This project, One Day on Earth, has endless possibilities for students, educators and lifelong learners -- to create, to share, to analyze and discuss.
You can help "document the world's story" through this project whose developers describe its goals as "Students learn the applicable practices of observation, investigation, notation, and documentation of a subject through the One Day On Earth experience. They also gain understanding of participatory media as a vehicle for social justice, community building, civic literacy and global awareness."
For more information on how to participate, toolkits, lesson plans,and FAQ's, check out the main page or this investigate this pdf.
I have to admit that when I day goes by when I am not active on Twitter, I feel I've missed a lot. Yesterday was one of those days when I was out of the technology loop. Does that mean I am addicted to Twitter? Not really Twitter, the tool. But, definitely addicted to learning which is why I value my PLN (personal learning network) so much. It is a daily dose of learning which I believe adds up to quite a lot over time.
Bobbi L. Newman
On Twitter, one of the librarians I follow is librarianbyday; she is librarian Bobbi Newman from Columbus GA, actively involved in the Transliteracy blog.From her website, I learned that "Bobbi is dedicated to helping libraries find their place in the digital age. She has presented at local, national, and international library conferences on a variety of topics related to improving existing digital services through expanding traditional methods, while creating innovative new practices."
This is a must-read post for all librarians who want to keep current in the profession. I really think that where we need to go with all this is in leading our students to find their place in the digital age. We need to be modeling what a PLN looks like, including students in our PLNs and encouraging students to develop their own networks for learning. After all, when I first learned on a PC in the early1990s my initial teachers were students because most adults at that time had no clue about how to use a computer, do email, save documents, etc.
Bobbi Newman's tweet at 7:03 am this morning has been retweeted about 15 times in just one hour. Think about how quickly hundreds, even thousands of people have read/seen Stephen's Lighthouse post about social media competencies for librarians. That is truly learning at the speed of light and also generating an incremental shift in the way we all think about the work we do.
How do we ensure that our students have the ability to search, sift and know?
“The ability to know has suddenly become the ability to search and the ability to sift” and discern. “Skill plus social” is the key.
How do we teach critical and focused attention when students are multitasking more than ever before? Farhad Manjoo argues in, True Enough, Living in a Post-Fact Society that our citizens increasingly accept as true anything which is said loudly enough, repeated often enough and circulated widely on the Internet.
Silicon Valley social media strategist JD Lasica offers suggestions for increasing online media literacy. We need to teach our students not only to use reliable news media, but also to fact check when they use blogs, Wikipedia, or alternative media publications. Check multiples sources and international coverage.
Crowd source your fact checking on Twitter and also use NewsTrust, a news literacy tool which harnesses a bipartisan community of news evaluators who make judgments to determine bias and unverified facts.
More vetting tools librarians need to use during the research process with our students:
• Campaign Desk (Columbia Journalism Review) critiques media coverage of politics and policy
• Factchecked.org provides educators and students with a framework for analyzing information and avoiding deception in the media.
• FactCheck.org, (Annenberg Public Policy Center) focuses on political bias in the news.
• Media Matters for America -a nonprofit progressive research and information monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the media.
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is one of the longest-running media watch groups monitoring media bias and censorship.
• Metafilter and similar community sites offer robust discussions of current events.
• Twitter Journalism (“Where News and Tweets Converge”) published a series of steps to verify a tweet, including checking the history of past tweets to check context before retweeting a claim about a news event.
• Dispute Finder Firefox Extension (Intel labs) “highlights disputed claims on web pages you browse and shows you evidence for alternative points of view.”
• Questioning Video -understand the vocabulary of visual deception that can be used to distort TV news.
JudyG posted a video [Socialnomics] yesterday about Social Media and bringing digital media into the classroom as described in a new book, Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids. That author, Jessica Parker, just started a new web site on the subject.
I initially learned about this due to a fairly extensive interview which she and other educators had recently with Henry Jenkins. Here's his blog posts: part one and part two -- well worth reading and discussing.
For example, high school teacher and UC Berkeley doctoral candidate Maryanne Berry says, "Excellent teaching involves a degree of risk and sadly today there are many constraints on teachers that keep them from trying anything new....I think teachers need to ... ask themselves, 'how can I use this to forward the subject I teach?'" There are also several comments about Wikipedia and an observation from Jessica Parker about how "classroom teachers are often voicing their concerns about a lack of opportunity to sit down with their colleagues and discuss important issues; time is not allocated for them to be apart of a learning community." She also talks about "the possibility to create a community of learners made up of both teachers and students working toward a common goal." Join the discussion - post your thoughts here, on Jenkins' blog or on Parker's new page.
