Song: Practicing Web Wisdom: Mindfully Incorporating Digital Literacies into the Classroom Chapter Three
Viewed: 49 - Published at: 4 years ago
Artist: Patrick Thomas Morgan
Year: 2013Viewed: 49 - Published at: 4 years ago
Digital literacies can leverage the Web’s architecture of participation, just as the spread of reading skills amplified collective intelligence five centuries ago. Today’s digital literacies can make the difference between being empowered or manipulated, serene or frenetic.
— Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online“Aloha!” That was the first word I heard from Howard Rheingold as our classroom-projected Skype screen lit up, revealing the social media expert in all his silver-mustachioed, multi-colored-shirt glory. Wearing a brightly polka-dotted button-up T-shirt that resembled a repurposed Jackson Pollock canvas, Rheingold—through the power of networked digital media—stood before us, simultaneously located in our Duke21C classroom in Durham, North Carolina, and outside his Northern California home. On this mild, late-winter afternoon, the man who coined the phrase “virtual community” generously devoted a part of his day to talk with us about the personal and social skills one needs to excel in this digitally webbed world. A nearby fountain gently trickled as he donned his Panama hat and sat down on a sturdy wooden chair in his backyard garden, initiating us into that rare group of honorees who have been invited into the shade of the sanctum sanctorum called Howard’s Plum Tree.
It was quite fitting to interview Rheingold underneath his plum tree because this is where he conversed with digital specialists—such as MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito and 1990s Microsoft Virtual Worlds Group Director Linda Stone—to write the very book we were discussing with him: Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (which, not surprisingly, he wrote under his plum tree). A lecturer on virtual communities, social media, and digital journalism at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, Rheingold has been exploring and writing about digital environments for over thirty years, writing such books as Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. His book Net Smart introduces readers to the skills, habits, and modes of thinking one needs in order to participate and make full use of the virtually infinite possibilities afforded by the Internet. Rheingold believes that “we can all benefit from adopting some of the rules of thumb discovered by mindful digital media users” (4). He calls these digital “rules of thumb” skills, or literacies, although he admits that “solitary skills are not enough today. Literacy now means skill plus social competency in using that skill collaboratively” (4). Within the World Wide Web’s architecture of participation, digital literacies are both solitary and social because any single act ramifies outward to affect nearly anyone with Internet access. “We live in a world in which you can get the answer to any question within seconds,” Rheingold told us over Skype, “but it’s up to you to determine the validity of the information you receive. It’s so important for learners to understand that critical thinking is not just a tool in the toolkit that you can pull out on occasion, but an attitude towards seeing information that you swim in.” In other words, a digital literacy can be seen as a mental framework one develops through practice—a simultaneously personal and collaborative skill that one must constantly hone in the midst of our computer-mediated lives.
“Every two days,” writes Rheingold, “humans produce as much information as we did from the era of cave paintings up to 2003” (98-99). Swimming in this ubiquitous, always-on digital data, the average American “consumes thirty-four gigabytes of information on an average day” (Rheingold 99). In 2007 alone, YouTube singlehandedly devoured more bandwidth than the entire Internet did back in 2000 (Thomas and Seely Brown 41). All this information means that the Internet provides powerful tools for learning, such as online games, YouTube, and Wikipedia, creating a classroom that is all-pervasive and always accessible—what Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown call the “new culture of learning” (17). As Thomas and Seely Brown elaborate, the Internet connects individual intellectual pursuits with a virtually limitless number of networks and collectives, which means that learning “driven by passion and play is poised to significantly alter and extend our ability to think, innovate, and discover in ways that have not previously been possible,” allowing us to “ask questions that have never before been imaginable” (Thomas and Seely Brown 89). But this digital ubiquity also means that, without the essential skills to navigate this flood of data, it’s easy to digitally drown as our lives become swamped in endless information. Without basic digital literacies, this new culture of learning also becomes engulfed in a digital deluge, and we become so occupied treading the water of our digital in-flow that we don’t have time to ask these innovative questions. Without digital literacies, manipulation becomes the norm instead of empowerment; we become mere consumers as opposed to creative citizens; and, as Rheingold asserts, without digital literacies, our lives revolve around searching and finding instead of learning and knowing (18, 86). Even worse is when individuals shut off the digital flow altogether because, although you may have eliminated some distractions, you’ve also eliminated opportunities (Rheingold 41). “The free flows of information that digital technologies have made possible are enriching if used properly,” writes Rheingold, “but unhealthy for us as individuals, unproductive for businesses, and toxic for our societies if we don’t know how to take them in […], evaluate and assimilate them, and contribute our own participation or collaboration” (5). Without digital literacies, the thoughts, innovations, and discoveries promised by the new culture of learning become narrower, less frequent, and dissipated—an atrophied version of its potential self.
Considering how beneficial it is to practice and share the essentials of social media know-how, as a class we decided to read Net Smart and talk with Howard Rheingold in order to use our knowledge of digital literacies to create a foundation for our research into 21st century pedagogies. In many ways, Net Smart seemed like the logical next step after reading Thomas and Seely Brown’s A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, encouraging fruitful intertextual conversations when these two texts are directly juxtaposed. In their book, Thomas and Seely Brown characterize this new culture of learning as a classroom freed of geographic restraints—where learning happens wherever one has a connection to the Internet. Often, they define this new culture of learning within the 21st century classroom by contrasting it with characteristics of the 20th century classroom. For example, if the 20th century classroom frames knowledge as a passively shared commodity that changes slowly through time, then the 21st century classroom represents knowledge as an actively shared process that is dynamically changing (98). Twentieth century knowledge is a what; 21st century knowledge is a where (91). Thus, in the 21st century classroom, rather than necessarily progressing out of interpretation (“what something means”), meaning more often progresses out of contextualization (“where something has meaning”) (Thomas and Seely Brown 95). When information becomes a where and not a what, the practice of critically thinking about this information—that is, of practicing digital literacies—becomes all the more crucial because it is now, to a greater extent, up to you to arbitrate not only if this information is reliable, but also if it is worth your time.1 Although Thomas and Seely Brown rightly point out how imagination and play are methods to make sense of the digital flood of information, there are also some fundamental, learnable skills that one needs to reach that playful point, and it is these skills which constitute digital literacies. With digital literacies, the Internet transforms from a space of distraction and information overload into a space of mental-augmentation. With regard to how the 21st century classroom relates to knowledge in a different way, seeing knowledge as a place to imaginatively express and develop passions (i.e. a learning community), rather than a mere collection of facts and figures (i.e. an information warehouse), digital literacies represent the essential skills that allow this new culture of learning to thrive, conveying that initial empowering perception of agency. Even though one could directly teach digital literacies in the classroom as a course in itself, I was particularly interested in exploring ways of incorporating digital literacies into the structure of the classroom such that they could be introduced within most any educational discipline. With this integrated approach in mind, I’d like to briefly describe Rheingold’s fundamental digital literacies, and then focus on the ways he assimilates them into the classroom, exploring implications and alternative examples as they arise. This chapter integrates Rheingold’s essential digital literacies into the classroom, taking these words of web wisdom as a whole and suggesting pedagogical points of departure.
