Rheingold suggests that ‘skills’ alone are not sufficient to navigate the internet safely and productively; he wants to add another factor – ‘community’. Skills + Community = Literacies. I think he is saying that the internet skills we have are most effective when they are used in a communicative realm. I usually think of literacies as abilities to understand a message read, heard or viewed, and to communicate that message to someone else in oral or written form. So I think I see what he’s getting at.
He lists 5 main literacies for the use of the internet:
1. Attention
2. Participation
3. Cooperation
4. Critical consumption – “crap detection”
5. Network awareness
Teaching our students critical thinking will improve internet safety, to be able to examine the validity of information on the web. He recommends having a critical attitude towards everything online, an “internal crap detector” (a quote from Hemingway).
He doesn’t want the freedom that we all currently enjoy to add information to the internet to be restricted, rather users need to be able to filter web content and determine its credibility. There will always be the "uneducated", people who don't get that "filter training" or who don't care to. I suppose we just have to try our best to train as many as possible.
How long is the internet going to last and be useful if we can’t sort out the good from the bad? I have visions of the Roman Empire (i.e. our society) falling to pieces under the weight of an overloaded and irrelevant mountain of websites.
Rheingold suggests we teach young kids (as young as 8) how to ask questions properly, so they will do that when they are interacting with the web. He wants us and our students to think of the web as a “commons”, a meeting place for groups of common interest.
In response to a question from a viewer on the vlog, i.e. “What kind of skills do we need to teach our kids, and how can we do that?” he further advances his concept of literacies and divides them into three aspects:
Literacies of credibility – having that critical view of everything online until it’s been filtered by the strategies he suggests in his SFGate blog
Technical skills – e.g. using search engines that incorporate plug-ins that help sort through online medical information.
Social literacy - PLN’s – “Whom do I trust?”
Before Google , we needed to know how search engines worked, how to use search terms (Boolean terms, I think they are called – I remember learning those!), so we had a better chance of filtering out the bad stuff before it came up on our screen. Now Google does it all for us, it gives us every website that includes the word(s) we are searching for, in what? – 0.3 seconds or less? No filter there!
He suggests two steps in filtering website information:
First step – Who is the author? What do other people say about him/her? What are the sources? Who is behind the website? www.easywhois.com – very quick and easy!
Second step – What is their agenda? Bias? Terms they use, sources? Examine sources and what other people say about them.
Critical thinking skills = questions, that’s where we start.
Culture of collaborative inquiry is the goal.
I found Howard’s vlog much easier to follow and digest than the blog. The SFGate blog has good information and great-looking tools for crap detection, but is too long to take in completely – information overload!
I find his tools for filtering medical information quite useful. I downloaded and installed the plug-in from HON – Health on the Net Foundation – to test the credibility of a popular health newsletter I get by email. I checked this website with the HON filter and found it to be questionable, i.e. it doesn’t qualify for the HON code. However, my personal experience with remedies suggested in the newsletter has been quite favourable. One article HON directed me to regarding the doctor behind the newsletter states: “Although Dr. Whitaker's magazines may have some useful advice, NCAHF still cannot recommend them. It takes an expert to sort out the wheat from the chaff.” I guess I filtered out the chaff. Interestingly, one of the linked articles suggested in the guide recommended by Rheingold, “Health Information Online: How to check the quality” itself does not meet the HON code!
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