Think Link

Picking up from yesterday's thinking about links and why it's important to 'teach links', here's a brief talk by Jay Rosen on the 'ethic of the link' and the meaning of the Web:

I'm still working this stuff out in my mind, but I would love to hear what you all have to say about it.

The Difference Between Knowing and Understanding in the Immediately Connected Mobile World

Fisch notes that 'We have the technology'. Concerning the Bionic Eye iPhone app, he notes:

This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it’s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it’s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app – or something like it – connects you to all the available information about whatever you’re looking at.

Whether it's this thing or some other, we are one way or another headed towards immediate on-the-go information all the time. But information alone is not education. Knowledge of content is only half the battle.

As constant immediate information becomes the norm, more than ever we are going to need to instill critical analytical skills into our students' educations. But we have to get beyond the limited definitions of critical thinking so often espoused.

We have to ever more distinguish between the ability to 'know' something and the ability to 'understand'. And most specifically to what this type of critical thinking should look like in the Digital Age, I'd suggest we need to consider the uniquely particular 21st century instances of content: namely links and apps.

Now, sure, links have been around since the beginning of the World Wide Web. But especially with regard to the savvy linking done on the fly via Twitter, links themselves are taking on the position of content rich text-forms.

We have to teach kids to understand the critical basis of 'link decision'; that is, the decision to hyperlink online. Links -- especially in mobile apps -- have become more than just directional; they've gained a sort of a live intertextual import. And so, I'd like to see intertextuality take center stage in our discussion of teaching critical thinking skills.

Because it's not just about reading the text; it's about meta-reading the links.

That too is part of the difference between knowing and understanding in the Digital Age.

Owning Knowledge: thoughts about the 'Ethic of the Link'

Great interview with Jay Rosen on social media and journalism that I think bears a lot of importance for educators.

Pay close attention to the comments made concerning the "Ethic of the Link" around 4:27:

"You don't just use the web to tell people stuff, you send them to where they can learn more.... to connect people with sources of knowledge that they can use themselves so that they're not dependent on you all the time to tell them something else."

That's what we want to happen in the classroom. As we discussed concerning the Pappas article from a couple of days ago, if a student is always looking for teacher validation, that student will be lost once they leave the classroom.

We need students to validate themselves.

So, we shouldn't be giving information to the students. We should be giving students links to the information and then we should hold them responsible for following and searching the links. Classtime itself should be a conversation, a debriefing, a discussion based on what the students found.

Now, this is not unlike asking a student to go read an article so that we can discuss it tomorrow. Except in that few students are going to read a piece of paper and then, autodidactically, go off and try to find out more information. But via links, the student enters into a Web of information navigable in an inviting way; personal interest and self-motivation is cued by curiosity and made accessible by simple access to more links. And, of course in the fluid and social world of links available via Twitter, Diigo, and the like, the student actually becomes part of the process of the creation of knowledge itself. The result is ultimately one of activating ownership.

The process of actively accessing sources of knowledge rather than expecting the passive reception culled from the distribution of knowledge is the defining feature of a successful academic mindset.

We want the student to own knowledge, not lease it until the exam is through.