Digital Literacies
In his book, Howard Rheingold delineates five fundamental digital literacies, or “expressive and interpretive skills with a social element, grounded in a shared context”: the digital literacies of attention, critical consumption of information (aka “crap detection”), participation, collaboration, and network smarts (252).2 It would take an entire book to adequately explain these literacies (indeed, it is a book: Net Smart), and since my goal is to provide some worked examples of how one might integrate some of these literacies into the classroom, I’d like to briefly define each of the five literacies before diving into the classroom.
As Howard writes, your most fundamental technological affordance is your own attention (9). Trying to be mindful on the web before you’ve practiced mindfulness in your own life is like trying to outrun 2012 Olympian Usain “Lightning” Bolt before you’ve learned how to walk. It doesn’t work, which is why the digital literacy of attention focuses on ways to cultivate mindfulness. Dipping into a pop-science version of modern neuroscience, Rheingold invokes neuroscientist Carla Shatz’s apothegm—“neurons that fire together wire together”—in order to show that simply aiming your awareness at your breath (i.e. spending a little time each day counting your exhalations) allows you to transform your breath into a tool for mindfulness (72). That is, you can begin to practice the digital literacy of attention simply by noticing your attention: intention leads to attention. “Attention connects the events that occur simultaneously in the mind, between people, and among technologies,” writes Howard. “Human thought processes are themselves no more than a part—a kind of focusing lens—of a system that includes neurons, symbols, search engines, social systems, and computational clouds” (33).
The next digital literacy—critical consumption of information—moves up by one order of complexity by thinking about awareness in relation to how your technologies can be used to augment your attention and, when immersed in the digital web, how you differentiate the cream from the crud. Rheingold points out that “crap detection” can be as simple as searching for the author’s name on a webpage or triangulating the credibility of a breaking-news story from Twitter.3 Best of all, you can have your computer work for you even when you’re away by making use of the available filters, dashboards, and news radars, creating a melding of mind and machine that Rheingold refers to as “infotension” (97).
Using the personal digital literacies of attention and crap detection, Rheingold sets the stage for the interpersonal literacy of participation: the space where digital consumption transforms into active agency. To illustrate this concept, Rheingold introduces the reader to the activist-blogger Cory Doctorow’s colorful phrase, “sheep that shit grass,” meaning that “the act of using a resource supplies the very resource it uses” (113). In other words, harnessing the participatory power of the Web, each one of our small digital acts can ramify outward to create a collective, social benefit. “It does not cost me any extra effort,” Howard points out, “to make public the bookmarks and tags I make for my own use in social bookmarking services—another example of an architecture of participation” (113). Tag a photo. Correct a Wikipedia error. Or, if you’re feeling extra participatory, start a blog. Pardoning the pun, each digital doing makes a difference.
The last two fundamental digital literacies—collaboration and network smarts—launch participation into the stratosphere of interaction. With collaboration, Rheingold discusses what he calls the “distributed cognition” of wiki-thinking, providing tips on how to solicit mass collaboration and how to make collaborative experiences more fulfilling for everyone involved (17). Using network theory, he also incorporates ideas of social capital and network dynamics to think about how we present ourselves online and “how online capabilities can be used to enhance social behavior” (24). Rheingold shows us how our online actions can build “networks of trust” and “norms of reciprocity” that combine to create a vibrant digital environment (219). By mindfully incorporating these five fundamental digital literacies, Rheingold envisions “a social media commons in which information is useful and trustworthy, discussions are civil and productive, and networked collaborations generate social capital,” all through the combinatorial power of each minor action you make within the Web (252).
Digital Literacies Meet the Classroom: The First Day
Sitting underneath his plum tree on this balmy late-winter afternoon, Howard Rheingold told us a story about how he uses a pedagogical technique he borrowed from Cathy Davidson in order to introduce his students—both graduates and undergraduates—to the basic utility of wikis, which are websites and documents that allow multiple instantaneous changes, such as Google Sites or Google Drive. On the first day of class, Howard says, “the first thing I do is have them ask questions.” He divides the class into groups of four, and—borrowing Cathy’s technique—invites them to “take ninety seconds to write down the three most important questions you’d like to have answered by the end of this course.” By using this de-surfacing technique, Howard helps to define the class from the start as a space of inquiry, given how, as Thomas and Seely Brown write, “Inquiry is the process by which we ask not ‘What is it that we know?’ but ‘What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?’” (83). To this capacity for inquiry he then adds the empowering agency of digital literacies, which allow the students to continue this inquiry outside the limited spatial and temporal confines of the classroom. As Howard continues:And then when I have the groups report out—having distilled them down to four different groups of different questions—I open up the wiki, I show them how you edit the wiki, and I transcribe the questions into the wiki as they tell them to me. [I then show them how] I can create a new wiki page for each of the questions, and how there is a comments thread attached to the wiki page, as I type a comment into it. So I go back and forth between soliciting what it is you really want to know, showing them how to use the medium, and then getting them set to divide up into teams around the questions, collaborating on trying to pursue those questions on your own, without my guidance.4
(personal interview)In other words, Howard doesn’t assume that any of the students are familiar with the digital tools, and—through a dialectic between the medium and the message—fosters an inquiry-based classroom at the same time that he enables the class to participate and collaborate within the digitally networked environment. Elaborating on Thomas and Seely Brown, Howard—by using digital literacies within the inquiry-based classroom—goes beyond “What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?” to ask: where are the things that we don’t know and how can we use the digital medium to ask better questions?
After this first class, Howard then has the students work on their shared questions via the wiki until they reconvene face-to-face during the next class, sharing their progress, problems, and further questions. Laying the participatory groundwork, he also encourages the students—some of whom may be encountering these digital tools for the first time—to “continue the conversation in email, blog, or forum,” encouraging them to see both himself and the rest of the class as a learning community.
