Week 5 - Lots to think about

This week’s articles were dense, to say the least.  In particular, the one by Emejulu and McGregor (2016) It was a slow read, then reread, kind of article, but worth putting in the time.  The idea of radical digital citizenship should not have felt so foreign to me, but it was.  I had many eye-opening moments reading that article.  I had never taken time to think about the resources needed to build all of the technology that we consume, nor about who was doing the labour.  And the example of Robert Moses and how he planned the freeways and bridges to exclude minority groups – never in a million years would I think that someone would think and act like that. 

I noted a couple of the quotes that Jeremey used that really made me reflect, “We know too much, but understand too little” and “When we use these sites, we’re not the consumer, we’re the product”.  Powerful.   The article by Emejulu and McGregor concludes with a comment that they are “sceptical about the possibilities of developing a radical digital citizenship in digital education”.   I believe that this is true for now, but I remain hopeful that we are making steps in the right direction.

I absolutely loved how Kimberley and Kristy provided us for the framework to use for video analysis.  What a great tool to use with students.  I would love to show them a real video and then a fake video and see how their answers compare.   We must teach children to think critically about what they see, and to look for bias.  As this article https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/opinion/fake-news-and-the-internet-shell-game.html from the New York Times shares, years ago when we heard something “outrageous” we would have ignored the information, knowing that if it were true, we would surely have heard about it from a credible source.  Nowadays, people happily retweet or repost very outrageous things without fact checking.   Our students are doing this at an alarming rate when they hear news/gossip about their peers. 

We were left with the question about how to apply this digital literacy in our classrooms, since it does not have its own curriculum.  Off the top of my head, I am thinking that it would fit nicely under the Social Studies “Research and Communication” or “Critical Thinking and Citizenship” strands, as well as the “Critical Thinking” strand in Language Arts.   We just need to be creative with the “big idea” that we are presenting to students, and dig a bit deeper into these topics. 

This Ted Talk, relates well to the template shared by Kimberley and Kristy, and speaks to the importance of helping students think critically about media literacy, and how to give them the “golden lasso” of truth.

This talk also speaks to how in social media "we are the product".  A bit of doom and gloom, but then talks about the positive aspects as well.