Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.21.06 | In the very simplest sense, if one is reading about a topic online (in the news or a more archival context) one can quite easily find alternative sources for the same information immediately and easily.  (One doesn’t have to find a copy of the LA Times or Forbes to check the views presented in the NY Times, or find an encyclopedia to check the accuracy of a historical proposition, or call a friend to see if a news story in their town was accurate. Instead, the “net is one’s friend”.  Immediately, with very little effort, inside the psychological moment of the initial presentation, one can find alternative views and data on a topic. Who knows, popular information sources may even start including references that can deliberately support various positions ...)

And so the basic context of online engagement is fundamentally that of credibility checking. Add to this some experience with different databases, meta-tagging and metrics of credibility, and existing tools will become refined to assess accuracy/ references at a scale quite unknown today.

The weaknesses of these tools?  Human judgment.  Deciding what to believe, how to connect it to prior assumptions, and what to do with new knowledge is a human task. Systems can provide better and better data, but then humans are typically required (for important tasks).

Many individuals who are accessing information on the web have no experience in traditional skills of judgment and information aggregation (e.g., they are young). Most individuals are very unsophisticated in using online sources and don’t like to spend their entire lives online (e.g., they are old).  In theory, these two groups of individuals will intersect, and new models of best practice will develop from the experiences that come from these two different perspectives.