Like a cardboard box in the hands of a two-year-old, Howard’s rubric for the first and second classes opens up a world of pedagogical possibilities. For example, if—as Howard tells us—the class lands upon a question for which there may be no clear answer, he sometimes poses the question as a debate, dividing the class into two groups and allowing each group to state their case. Throughout this co-learning process, there’s one important thing to keep in mind, Howard tells us: he still very much wants the students to know what he thinks about the topics. “When I started” this co-learning process, Howard admits, “the evaluation that I got from the learners […] was: ‘oh, we took this course because we wanted to learn from you,’” thinking that Howard should have spoken up more often. “So now, I lecture in the context of conversation, more or less. But I know that it’s very important to understand when to pipe down and let them go.” Managing conversation with lecture is a subtle art, built on a tacit knowledge one gains only by trying the method on for size and learning from the process.
Another point of departure for Howard’s first-day classroom activity is, instead of asking questions, to have the students state their areas of ignorance, or spaces for growth: what aspect of the course description is driving their passion? What are they specifically aching to learn about? Approaching the first day from the standpoint of de-surfacing potential passions and areas of growth, as opposed to (or in addition to) de-surfacing questions would be a way to distance the class even further from the traditional question-to-answer funnel. (Though, admittedly, asking questions that derive from the students themselves already allows the classroom to challenge this traditional framework.) As Thomas and Seely Brown write, “Our educational system is built upon a structure that poses questions in order to find answers” (81). But “what if, for example, questions were more important than answers?” (Thomas and Seely Brown 81). What if uncovering educational enthusiasms was more important than forcing questions? What if a pedagogy that saw students as individuals with specific passions was more important than framing them as faceless, fungible widgets to be filled with knowledge? Howard’s first-day activity provides a flexible and sensible method for concretely incorporating the principles of the new culture of learning, providing—in the process—the very skills the students require to transform the classroom from a physically limited space to an educational event constantly playing out around us.
Digital Literacies Meet the Classroom: Attention Probes
As students filter into his classroom during the first session of his digital media course, unfolding their laptops and booting their computers, Howard sometime throws them (the students, not the computers) for a loop: “‘Close your laptops,’” he says calmly (35). “‘Turn off your phones.’” “‘Now close your eyes’”. He then gives the students sixty seconds to observe the natural flow of their attention, as their thoughts weave in and out of the twenty-four-hour news channel called the “modern mind.” “‘Note how you don’t have to work to make your mind wander,’” he points out. “‘It does that all on its own’” (35).
Beginning in this way, Howard has planted the seed of mindfulness, and prompted his students to start learning that most fundamental of digital literacies: attention. “I’ve found that introducing a little mindfulness where previously there had been none can be insidiously irrevocable,” says Howard. “Asking students to become conscious of their laptop use during class is like asking them to not think of a purple dinosaur” (36). He also uses this exercise to introduce the idea of attention probes, which, Howard explained from the shade of his plum tree, are activities and frameworks that “remind them that they’ve got their laptops open: is it open for a purpose?” He comes up with a new attention probe each week, all in the hopes of instilling a habit of self-reflection and self-awareness. This is not a resurrection of the 20th century classroom’s Loch Ness Monster fiction of the laser-like über attention, in which “all eyes are on me,” the teacher. Rather, it’s an empowering pedagogical move that spurs students to start paying attention to attention.
One simple attention probe involves having a timer and three sets of differently colored sticky notes. As Howard told us:I ask them to be attentive to where they are putting their attention when their laptops are open. I pose at the very beginning a goal to develop a little bit of that meta-cognition that they are the observer—that [when you are checking your email,] you know that you’re off checking your email. Don’t start taking notes and then slide into [checking your email] without realizing it. [I help them focus their attention] with a number of attention probes: one that I’ve used is to have something chime at a random interval, and then you distribute sticky notes, and tell your students: “Write what you’re honestly thinking; if it’s directly related to what is being discussed, write it on a yellow sticky note; if it’s tangential, on an orange sticky note; and if it has nothing to do with what is going on in the class, on a red sticky note. I then stick the notes up on the whiteboard, and we get a little cross-section of our attention at that moment. (personal interview)Knowing that Howard is going to take a random cross-section of their attention, the students become, at the very last, a little bit more mindful than if the attention probe was never proffered. In other words, intention’s relation to attention also works in the future tense: the students are primed by the attention probe, knowing the professor’s intentions to carry it out, and are thereby that much more aware of their streams of thought.
If the sticky-note attention probe seems like it might take up too much class time, there are many other possibilities. An attention probe can be as simple as creating the classroom norm of having students semi-close their laptop lids whenever they’re not actively using their computers, communicating to the rest of the class that their attention is on them and not on the computer. “It’s not just that I’m not sure whether they’re paying attention to me,” Howard told us. “It’s disconcerting for the co-teaching team, who for the first time are taking the lead, and may not know where people are directing their attention.”
Ramping up the laptop probe to another level, Howard sometimes poses the attention probe as a collective action problem: he tells his class of fifty students that only five laptops can ever be open at one time during the class session (36). So if two other students wanted to open their computers while five other students were already working or taking notes on theirs, these two students would have to wait until two of the five students finished. “It forced the current five to be aware of their own attention in the context of other students who were waiting to Google my lecture (or slay monsters in a role-playing game)” (36). Framed another way, this five-laptop rule could also be a means for collective note-taking: five students take notes on the class wiki for the rest of the class, and the note-taking periodically switches to another five, allowing each student to both pay attention and respond in the moment while having a record of the discussion. Either way, attention probes, in the end, should act as a net benefit for the class, compelling students to begin the habit of practicing digital mindfulness.5Digital Literacies Meet the Classroom: Collective Action Problems
Collective action problems consist of inquiry-based collaborative activities that incite (and excite) students to express their creativity and elasticity of thought within the structure of some kind of assignment or prompt. Howard, for example, borrowed from a colleague the idea of a class self-examination in which he asks each of the sixteen students in his class to email him a question that they think would indicate that the students read and thought deeply about the course’s texts. As Howard told us: “Then I hand out sixteen tests and ask the students to take sixteen pieces of paper, write their name and the number of the question on each piece of paper, and then have the students answer each question on a separate piece of paper; next, I ask each student who has proffered a question to collect their question, and to grade them.” The students, Howard says, enthusiastically undertook this assignment, although there was one snag, after the students asked how much the exam was going to count for their grade:I said, “It’s not going to count on your exam—it’s for fun!” And the look I got from them—it’s like I’d said, “Would you like to come and clean my toilet?” They were astonished and disgusted [by how the self-examination didn’t “count” toward their academic record]. And so I said: “Do you remember when learning was fun?” And you could kind of see that they sort of did remember. […] It just shows that breaking from the pattern of institutionalization requires a little bit of de-programming, or self-de-programming. (personal interview)Although allowing the students to create their own examination was met with excited expectation, the subsequent knowledge that the exam wasn’t factored into their grade fomented verbal rebellion. Obviously, Howard could have taken the path of having the self-examination count toward each student’s grade, though for Howard, the larger lesson within the activity was to bring them back to a time they