Believing What You Read

In my transcultural education class on Wednesday, we had a wonderful Spanish professor speak to us about "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." Are you "fluent" in new technology, or do you find yourself learning the language and not always getting the idioms? I think I'm both - I write out some things by hand, but I live much of my life online, as you can tell from my love of this blog!

One thing that came up was Wikipedia, and how students use it as the ultimate source for information. Wikipedia can be great for learning about issues that have not yet come up in more traditional journals or in books; however, there is an authenticity/subjectivity problem at times. I think Wikipedia does a pretty good job of self-monitoring; however, this professor dismissed it categorically, which I think demonstrates her "digital immigrant" status.

What I glean from the plethora of information available in the digital age is that all sources can be suspect, and all sources can be useful. Even a book has an author who writes from a certain viewpoint. Maybe the problem with Wikipedia is that we don't know exactly who is writing them, so we can't say what how/why the viewpoint might be skewed. Which is probably why, incidentally, that conservatives started Conservapedia (fyi, apparently conservatives are less native to the digital era than liberals, because this link appears to be down) ... if you come up with a conservative alternative, then the original must be horribly liberal, right? -Sigh-

I'm not really speaking in terms of liberal/conservative - I'm so tired of that. Rather, I'm interested in more minute details of a person's views - why they might be supporting a particular viewpoint. Do they have a son or daughter with a disability, and so they feel differently about those issues? Does their job or social class give them a particular perspective?

Which brings me back to the original impetus behind talking about this, which was a press release from the Department of Education touting the Secretary's visit to a school in Tampa. I read it, but it's so hard to gauge what's real and what's fluff. There's such a dearth of good educational research out there.