resources maybe it will be beneficial to all students.
I would agree that more exposure to different websites would help to achieve more popularity. We have been taught to use most of these websites by our friends and family and I think that if they told us about more educationally beneficial websites than we would be more likely to utilize these websites as well. An easy way to make students gather information in new ways would be to have them explore things that they are actually interested in, rather than things that some teachers want them to learn about. Students are going to get more out of the experience if they chose the topic than if they were assigned to do something about a boring man who lived in the 1800's and wrote poetry, even if it is good poetry.
I think it would take assignments like day-by-day blogging to interest and inform kids about the real resources from the plethora of garbage. Kids also need to be innately favored to these unique resources. I think that once a student is well adjusted to such, that person will fully understand the concept of the resource in the first place.
Well, i don't know if you can stop our addiction to our favorites like myspace, facebook,you tube, etc. But there is nothing stopping us from enjoying other websites and adding them to our favorites. There is a lot of useless stations and channels, but "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". What one likes, the other might not. But i encourage you to show new websites and things you might fight interesting. For instance, this blogger website is very interesting and it is definately a must add to our favorites. It was a success. :)
I think we are lucky to have so many resources that are available to us on any topic. I wish people would get away from such resources as MySpace and Facebook, and explore other websites that are even better that are out there. I don't believe that every resource has reliable information, but if you search through a few and are finding the same info, you should be able to trust it. I am so happy that you have introduced us to so many different ways of technology, because they have been very useful not only in this class, but in my others as well.
There is definately a plethora of ways in which people can obtain knowledge in the world. Especially now with all the advances in technology and communication recieving information is limitless. Yet many of the resources that people, especially teens, choose to use are not very reliable and are poorly supported. I would be very interested to learn new ways of gathering information and expanding my knowledge. Most people just need to be motivated and know that it would know benefit them.
I totally agree there are waaaay to many information news stations and websites. I personally think your doing a good job at introducing us to new information, just like the blogs that you showed us. But we will always use myspace, facebook and youtube just because all of our friends have it. It allows us to stay in touch and tell stories when we aren't together.
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