Education 2.0 & 3.0

There are so many useful skills you’ll develop while doing your research – from critical thinking and being able to evaluate your work and that of others, to time management skills. But the research world is rapidly changing, so what skills can you develop now to make you ready for the research future? In this post we guide you through some of the key skills for researchers today.

Jamie McKenzie writes: "It is essential that schools teach students how to escape this stranglehold that Google creates. While helping visitors to find the information they need, Google effectively limits and narrows their searches - steering them toward the obvious and the conventional."

Zeynep Tufekci writes: "What we are witnessing is the computational exploitation of a natural human desire: to look “behind the curtain,” to dig deeper into something that engages us. As we click and click, we are carried along by the exciting sensation of uncovering more secrets and deeper truths. YouTube leads viewers down a rabbit hole of extremism, while Google racks up the ad sales."

Research Shorts are short research video summaries by George Veletsianos and The Digital Learning and Social Media Research Group: http:/...

Our public square isn’t what it used to be. But, if schools lead the way, media literacy education can help us rebuild civic society. 

If the damage to public discourse wasn’t clear already, the recent controversy over political advertising on social media platforms surely drove the point home. While Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a ban on such advertising, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s decision to keep hosting political ads without subjecting it to rigorous fact-checking. 

This video clip is a bit old, but I still like using it to spark conversation on why we need to teach differently in today’s classrooms. When we have almost instant access to factual information, we shouldn’t be asking students to simply recall those facts. The Teaching Innovation Progression Chart highlights Research and Information Fluency as one of the key strands for student success. In a student-driven classroom, teachers should be modeling strategiesto guide student investigation, designing challenges that promote synthesis of resources to address an authentic task, supporting students as they acquire, evaluate, and apply information, and facilitating and formatively assessing authentic tasks where students are engaged in research and using information fluently. In these classrooms, we should see students constructing questions to guide research, selecting the most appropriate digital tools and information sources, assembling and synthesizing information to address authentic tasks, and using tools to powerfully display and interact with information. 

Students often think that because they can type a phrase into Google or saying something aloud to Siri they know how to search. Of course, any teacher who has heard a student say "Google has nothing on this" or "there's no information about my topic" knows that students don't inherently know how to search despite growing up in a world filled with Google and Siri. When your students need help formulating or refining a search, have them review the following ten tip. Better yet, have them review these tips before starting their next searches.

Information cannot always be trusted. Despite popular opinion regarding the devastating impact of the Internet on the modern age, the inherent untrustworthiness of information is not new. Satire, misinformation, and disinformation have been circulating for centuries, even long before the printed word. However, thanks to the relative ease of creating and sharing content online, our students are confronted with publications created solely to entertain, persuade, and incite via incorrect or incomplete statistics.

Time for an update. The last time I wrote about our co-design project, I let you know that we’re pursuing five exciting ideas, as chosen by you. Since then, we’ve been working with experts and those on the ground to gather research and draw conclusions, and generally work out where to take the projects from here.