could hardly remember: when learning was a passion that flowed up out of a creative mind, rather than an alienating framework forcing students into their institutionalized mind-forged manacles. One could also see how Howard could bring the collaborative activity to another level because it still falls short of Thomas and Seely Brown’s new culture of learning insofar as the activity is still somewhat aligned with the teaching-based model of learning. “In the teaching-based approach,” write Thomas and Seely Brown, “students must prove that they have received the information transferred to them—that they quite literally ‘get it.’” But in the “new culture of learning the point is to embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more […] both incrementally and exponentially” (38). So one could modify Howard’s activity, for example, by grounding the entire activity in the expectation that it should lead to deeper, more thought-provoking questions. Indeed, you could administer the exam just like Howard did, but instead of having the students simply answer the questions, prompt them to write an even better question. Or if this particular tenant of the new culture of learning is a little bit too radical for your own classroom needs, there is also the option of having the self-examination function as, for example, a mid-term, with the questions that arise out of this first activity feeding into the plans and discussions within the second half of the semester. The great thing about collective action problems like these is that they can be easily modified to fit most any pedagogical need.6
In a 21st century world where knowledge has become a where and not a what, it’s becoming ever more apparent that digital literacies are the essential skills that empower co-learners. If the new culture of learning is like a vibrant, living bacterial culture—as Thomas and Seely Brown suggest—playfully interacting and growing within the bounds of the Petri dish, then Howard Rheingold’s five fundamental digital literacies are akin to the Q-tip swab of the inner cheek. That is, digital literacies provide that initial impetus for this new culture of learning to grow and flourish. By placing Rheingold’s text in conversation with the inspiring work of Thomas and Seely Brown, I’ve tried to suggest ways one might transfer the highly practical lessons of Net Smart into the classroom environment. But inspiration is never a sure thing. Because, in the end, Howard Rheingold doesn’t say that digital literacies will or must leverage the Web’s architecture of participation. “Digital literacies can leverage the Web’s architecture of participation, just as the spread of reading skills amplified collective intelligence five centuries ago. Today’s digital literacies can make the difference between being empowered or manipulated, serene or frenetic” (3; emphasis mine). It’s up to us to simultaneously practice and share them.
Notes
1 A sense of agency, as Rheingold writes, is precisely what’s needed and what digital literacies provide. “Most important,” writes Rheingold, “as people who are trying to get along day to day in a hyperscale, warp-speed civilization that seems so often to be beyond anyone’s control, digital literacy is something powerful we can learn as well as exercise for ourselves and each other” (3).
2 There are of course many types of literacies and digital literacies: the traditional literacies of reading and writing, along with scientific literacy, program literacy, information and media literacy, and social and emotional intelligence (Rheingold 253). In her book Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century, Cathy Davidson acknowledges Rheingold’s digital literacies, while suggesting a few 21st century literacies of her own: global consciousness, design, affordance, narrative, procedural, digital divides, ethics, assessment, data mining, preservation, and sustainability (297-299).
3 Indeed, the value of triangulating breaking news was clearly exhibited in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Reddit users, for example, failed to implement the literacy of critical consumption of information, leading to the false accusation of innocent citizens. See, for example, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/reddit-boston-marathon-apology-suspects_n_3133472.html and http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/reddit-tsarnaev-marathon-bombers-wisdom-of-crowds.html.
4 Rheingold has recognized a potential problem in collaborative exercises like these. As he told us, the students “are not accustomed to having the group responsible for something. And usually, there are two or three really intelligent students who do most of the work, and often there are a couple who do nothing at all. And, so, the next week—the second class—I show them the revision history. I just show them: click here, and you can see who does the work.” Students, in this way, can be held accountable for their own contributions.
5 Rheingold covers several other attention probes in Net Smart. One idea is to have your students keep a “log of their email behavior for a week, noting how their body and emotions felt, and how they were breathing while they were online,” and then having them look for irregularities within the log. “‘Every single student discovered,’ [David] Levy said in a talk to Google employees, ‘by doing this form of mindfulness practice, that there were certain things happening for them around email that were actually not what they wanted at all’” (Rheingold 73).
6 Another productive collaborative action problem that Rheingold uses is to have the co-teaching team delineate concepts, words, and phrases, and place them on the class wiki. And then everyone is in charge of helping to define these terms in the coming week. Howard described to us the benefits he’s discovered of incorporating the creation of common terms in his digital media class: “If everybody does a little bit of something and there are sixteen of us, we can get a very impressive lexicon made by the time we’re done with the quarter, and these are the words that you want to carry away with you—you want to know these words when you are dealing with social media in the future.”
Works Cited
Bindley, Katherine. “Reddit Apologizes for Speculating About Boston Marathon Suspects.” Huffington Post. 23 April 2013. Web. Accessed 1 May 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/ reddit-boston-marathon-apology-suspects_n_3133472.html.
Davidson, Cathy. Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Surowiecki, James. “The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt.” The New Yorker. 24 April 2013. Web. Accessed 1 May 2013.
Rheingold, Howard. Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012. Print.
---. Personal interview. 26 Feb. 2013.
Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Lexington, Kentucky: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. Print.
Resources
Net Smart Resources:
http://rheingold.com/netsmart/
http://rheingold.com/books/net-smart/
Douglas Thomas on The New Culture of Learning:
Howard Rheingold on Net Smart:
Critical Thinking Resources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/betsy-aoki/critical-thinking-roundup_b_642945.html
http://critical-thinking.iste.wikispaces.net/Crap+Detection+101
Teaching Critical Thinking:
Social Bookmarks:
https://delicious.com/
https://www.diigo.com/
Question-and-Answer Websites:
http://www.formspring.me/
https://www.quora.com/
“In the Context of Web Context: How to Check Out Any Web Page”:
http://www.wordyard.com/2010/09/14/in-the-context-of-web-context-how-to-check-out-any-web-page/
To Find Front Groups:
http://www.sourcewatch.org
To Discover Urban Legends and Misinformation:
http://www.snopes.com/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/government/Politics_and_Government.htm
http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html
Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index:
http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/
Google Scholar Citation Analyzer:
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Political Fact Checker:
http://factcheck.org/
Science:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/
Health on the Net Foundation:
http://www.hon.ch/
How to Check Online Health Articles:
http://scienceroll.com/2009/05/20/health-information-online-how-to-check-the-quality/
http://www.mlahq.org/resources/userguide.html
Aggregator of Reliable Blogs:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/
Guide to Good Journalism:
http://newstrust.net/>
— Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online“Aloha!” That was the first word I heard from Howard Rheingold as our classroom-projected Skype screen lit up, revealing the social media expert in all his silver-mustachioed, multi-colored-shirt glory. Wearing a brightly polka-dotted button-up T-shirt that resembled a repurposed Jackson Pollock canvas, Rheingold—through the power of networked digital media—stood before us, simultaneously located in our Duke21C classroom in Durham, North Carolina, and outside his Northern California home. On this mild, late-winter afternoon, the man who coined the phrase “virtual community” generously devoted a part of his day to talk with us about the personal and social skills one needs to excel in this digitally webbed world. A nearby fountain gently trickled as he donned his Panama hat and sat down on a sturdy wooden chair in his backyard garden, initiating us into that rare group of honorees who have been invited into the shade of the sanctum sanctorum called Howard’s Plum Tree.
