The Most Powerful Technologies

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The Most Powerful Technologies

• Melanie Roffino
• 4100.004 Tuesdays
• Journal Article Review

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Questions and Questioning

• Questions and questioning may be the most
  powerful technologies of all.
• Questioning is central to learning and growing.
• An unquestioning mind may have little defense
  against the data smog so typical of life in this
  Information Age.

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Mouseclick

• How do we sort and sift our way past the
  charlatans and self anointed frauds of this new
  electronic marketplace?
• How do we protect ourselves from the fraudulent
  and the deceitful?
• For those who work in schools, how do we raise
  young people to find their way through the maze?

• Be careful where you click!!

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Information Power

• When we come to a Web page or online article, we
  immediately ask who put it there and whether
  their ideas can be trusted.
• We must be wary of experts lacking in wisdom,
  discretion or reliability.
• We find Web sites proudly dispensing hogwash and
  blather of the worst kindhistory that is not
  history and medicine that is not medicine.

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Technology

• Why do we create a special subject area in
  schools separate from the real classrooms and
  call it technology?

• Yet we see this trendy approach to information
  and to learning sweeping through schools and
  towns with little opposition or concern.
• Being good at technology, we are assured, is
  crucial if we wish a comfortable future for our
  children.

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Print books are technologies - information
delivery systems with distinct advantages over
some of their new, electronic relatives - they
have been pushed aside in some places (along with
libraries) by the information Gold Rush, and they
have been relegated to basement status.

• Much of the new information is of inferior
  quality, the glitz, the glamour, the ratings and
  the profits go to the electronic sources.