Matthew Kay, discussing teaching 13 year olds armed with laptops and other technology, at the Science Leadership Academy:
“As important as it is for students to expand their sense of community and learn to collaborate — it is more crucial that they learn how to sift thoughtfully through increasing amounts of information. The Internet presents a unique challenge to scholarship — many of the questions that once required extensive research can now be answered with 10-minute visits to Google. The issue now is distinguishing between rich resources and the online collection of surface facts, misinformation, and inexcusable lies that masquerade as the truth. It will be hard for our students to be thoughtful citizens without this ability to discern the useful from the irrelevant. This is especially clear during this election season. If they are never asked to practice dealing with this new onslaught of information, they will have to practice when the stakes are much higher.”
Matthew Kay, “Putting Technology in Its Place,” New York Times, October 11, 2008, available at http://lessonplans.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/putting-technology-in-its-place/?th&emc=th
Sunday, October 12, 2008
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Not only the image of the average 13 yr old "armed with a laptop" that is false, are the facts that so many young children and teenagers are not in that socio-economic stratum, do not necessarily have access to public library computers where they live either, or parents wealthy enough to afford laptops for their kids. Perhaps that is not a concern either, many public schools still do not have enough desks and textbooks for students.
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