It was quite fitting to interview Rheingold underneath his plum tree because this is where he conversed with digital specialists—such as MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito and 1990s Microsoft Virtual Worlds Group Director Linda Stone—to write the very book we were discussing with him: Net Smart: How to Thrive Online (which, not surprisingly, he wrote under his plum tree). A lecturer on virtual communities, social media, and digital journalism at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, Rheingold has been exploring and writing about digital environments for over thirty years, writing such books as Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. His book Net Smart introduces readers to the skills, habits, and modes of thinking one needs in order to participate and make full use of the virtually infinite possibilities afforded by the Internet. Rheingold believes that “we can all benefit from adopting some of the rules of thumb discovered by mindful digital media users” (4). He calls these digital “rules of thumb” skills, or literacies, although he admits that “solitary skills are not enough today. Literacy now means skill plus social competency in using that skill collaboratively” (4). Within the World Wide Web’s architecture of participation, digital literacies are both solitary and social because any single act ramifies outward to affect nearly anyone with Internet access. “We live in a world in which you can get the answer to any question within seconds,” Rheingold told us over Skype, “but it’s up to you to determine the validity of the information you receive. It’s so important for learners to understand that critical thinking is not just a tool in the toolkit that you can pull out on occasion, but an attitude towards seeing information that you swim in.” In other words, a digital literacy can be seen as a mental framework one develops through practice—a simultaneously personal and collaborative skill that one must constantly hone in the midst of our computer-mediated lives.
“Every two days,” writes Rheingold, “humans produce as much information as we did from the era of cave paintings up to 2003” (98-99). Swimming in this ubiquitous, always-on digital data, the average American “consumes thirty-four gigabytes of information on an average day” (Rheingold 99). In 2007 alone, YouTube singlehandedly devoured more bandwidth than the entire Internet did back in 2000 (Thomas and Seely Brown 41). All this information means that the Internet provides powerful tools for learning, such as online games, YouTube, and Wikipedia, creating a classroom that is all-pervasive and always accessible—what Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown call the “new culture of learning” (17). As Thomas and Seely Brown elaborate, the Internet connects individual intellectual pursuits with a virtually limitless number of networks and collectives, which means that learning “driven by passion and play is poised to significantly alter and extend our ability to think, innovate, and discover in ways that have not previously been possible,” allowing us to “ask questions that have never before been imaginable” (Thomas and Seely Brown 89). But this digital ubiquity also means that, without the essential skills to navigate this flood of data, it’s easy to digitally drown as our lives become swamped in endless information. Without basic digital literacies, this new culture of learning also becomes engulfed in a digital deluge, and we become so occupied treading the water of our digital in-flow that we don’t have time to ask these innovative questions. Without digital literacies, manipulation becomes the norm instead of empowerment; we become mere consumers as opposed to creative citizens; and, as Rheingold asserts, without digital literacies, our lives revolve around searching and finding instead of learning and knowing (18, 86). Even worse is when individuals shut off the digital flow altogether because, although you may have eliminated some distractions, you’ve also eliminated opportunities (Rheingold 41). “The free flows of information that digital technologies have made possible are enriching if used properly,” writes Rheingold, “but unhealthy for us as individuals, unproductive for businesses, and toxic for our societies if we don’t know how to take them in […], evaluate and assimilate them, and contribute our own participation or collaboration” (5). Without digital literacies, the thoughts, innovations, and discoveries promised by the new culture of learning become narrower, less frequent, and dissipated—an atrophied version of its potential self.
Considering how beneficial it is to practice and share the essentials of social media know-how, as a class we decided to read Net Smart and talk with Howard Rheingold in order to use our knowledge of digital literacies to create a foundation for our research into 21st century pedagogies. In many ways, Net Smart seemed like the logical next step after reading Thomas and Seely Brown’s A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, encouraging fruitful intertextual conversations when these two texts are directly juxtaposed. In their book, Thomas and Seely Brown characterize this new culture of learning as a classroom freed of geographic restraints—where learning happens wherever one has a connection to the Internet. Often, they define this new culture of learning within the 21st century classroom by contrasting it with characteristics of the 20th century classroom. For example, if the 20th century classroom frames knowledge as a passively shared commodity that changes slowly through time, then the 21st century classroom represents knowledge as an actively shared process that is dynamically changing (98). Twentieth century knowledge is a what; 21st century knowledge is a where (91). Thus, in the 21st century classroom, rather than necessarily progressing out of interpretation (“what something means”), meaning more often progresses out of contextualization (“where something has meaning”) (Thomas and Seely Brown 95). When information becomes a where and not a what, the practice of critically thinking about this information—that is, of practicing digital literacies—becomes all the more crucial because it is now, to a greater extent, up to you to arbitrate not only if this information is reliable, but also if it is worth your time.1 Although Thomas and Seely Brown rightly point out how imagination and play are methods to make sense of the digital flood of information, there are also some fundamental, learnable skills that one needs to reach that playful point, and it is these skills which constitute digital literacies. With digital literacies, the Internet transforms from a space of distraction and information overload into a space of mental-augmentation. With regard to how the 21st century classroom relates to knowledge in a different way, seeing knowledge as a place to imaginatively express and develop passions (i.e. a learning community), rather than a mere collection of facts and figures (i.e. an information warehouse), digital literacies represent the essential skills that allow this new culture of learning to thrive, conveying that initial empowering perception of agency. Even though one could directly teach digital literacies in the classroom as a course in itself, I was particularly interested in exploring ways of incorporating digital literacies into the structure of the classroom such that they could be introduced within most any educational discipline. With this integrated approach in mind, I’d like to briefly describe Rheingold’s fundamental digital literacies, and then focus on the ways he assimilates them into the classroom, exploring implications and alternative examples as they arise. This chapter integrates Rheingold’s essential digital literacies into the classroom, taking these words of web wisdom as a whole and suggesting pedagogical points of departure.
