Making an impact in a crowded world

The article Creating a New Culture of Teaching and Learning addresses some of the biggest challenges with integrating technology in education today. One important challenge that I want to address is our trust in the internet. The article describes the misconceptions that some people have about the internet, saying "I have learned that for many kids if it’s on the Internet, it’s true. I didn’t realize until recently that it’s also the case that for a significant group of kids, if it’s not on the Internet it’s not true." The internet is intimidatingly vast. When I perform a Google search nowadays, I generally don't venture far from the first page of results, let alone the first result itself. But I am always aware of the long row of "ooooooooooo" at the bottom between "G" and "gle" informing me that there are many more pages, each filled with 10 results. Unlike a library, you can't quantify the internet. You can't see a building that contains all of the internet, or shelves lined with all of its web pages. The effect that this has on us as individuals, I believe, is it makes our knowledge and opinons feel small and unimportant. It used to mean more if you were a knowledgable person; people directed their questions at you and trusted your responses. Nowadays, any person with a smartphone in his pocket is a trivia master, capable of quickly finding you any piece of information you would likely want to know, so long as he has a good 3G or wifi signal.

There are over a billion people in the world connected to the internet, capable of quickly putting up their own webpage, blog and tweets filled with whatever information or opinons they have to offer. That's a lot of competition for our own ideas to affect people, but we need to remind kids (adults too) that it is still possible to impact the world with their mind and voice. Many times, the papers we write and theories we come up with in high school aren't that far off from what the "experts" of the world create. We should encourage students to create from an early age, assess the value of their creations, and get them out into the world if they are good. I love the author's suggestion that students learn how to create webpages early on in school. People do not usually seek information nor insightful opinions from printed five paragraph essays; so why are they the primary way we have students express themselves? When students write and print out essays for years, they have little chance to impact anyone in the world other than the teacher reading their work. So why don't we have them publish their work in more real-world ways, so they can have a real-world impact and receive useful real-world criticism? We need students to value their own opinions and the work they do more, instead of doing the bare minimum to get A's in classes.

As people are quick to note, this ease of publishing content to the world requires those consuming from the internet to do so with more caution and skepticism. But I think people make too much of a big deal about how the internet is creating a need to question information and sources. Why? Because we should always question the information presented to us, and acknowledge that humans, no matter what their academic title is or how "peer reviewed" their work is, are prone to making and publishing their errors to the world. Maybe students put too much trust in what they read on the internet, but they have also been putting too much trust into what they have read in textbooks and magazines for years. Skepticism is an essential aspect of critical thinking, and students should know that textbooks are written by humans, history is written by humans, research is conducted by humans, and any given piece of information they read can by false. This article says "don’t teach children to use the Internet unless you’re willing to teach them to think and discriminate." Don't be a parent or teacher if you're not willing to teach children to think and discriminate.