As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
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Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#2Is this an education problem though? Surely those crowds at the capitol had plenty of well educated, highly functioning adults. But when you incentivize divisiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, companies like Facebook, grifting media personalities, and corrupted politicians will always collude to outwit them. We have a problem with a runaway hyper-capitalist economic system and decaying democratic institutions that reward manipulative sociopathic behavior.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#330 years ago we called this "critical thinking", something schools have always had a lot trouble with, in part because critical thinking is a weapon against illegitimate authority, which schools also have a lot of trouble with.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#4Is this an education problem though? Surely those crowds at the capitol had plenty of well educated, highly functioning adults. But when you incentivize divisiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, companies like Facebook, grifting media personalities, and corrupted politicians will always collude to outwit them. We have a problem with a runaway hyper-capitalist economic system and decay…
Citation needed on that "educated, well functioning".
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#530 years ago we called this "critical thinking", something schools have always had a lot trouble with, in part because critical thinking is a weapon against illegitimate authority, which schools also have a lot of trouble with.
It's also really hard to measure, and just like everything nowadays, there has to be KPIs and metrics everywhere. No one relies on gut feeling or what they think is best anymore, too afraid to stick their neck out without data to back it up, no matter how iffy the data is.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#630 years ago we called this "critical thinking", something schools have always had a lot trouble with, in part because critical thinking is a weapon against illegitimate authority, which schools also have a lot of trouble with.
Also because teachers have trouble with it. I’d guess out of all the teachers I had at a decent public school, probably only 1 in 5 could be reasonably considered critical thinkers.
I’d guess 2 in 5 were actively hostile to the concept and the rest were just ambivalent.
Illegitimate (or at least arbitrary) authority is something schools seem to thrive on. Our school had a staircase you could only go up and one you could only go down and you got yelled at if you went the wrong direction. Naturally the building wasn’t made by insane people so the stairs were on opposite ends, this meant if you had to go downstairs but were near the “up only stairs” you had to traverse the entire building and would be late with 3min class change times (and you couldn’t run either).
We also couldn’t talk during the second half of lunch because it was too loud for the lunch monitors.
Underpaid, low status jobs with unions that prevent people from getting fired is a great way to end up with dumb, awful people in those positions. I was lucky there were a few great teachers at all given those incentives.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#7The problem with this "bad information" monicker is that it's absolutely contaminated with politics just like "fact checkers" and someone who points out data or inconsistencies that go against an official stance might be labeled simply for countering the narrative.
It's easy to believe this doesn't happen when you're always aligning with the official/tech-platform positions but you surely can remember an instance where this wasn't so in the past.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#8I wonder if this will work out any better than the "computer" classes that teach people to use MS Word (do you really need a class on this?) instead of something they could actually use like an understanding of relational algebra.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#9What you call "bad information" I call "a difference of opinion." And I call your attempts to institute mass re-education in "digital literacy" to "combat" this "bad information" suppression of free thought and oppression of contrarian and non-mainstream voices.
Re: As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'
#10I wonder if this will work out any better than the "computer" classes that teach people to use MS Word (do you really need a class on this?) instead of something they could actually use like an understanding of relational algebra.
What do people use more often to get work done. MS Word or relational algebra?