the Civic Engagement Research Group at Mills College queried 967 juniors and seniors from 28 high schools in California about what [Joseph] Kahne calls “sort of a day-to-day skill set.” The students, who came from urban, rural, and suburban districts, were asked how often they were asked in class to assess the trustworthiness of information;...
Category: digital citizenship
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Power of the press without concurrent accountability
Peggy Drexler said: The problem with social media, and our dependence on it, is that it allows people to present and receive whatever angle they want, biased or not, fair or not. It’s the “power of the press” without the objectivity or accountability demanded of the actual press. And it has enabled a dangerous vigilantism...
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Men behaving badly
Lindy West reports: the anti-free-speech charge, applied broadly to cultural criticism and especially to feminist discourse, has proliferated. It is nurtured largely by men on the internet who used to nurse their grievances alone, in disparate, insular communities around the web — men’s rights forums, video game blogs. Gradually, these communities have drifted together into...
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Unthoughtful consumption
We spent the last 200+ years (at least) pushing consumption models of learning on most of our students. We asked them to be passive recipients of whatever information came from the teacher or textbook. We gave them few opportunities to question the reliability or validity of the information that we spoon-fed them. We trusted that...
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The surveillance of our youth
Like many school districts, the Southeast Polk School District in Pleasant Hill, Iowa monitors the Web usage of its students on district-provided computers for inappropriate activity. And like some school districts, Southeast Polk also uses a monitoring service that sends weekly emails to parents summarizing their students’ Internet search history. This raises some difficult issues because...