Flattener #4 Uploading Communities

What should our students be learning? Warlick seems to suggest that we need to be teaching them about how to control or handle the information they are connecting with on the internet. This, according to Warlick (pg 22), means that kids need to control the information in postive, productive, and personally meaningful ways. In other words, they need to be able to seperate the good, the bad, and the indifferent and then use what they have left over in an insightful and constructive manner.

It is the journey of getting that information that Friedman discusses in flatner #4. There he talks about community developed, or open source software. Usually this software is quite cheap or it is free. This type of software allows costs associated with the internet to decrease, this in turn could mean better access to the internet, but not necessarily better quality information. Today, the internet offers everyone an opportunity to be a star, whether in their own blog, podcast, photo album or what-have-you, everyone is capable of uploading all kinds of information to the web. It is clear that future technology will include the community and it's customers. A joint effort by everyone that will ultimately benefit everyone.

The example cited in Friedman's flatener #4 chapter comments on blogging and how the BBC in England not only encouraged uploading of photos, comments, and personal pieces related to a July 7 underground bombing episode in London, but the BBC also managed to channel these items into useful editorial information (119). When one thinks about what the BBC did, it not long before you realize just how wide open they made themselves. The number of photos, and written texts they received was overwhelming and not to mention a bit labourous when it came to reading it. Still the good points here just might outweigh the not so good points. You have to wonder, not only what the future of journalism might be, but also that of education, politics, writing in general and many other occupations. What will be the effects on these occupations, and how will people cope with the everchanging face of technology?

Internet Character Assassination was an interesting term I came across as I read about Wikipedia (123) in Friedman's book. It was related to a story about John Seigenthaler Sr. whose biography was posted with some untrue facts for 132 on the Wikipedia website. This, then seems to go along with my cautions that I have expressed in previous blogs about having your information out, except that this was information that was made up and designed to slander a person's identity. Just think if one of our students had looked this up an found that bio and then included some of the information in a research paper on Robert or John Kennedy. . . All I can say is it's a pretty scary thought.

As an ELA teacher we will have our work cut out for us determining what is, or is not appropriate research material. Was a particular document just created by Freddy down the street, who really has no ideal what he is talking about, but boy can he make a sweet looking web page or is it a legit site created by a reliable source? How about thatWikipedia entry? It is these types of questions that the ELA teacher must be prepared to answer.

I do have to add that learning about the birth of Mozilla-FireFox was neat, since that is the browser I use most of the time!!!