Digital Literacies
In his book, Howard Rheingold delineates five fundamental digital literacies, or “expressive and interpretive skills with a social element, grounded in a shared context”: the digital literacies of attention, critical consumption of information (aka “crap detection”), participation, collaboration, and network smarts (252).2 It would take an entire book to adequately explain these literacies (indeed, it is a book: Net Smart), and since my goal is to provide some worked examples of how one might integrate some of these literacies into the classroom, I’d like to briefly define each of the five literacies before diving into the classroom.
As Howard writes, your most fundamental technological affordance is your own attention (9). Trying to be mindful on the web before you’ve practiced mindfulness in your own life is like trying to outrun 2012 Olympian Usain “Lightning” Bolt before you’ve learned how to walk. It doesn’t work, which is why the digital literacy of attention focuses on ways to cultivate mindfulness. Dipping into a pop-science version of modern neuroscience, Rheingold invokes neuroscientist Carla Shatz’s apothegm—“neurons that fire together wire together”—in order to show that simply aiming your awareness at your breath (i.e. spending a little time each day counting your exhalations) allows you to transform your breath into a tool for mindfulness (72). That is, you can begin to practice the digital literacy of attention simply by noticing your attention: intention leads to attention. “Attention connects the events that occur simultaneously in the mind, between people, and among technologies,” writes Howard. “Human thought processes are themselves no more than a part—a kind of focusing lens—of a system that includes neurons, symbols, search engines, social systems, and computational clouds” (33).
The next digital literacy—critical consumption of information—moves up by one order of complexity by thinking about awareness in relation to how your technologies can be used to augment your attention and, when immersed in the digital web, how you differentiate the cream from the crud. Rheingold points out that “crap detection” can be as simple as searching for the author’s name on a webpage or triangulating the credibility of a breaking-news story from Twitter.3 Best of all, you can have your computer work for you even when you’re away by making use of the available filters, dashboards, and news radars, creating a melding of mind and machine that Rheingold refers to as “infotension” (97).
Using the personal digital literacies of attention and crap detection, Rheingold sets the stage for the interpersonal literacy of participation: the space where digital consumption transforms into active agency. To illustrate this concept, Rheingold introduces the reader to the activist-blogger Cory Doctorow’s colorful phrase, “sheep that shit grass,” meaning that “the act of using a resource supplies the very resource it uses” (113). In other words, harnessing the participatory power of the Web, each one of our small digital acts can ramify outward to create a collective, social benefit. “It does not cost me any extra effort,” Howard points out, “to make public the bookmarks and tags I make for my own use in social bookmarking services—another example of an architecture of participation” (113). Tag a photo. Correct a Wikipedia error. Or, if you’re feeling extra participatory, start a blog. Pardoning the pun, each digital doing makes a difference.
The last two fundamental digital literacies—collaboration and network smarts—launch participation into the stratosphere of interaction. With collaboration, Rheingold discusses what he calls the “distributed cognition” of wiki-thinking, providing tips on how to solicit mass collaboration and how to make collaborative experiences more fulfilling for everyone involved (17). Using network theory, he also incorporates ideas of social capital and network dynamics to think about how we present ourselves online and “how online capabilities can be used to enhance social behavior” (24). Rheingold shows us how our online actions can build “networks of trust” and “norms of reciprocity” that combine to create a vibrant digital environment (219). By mindfully incorporating these five fundamental digital literacies, Rheingold envisions “a social media commons in which information is useful and trustworthy, discussions are civil and productive, and networked collaborations generate social capital,” all through the combinatorial power of each minor action you make within the Web (252).
Digital Literacies Meet the Classroom: The First Day
Sitting underneath his plum tree on this balmy late-winter afternoon, Howard Rheingold told us a story about how he uses a pedagogical technique he borrowed from Cathy Davidson in order to introduce his students—both graduates and undergraduates—to the basic utility of wikis, which are websites and documents that allow multiple instantaneous changes, such as Google Sites or Google Drive. On the first day of class, Howard says, “the first thing I do is have them ask questions.” He divides the class into groups of four, and—borrowing Cathy’s technique—invites them to “take ninety seconds to write down the three most important questions you’d like to have answered by the end of this course.” By using this de-surfacing technique, Howard helps to define the class from the start as a space of inquiry, given how, as Thomas and Seely Brown write, “Inquiry is the process by which we ask not ‘What is it that we know?’ but ‘What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?’” (83). To this capacity for inquiry he then adds the empowering agency of digital literacies, which allow the students to continue this inquiry outside the limited spatial and temporal confines of the classroom. As Howard continues:And then when I have the groups report out—having distilled them down to four different groups of different questions—I open up the wiki, I show them how you edit the wiki, and I transcribe the questions into the wiki as they tell them to me. [I then show them how] I can create a new wiki page for each of the questions, and how there is a comments thread attached to the wiki page, as I type a comment into it. So I go back and forth between soliciting what it is you really want to know, showing them how to use the medium, and then getting them set to divide up into teams around the questions, collaborating on trying to pursue those questions on your own, without my guidance.4
(personal interview)In other words, Howard doesn’t assume that any of the students are familiar with the digital tools, and—through a dialectic between the medium and the message—fosters an inquiry-based classroom at the same time that he enables the class to participate and collaborate within the digitally networked environment. Elaborating on Thomas and Seely Brown, Howard—by using digital literacies within the inquiry-based classroom—goes beyond “What are the things that we don’t know and what questions can we ask about them?” to ask: where are the things that we don’t know and how can we use the digital medium to ask better questions?
After this first class, Howard then has the students work on their shared questions via the wiki until they reconvene face-to-face during the next class, sharing their progress, problems, and further questions. Laying the participatory groundwork, he also encourages the students—some of whom may be encountering these digital tools for the first time—to “continue the conversation in email, blog, or forum,” encouraging them to see both himself and the rest of the class as a learning community.
Like a cardboard box in the hands of a two-year-old, Howard’s rubric for the first and second classes opens up a world of pedagogical possibilities. For example, if—as Howard tells us—the class lands upon a question for which there may be no clear answer, he sometimes poses the question as a debate, dividing the class into two groups and allowing each group to state their case. Throughout this co-learning process, there’s one important thing to keep in mind, Howard tells us: he still very much wants the students to know what he thinks about the topics. “When I started” this co-learning process, Howard admits, “the evaluation that I got from the learners […] was: ‘oh, we took this course because we wanted to learn from you,’” thinking that Howard should have spoken up more often. “So now, I lecture in the context of conversation, more or less. But I know that it’s very important to understand when to pipe down and let them go.” Managing conversation with lecture is a subtle art, built on a tacit knowledge one gains only by trying the method on for size and learning from the process.
