Blog Post 2

Students now have a unique challenge that has not been faced by previous generations of having too much information at their disposal.  The role of the educator has shifted from the "keeper of the knowledge" to teaching students how to navigate through information.  Without the appropriate skills, it becomes easy to lost in the ether that is the internet and have a lack of understanding of what is useful and what is not. 

The video "Infowhelm and Information Fluency" showed how much data is out there for individuals to sort through on a daily basis when they are online.  It is easy to become lost and not be able to find where you started in the first place.  Bryan Alexander gives useful tips, on his post "My Daily Info-Wrangling Routine" on how to organize the tools you use on the internet and for the appropriate purposes.  He also provides a useful framework on how to determine if what you are looking at is, in fact, useful.

It is vital that students are taught how to discern what is useful and how to find things that are useful when they begin taking control of their own learning on the internet.  Students are going to do their own learning, the question is will it be reliable or not.