Mindful Infotention. That is a nice alternate label for Information Literacy. It covers a multitude of sins or in this case virtues. Rheingold’s “Crap Detection 101” is great because it’s full of useful tools to check the authority of a website such as easywhois.com and the suggestion of using the search term “link:http://…” to follow outside links. The post is full of suggested tools. the difficult part is in making yourself use the tools. Rheingold talked about exercising the “flabby think-for-yourself muscle”. It takes time to check sources, to critically ask questions about the authenticity of what you’re reading or watching and I think a great number of people don’t really want truth they want entertainment.
This weekend I’m giving my final presentation for the course, The Library’s Role in Teaching and Learning. I choose to create a lesson plan for adult learners around the consumer health information website MedLinePlus and part of the lesson includes a segment on healthy web surfing. Rheingold’s blog post on Mindful Infotention reinforced my belief that as information specialists we are obligated to use our expertise to help our patrons, users, adult learner, students quite the “noise-death of the Internet”.
3 replies on “Howard Rheingold, where have you been all my life!”
Hi Elizabeth
Nice post, glad you discovered Rheingold. He’s quite colourful (literally).
Will you take LIBR534?
Dean
Thanks for the encouraging words. LIBR534 would have to be a WISE offering in the next summer session to fit my schedule.
Thanks for encouraging me to explore Rheingold further! The development of critical thinking processes in the individual is what I feel distinguishes social media as entertainment from social media as constructivist learning tools. Critical thinking is also what allows us to harness the true potential of social media, and keeps us away from cyber-balkanization (shameless plug, lol).