Another point of departure for Howard’s first-day classroom activity is, instead of asking questions, to have the students state their areas of ignorance, or spaces for growth: what aspect of the course description is driving their passion? What are they specifically aching to learn about? Approaching the first day from the standpoint of de-surfacing potential passions and areas of growth, as opposed to (or in addition to) de-surfacing questions would be a way to distance the class even further from the traditional question-to-answer funnel. (Though, admittedly, asking questions that derive from the students themselves already allows the classroom to challenge this traditional framework.) As Thomas and Seely Brown write, “Our educational system is built upon a structure that poses questions in order to find answers” (81). But “what if, for example, questions were more important than answers?” (Thomas and Seely Brown 81). What if uncovering educational enthusiasms was more important than forcing questions? What if a pedagogy that saw students as individuals with specific passions was more important than framing them as faceless, fungible widgets to be filled with knowledge? Howard’s first-day activity provides a flexible and sensible method for concretely incorporating the principles of the new culture of learning, providing—in the process—the very skills the students require to transform the classroom from a physically limited space to an educational event constantly playing out around us.
Digital Literacies Meet the Classroom: Attention Probes
As students filter into his classroom during the first session of his digital media course, unfolding their laptops and booting their computers, Howard sometime throws them (the students, not the computers) for a loop: “‘Close your laptops,’” he says calmly (35). “‘Turn off your phones.’” “‘Now close your eyes’”. He then gives the students sixty seconds to observe the natural flow of their attention, as their thoughts weave in and out of the twenty-four-hour news channel called the “modern mind.” “‘Note how you don’t have to work to make your mind wander,’” he points out. “‘It does that all on its own’” (35).
Beginning in this way, Howard has planted the seed of mindfulness, and prompted his students to start learning that most fundamental of digital literacies: attention. “I’ve found that introducing a little mindfulness where previously there had been none can be insidiously irrevocable,” says Howard. “Asking students to become conscious of their laptop use during class is like asking them to not think of a purple dinosaur” (36). He also uses this exercise to introduce the idea of attention probes, which, Howard explained from the shade of his plum tree, are activities and frameworks that “remind them that they’ve got their laptops open: is it open for a purpose?” He comes up with a new attention probe each week, all in the hopes of instilling a habit of self-reflection and self-awareness. This is not a resurrection of the 20th century classroom’s Loch Ness Monster fiction of the laser-like über attention, in which “all eyes are on me,” the teacher. Rather, it’s an empowering pedagogical move that spurs students to start paying attention to attention.
One simple attention probe involves having a timer and three sets of differently colored sticky notes. As Howard told us:I ask them to be attentive to where they are putting their attention when their laptops are open. I pose at the very beginning a goal to develop a little bit of that meta-cognition that they are the observer—that [when you are checking your email,] you know that you’re off checking your email. Don’t start taking notes and then slide into [checking your email] without realizing it. [I help them focus their attention] with a number of attention probes: one that I’ve used is to have something chime at a random interval, and then you distribute sticky notes, and tell your students: “Write what you’re honestly thinking; if it’s directly related to what is being discussed, write it on a yellow sticky note; if it’s tangential, on an orange sticky note; and if it has nothing to do with what is going on in the class, on a red sticky note. I then stick the notes up on the whiteboard, and we get a little cross-section of our attention at that moment. (personal interview)Knowing that Howard is going to take a random cross-section of their attention, the students become, at the very last, a little bit more mindful than if the attention probe was never proffered. In other words, intention’s relation to attention also works in the future tense: the students are primed by the attention probe, knowing the professor’s intentions to carry it out, and are thereby that much more aware of their streams of thought.
If the sticky-note attention probe seems like it might take up too much class time, there are many other possibilities. An attention probe can be as simple as creating the classroom norm of having students semi-close their laptop lids whenever they’re not actively using their computers, communicating to the rest of the class that their attention is on them and not on the computer. “It’s not just that I’m not sure whether they’re paying attention to me,” Howard told us. “It’s disconcerting for the co-teaching team, who for the first time are taking the lead, and may not know where people are directing their attention.”
Ramping up the laptop probe to another level, Howard sometimes poses the attention probe as a collective action problem: he tells his class of fifty students that only five laptops can ever be open at one time during the class session (36). So if two other students wanted to open their computers while five other students were already working or taking notes on theirs, these two students would have to wait until two of the five students finished. “It forced the current five to be aware of their own attention in the context of other students who were waiting to Google my lecture (or slay monsters in a role-playing game)” (36). Framed another way, this five-laptop rule could also be a means for collective note-taking: five students take notes on the class wiki for the rest of the class, and the note-taking periodically switches to another five, allowing each student to both pay attention and respond in the moment while having a record of the discussion. Either way, attention probes, in the end, should act as a net benefit for the class, compelling students to begin the habit of practicing digital mindfulness.5Digital Literacies Meet the Classroom: Collective Action Problems
Collective action problems consist of inquiry-based collaborative activities that incite (and excite) students to express their creativity and elasticity of thought within the structure of some kind of assignment or prompt. Howard, for example, borrowed from a colleague the idea of a class self-examination in which he asks each of the sixteen students in his class to email him a question that they think would indicate that the students read and thought deeply about the course’s texts. As Howard told us: “Then I hand out sixteen tests and ask the students to take sixteen pieces of paper, write their name and the number of the question on each piece of paper, and then have the students answer each question on a separate piece of paper; next, I ask each student who has proffered a question to collect their question, and to grade them.” The students, Howard says, enthusiastically undertook this assignment, although there was one snag, after the students asked how much the exam was going to count for their grade:I said, “It’s not going to count on your exam—it’s for fun!” And the look I got from them—it’s like I’d said, “Would you like to come and clean my toilet?” They were astonished and disgusted [by how the self-examination didn’t “count” toward their academic record]. And so I said: “Do you remember when learning was fun?” And you could kind of see that they sort of did remember. […] It just shows that breaking from the pattern of institutionalization requires a little bit of de-programming, or self-de-programming. (personal interview)Although allowing the students to create their own examination was met with excited expectation, the subsequent knowledge that the exam wasn’t factored into their grade fomented verbal rebellion. Obviously, Howard could have taken the path of having the self-examination count toward each student’s grade, though for Howard, the larger lesson within the activity was to bring them back to a time they could hardly remember: when learning was a passion that flowed up out of a creative mind, rather than