Net Smart: How to thrive online by Howard Rheingold.
Net Smart by Howard Rheingold is a great follow up book to The Information Diet that we read early this semester. While The Information Diet book was a flashing road-sign making us aware of our information consumption and how to be aware of what we are consuming, Net Smart is the road-map to help us navigate the social media landscape with thought, thoughtfulness of others, and how to do it mindfully. Social media is here to stay and if we want to thrive in a world that combines our physical actions with our online lives then we need to know how to put into practice living mindfully in cyberspace.
Rheingold cover five digital literacies we should master. They are: attention, crap detection, participation power, collaboration, and networks. The first chapter covers the why and how to control your attention, your mind’s most powerful instrument, online. Are we captains or captives of our attention muscles? Attention, like a muscle can be strengthened and Rheingold gives us ways to do that including meditation. Who knew that following your breathing could help in our online lives. The second chapter covers crap-detection, how to find what you need to know and how to decide if it’s true. Parsing the validity of online information in today’s volatile online culture is of extreme importance, especially with our youth. I came across this article on NPR.org this week that points out our need to teach our youth this important skill: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/23/503129818/study-finds-students-have-dismaying-inability-to-tell-fake-news-from-real
The third chapter covers how we should be participating in the online universe. How this medium allows the free-flow of information, knowledge and ideas and how it can increase our overall collaborative intelligence.
The forth chapter expands on our collaborative intelligence and how we can tap into it’s power by using crowd-sourcing or online forums to solve problems that we could not come up with the answers on our own.
The fifth chapter is a natural extension of all of that collaborative work, networks, the power of human and technological networks. We as humans are inherently social creatures and online networks are a mirror of our need to connect and bridge the gaps between ourselves and how that feeling of interconnected-ness enhances our ability to thrive, in the physical world as well as online.
The last chapter cohesively wraps up the previous chapters and extolls us to use the web mindfully by giving us a checklist, or guideposts to helps us find our way.
In thinking of what I’ve learned from Net Smart and how it might impact my practice of teaching, I am eager to teach my students how to flex their crap-detection muscles or, after reading that article, how to get them in shape to begin with. I think these are the hidden skills that we take for granted, as we’ve had years of experience in detecting truth from falsehoods, fiction, embellished fish-tales, and even agenda driven information. This book is one I will read again and keep with me to reference from time to time. It’s such a goldmine of a road-map.
Hey Jim! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.
ReplyDeleteLike you, I see links between what we read in "The Information Diet" and what we read in Rheingold, and even what we're reading this week in Gardner's book "The App Generation". I always knew that the differences between digital immigrants and digital natives were there, but I didn't realize how stark the generational divisions were. On numerous occasions I've experienced this feeling of being in the middle - I was way more hip to the pleasures and benefits of technology and apps than my older colleagues, but never quite as quick to adopt new ones as my students. I think we all tend to learn the technologies that our generation adopted first and feel a prejudice toward the new ones (at least I sometimes feel this way - feeling expert level at Facebook, but never giving much time to the sillier snapchat). Anyway, our kids are early adopters of whatever is newest and coolest. We have to be ready for that!
Hey Jim! I like your analogies of road map and road signs. I am intrigued by the title of the article you linked and plan to read it next. As a mother of two teenage girls, I really want to be able to teach them how to be good crap detectors.
ReplyDeleteHey Jim! Your summary of chapter 5 is my favorite part of this post. I like how complicated, modern concepts can be compared to the simplest of natural happenings. The online connections we make aren't as easily visualized as something like a family free, but it continues to reiterate how much humans need contact and socialization and relationships with other humans.
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