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City Brights: Howard Rheingold

City Brights: Howard Rheingold
“Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.” Ernest Hemingway, 1954 The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge – the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it’s up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. Today, just as it was back then, “Who is the author?” Use the following methods and tools to protect yourself from toxic badinfo. Resources:

http://blog.sfgate.com/rheingold/2009/06/30/crap-detection-101/

Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask 1. What can the URL tell you? Techniques for Web Evaluation : Are Your Students Digitally Literate? 10 Resources Included in the Digital Tips Advent Calendar and part of the Effective Technology Integration category A computer does not substitute for judgment any more than a pencil substitutes for literacy. ~ Robert S McNamara Our learners live in a connected world where technology impacts their lives daily. Our students often dedicate many hours to communicating, sharing, and learning online. It’s the main way they learn and they receive a surplus of information.

Evaluating Internet Research Sources Robert Harris Version Date: January 21, 2015 Previous: December 27, 2013; November 6, 2013; Nov. 22, 2010 and June 15, 2007 "The central work of life is interpretation." --Proverb Introduction: The Diversity of Information Adopting a Skeptical Attitude 4 Principals Of Digital Literacy Literacy Literacy is the ability to make sense of something, often generalized as the ability to read and write. In many ways, reading is reading, media is media, but in the same way a play places unique comprehension demands on a reader compared to a poem or a letter, so do digital media compared to classic media forms. In the 21st century, new literacies are emerging and digital media forms allow communication to be more nuanced than ever before.

Project Information Literacy: Smart Talks Howard Rheingold: "Crap Detection 101: Required Coursework" Project Information Literacy, "Smart Talks," no. 5, January 3, 2011 Subscribe our Smart Talk RSS feed Printer-friendly version Photo Credit: Judith Maas Rheingold If one word captures Howard Rheingold's writing about the political, cultural, and social impact of new technologies, that word is prescient.

14 brilliant quotes on remixing Art cannot be created or destroyed — only remixed. In a convincing talk from TEDGlobal 2012, director Kirby Ferguson explores the challenges of originality and freshness in a world where creativity takes root in what has come before. Without previous inventions we would not have the iPhone, the Model T Ford, Star Wars, Warhol’s soup cans, or the electronic musician Girl Talk. Ferguson highlights that remixing, referencing and reproducing previous innovations allows artists to engage in a cultural dialogue and allows art, technology and society to continue evolving. What Ferguson calls remixing many call plagiarizing.

Evaluating Internet Research Sources Introduction: The Diversity of Information Information is a Commodity Available in Many Flavors Think about the magazine section in your local grocery store. Exactly Where Did the Selfie Stick Come From? Oxford Dictionaries made “selfie” the word of the year in 2013. U.S. consumers responded by making the selfie stick the gift of the year in 2014. Around the U.S. this holiday season, camera shops, department stores and pharmacies have been having a hard time keeping up with demand for the selfie stick, a retractable pole that people clamp onto their smartphones to take better pictures of themselves.

How to Test For One Hundred Percent Truth - the 3 Emergence Truth Tests This article was written only months before I discovered the map of the mind. And while these ideas are still true, our standards for accessing truth have since been raised a thousand fold. More important, in 2010, I began work on a new scientific method, one with which discoveries are guaranteed. This method also contains a far more stringent test for truth. This said, this article is still important in that is shows the relationships between my work on mind and consciousness, emergence personality theory, and emergence therapy.

Teaching Adolescents How to Evaluate the Quality of Online Information An essential part of online research is the ability to critically evaluate information. This includes the ability to assess its level of accuracy, reliability, and bias. In 2012, my colleagues and I assessed 770 seventh graders in two states to study these areas, and the results definitely got our attention. Curating versus Stealing One of the biggest compliments we can give to someone is to share their work. When someone writes a great post I share it on Twitter, post it on my Facebook wall, or share it out on Google+. Sometimes I even go old school and email it. I even have a dedicated page on my blog which called "Stolen Goods" where I share blogs that I think are valuable. I provide a very short description of the post then I link to the original post. I curate these resources so others can benefit from them.

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