Wesley Fryer - Students in the new media age
I'm really just testing a new interface, but why not include some real content?
Wesley Fryer blogs at Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Very much in touch with the front edge of teaching, learning, technology and information. He writes about our students being in the middle of the emerging "digital social network" (dsn) without any real guidance:
Even when mudslinging-ads are pulled by their sponsors, the content lives on via YouTube. An example is this video slinging mud at Tennessee incumbent Senator Harold Ford.This again highlights the lesson some MySpace and Facebook users havelearned– that they are writing their PERMANENT RECORD online. Oncesomething has been posted to the Internet, it may be there forever.This was also dramatized in a 10 pm news story I saw tonight aboutMcKinney North High School students (north of Dallas) who took nudepictures of themselves on a cell phone and sent them to the boyfriendof one of the girls. Now, not surprisingly, the photos have shown up onthe Internet, and no one can take them all offline. The parents were ontelevision, mad at school officials, but this is not the school’sfault: The students in this case made some bad choices and are nowfacing the consequences. Despite increasingly common news articles likethese, my perception is that most schools are not adequately addressingInternet safety, digital citizenship, and safe digital socialnetworking with students, parents, teachers and administrators. Ittakes a village to raise kids, and unfortunately not enough of ourcommunity villagers are talking about these issues and figuring outways to effectively address them.
So who's to instruct? And when? Or we just let it happen?
Read the full Fryer entry at: YouTube, Internet Games and Electoral Politics
BONUS for real bloggers...Session 3.5
OK, so it's 10:30 and we left class 3.5 hours ago, but I just read another good posting from David Warlick. Check it out at
"Reading and Books".
Read especially the bottom half of this.
Session 3
What do you think you can teach kids about evaluating sources of information?
Session 2
Why is it important in education that we always "begin with the end in mind?"
Blog Comments Digest from Session 1
Pithy snippets from last week worth a bit of discussion:
* So now that we've established that as the medium we're all swimming in, whether we know it or not, I think about my 3rd-5th graders reading novels and ideally thinking about them, and wonder if I'm trying to give them waterwings when what they really need is a jetski. And yet I still think what I do is important, because they're learning to get inside other people's heads through reading literature, and isn't that part of being human?
* ...has my own technology fear kept me from becoming a better teacher? Which leads me to my last comment, how much do I need to know to be more effective in my classroom?
* This evening has been another reason to communicate on the kids level, to understand "what they know" with the technology.
* I don't think I teach any where near the way I did ten years ago, however.
* It is heartening to be reminded that it's not as important to know the technology as it is to know how to teach the thinking skills necessary to use the technology and to sift through all of the information that is exploding around us.
October 19, 2006
Click on "comments" to leave your thoughts about today's conversation.
Welcome!
Welcome to blogging in the Information Literacy class. This blog is a place for all of us to post some thoughts and reactions while we learn about one of the most important new sources of information available online. While blogs are most often public journals with a single author, ours will demonstrate how a blog might be used with a group of learners to share information.
To keep this one organized for the entire class, I'll be posting a prompt before each session to which you will reply or "comment." It will be interesting to see how each of our "voices" comes out here even though we will be able to talk to one another daily.