an alienating framework forcing students into their institutionalized mind-forged manacles. One could also see how Howard could bring the collaborative activity to another level because it still falls short of Thomas and Seely Brown’s new culture of learning insofar as the activity is still somewhat aligned with the teaching-based model of learning. “In the teaching-based approach,” write Thomas and Seely Brown, “students must prove that they have received the information transferred to them—that they quite literally ‘get it.’” But in the “new culture of learning the point is to embrace what we don’t know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more […] both incrementally and exponentially” (38). So one could modify Howard’s activity, for example, by grounding the entire activity in the expectation that it should lead to deeper, more thought-provoking questions. Indeed, you could administer the exam just like Howard did, but instead of having the students simply answer the questions, prompt them to write an even better question. Or if this particular tenant of the new culture of learning is a little bit too radical for your own classroom needs, there is also the option of having the self-examination function as, for example, a mid-term, with the questions that arise out of this first activity feeding into the plans and discussions within the second half of the semester. The great thing about collective action problems like these is that they can be easily modified to fit most any pedagogical need.6
In a 21st century world where knowledge has become a where and not a what, it’s becoming ever more apparent that digital literacies are the essential skills that empower co-learners. If the new culture of learning is like a vibrant, living bacterial culture—as Thomas and Seely Brown suggest—playfully interacting and growing within the bounds of the Petri dish, then Howard Rheingold’s five fundamental digital literacies are akin to the Q-tip swab of the inner cheek. That is, digital literacies provide that initial impetus for this new culture of learning to grow and flourish. By placing Rheingold’s text in conversation with the inspiring work of Thomas and Seely Brown, I’ve tried to suggest ways one might transfer the highly practical lessons of Net Smart into the classroom environment. But inspiration is never a sure thing. Because, in the end, Howard Rheingold doesn’t say that digital literacies will or must leverage the Web’s architecture of participation. “Digital literacies can leverage the Web’s architecture of participation, just as the spread of reading skills amplified collective intelligence five centuries ago. Today’s digital literacies can make the difference between being empowered or manipulated, serene or frenetic” (3; emphasis mine). It’s up to us to simultaneously practice and share them.
Notes
1 A sense of agency, as Rheingold writes, is precisely what’s needed and what digital literacies provide. “Most important,” writes Rheingold, “as people who are trying to get along day to day in a hyperscale, warp-speed civilization that seems so often to be beyond anyone’s control, digital literacy is something powerful we can learn as well as exercise for ourselves and each other” (3).
2 There are of course many types of literacies and digital literacies: the traditional literacies of reading and writing, along with scientific literacy, program literacy, information and media literacy, and social and emotional intelligence (Rheingold 253). In her book Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century, Cathy Davidson acknowledges Rheingold’s digital literacies, while suggesting a few 21st century literacies of her own: global consciousness, design, affordance, narrative, procedural, digital divides, ethics, assessment, data mining, preservation, and sustainability (297-299).
3 Indeed, the value of triangulating breaking news was clearly exhibited in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings. Reddit users, for example, failed to implement the literacy of critical consumption of information, leading to the false accusation of innocent citizens. See, for example, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/reddit-boston-marathon-apology-suspects_n_3133472.html and http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/reddit-tsarnaev-marathon-bombers-wisdom-of-crowds.html.
4 Rheingold has recognized a potential problem in collaborative exercises like these. As he told us, the students “are not accustomed to having the group responsible for something. And usually, there are two or three really intelligent students who do most of the work, and often there are a couple who do nothing at all. And, so, the next week—the second class—I show them the revision history. I just show them: click here, and you can see who does the work.” Students, in this way, can be held accountable for their own contributions.
5 Rheingold covers several other attention probes in Net Smart. One idea is to have your students keep a “log of their email behavior for a week, noting how their body and emotions felt, and how they were breathing while they were online,” and then having them look for irregularities within the log. “‘Every single student discovered,’ [David] Levy said in a talk to Google employees, ‘by doing this form of mindfulness practice, that there were certain things happening for them around email that were actually not what they wanted at all’” (Rheingold 73).
6 Another productive collaborative action problem that Rheingold uses is to have the co-teaching team delineate concepts, words, and phrases, and place them on the class wiki. And then everyone is in charge of helping to define these terms in the coming week. Howard described to us the benefits he’s discovered of incorporating the creation of common terms in his digital media class: “If everybody does a little bit of something and there are sixteen of us, we can get a very impressive lexicon made by the time we’re done with the quarter, and these are the words that you want to carry away with you—you want to know these words when you are dealing with social media in the future.”
Works Cited
Bindley, Katherine. “Reddit Apologizes for Speculating About Boston Marathon Suspects.” Huffington Post. 23 April 2013. Web. Accessed 1 May 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/ reddit-boston-marathon-apology-suspects_n_3133472.html.
Davidson, Cathy. Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century. New York: Penguin, 2011. Print.
Surowiecki, James. “The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt.” The New Yorker. 24 April 2013. Web. Accessed 1 May 2013.
Rheingold, Howard. Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012. Print.
---. Personal interview. 26 Feb. 2013.
Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely Brown. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Lexington, Kentucky: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011. Print.
Resources
Net Smart Resources:
http://rheingold.com/netsmart/
http://rheingold.com/books/net-smart/
Douglas Thomas on The New Culture of Learning:
Howard Rheingold on Net Smart:
Critical Thinking Resources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/betsy-aoki/critical-thinking-roundup_b_642945.html
http://critical-thinking.iste.wikispaces.net/Crap+Detection+101
Teaching Critical Thinking:
Social Bookmarks:
https://delicious.com/
https://www.diigo.com/
Question-and-Answer Websites:
http://www.formspring.me/
https://www.quora.com/
“In the Context of Web Context: How to Check Out Any Web Page”:
http://www.wordyard.com/2010/09/14/in-the-context-of-web-context-how-to-check-out-any-web-page/
To Find Front Groups:
http://www.sourcewatch.org
To Discover Urban Legends and Misinformation:
http://www.snopes.com/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/government/Politics_and_Government.htm
http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html
Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index:
http://chronicle.com/stats/productivity/
Google Scholar Citation Analyzer:
http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm
Political Fact Checker:
http://factcheck.org/
Science:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/
Health on the Net Foundation:
http://www.hon.ch/
How to Check Online Health Articles:
http://scienceroll.com/2009/05/20/health-information-online-how-to-check-the-quality/
http://www.mlahq.org/resources/userguide.html
Aggregator of Reliable Blogs:
http://globalvoicesonline.org/
Guide to Good Journalism:
http://newstrust.net/>
( Patrick Thomas Morgan )
www.ChordsAZ.com