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"Most adults realize that, say, Facebook is engineered to increase the value of our "social graphs" to its customers, the corporations and research firms that buy this data. We understand that we're not the customers, but the product. The more critically we engage with all of the iPhones and Google searches in our lives, the better we can tell what they want from us.
But I no longer think that's enough. It took a few centuries after the invention of text for regular people to learn how to read and write. The printing press, which democratized print by reducing the cost of manuscripts, certainly helped. Now that we live in a world with newspapers, road signs, package labels and drug inserts, almost no one still questions the idea that teaching kids to read is a good thing, or that basic literacy makes us more likely to create value for ourselves or our employers."
"Showing students how to read critically and formulate research queries is part of the teaching function of college libraries. But how do you teach students to read critically that which has no text?
That is the challenge Frances May, an adjunct librarian at the University of North Texas, took on when she decided to adapt her library’s orientation program to meet what she sees as a growing demand for “visual literacy” among today’s college students."
In the wave of criticisms about America, one thing gets lost that explains American adult knowledge - America is the only major country that requires almost all its college and university students to complete a full year of science. So the scientific literacy of U.S. adults is higher than the general adult populations of other developed nations.
"Last year I learned about a rumor swirling around the comparative literature department at UCLA, where I did my PhD. Supposedly I had managed to get C++ to count as one of the three languages required for the degree. It's not true, for the record, but it is a topic that comes up from time to time—substituting programming languages for natural languages. Many of us who work in computing and the humanities claim that knowledge of computation is essential background for all discussions that hope to bridge the two, not just for those who intend to make things for computers. "
New Media Literacies (NML), a research initiative based within USC's Annenberg School for Communication, explores how we might best equip young people with the social skills and cultural competencies required to become full participants in an emergent media landscape and raise public understanding about what it means to be literate in a globally interconnected, multicultural world.
A common bias among the smart is to overestimate how smart everyone else is. This was certainly my experience in moving from top rank universities as a student to a mid rank university as a teacher. A better intuition for common abilities can be found by browsing the US National Assesment of Adult Literacy sample questions.
But a more fundamental issue than whether or not people can avail themselves of a home internet connection is that a terrifyingly large proportion of Americans can’t read and internet access isn’t going to be very helpful absent literacy:
They’re at it again.
The doom-cryers who assert we don’t read any more—or, if we do, it’s not the right kind of reading, not the literary reading we all used to do every single day back in the Golden Age of universal literacy.
Required science courses can have limited interest from some students. In this article, a physics professor and a science librarian describe methods used to engage non majors in learning about science in a non-threatening way. By evaluating the science on selected web sites, and classifying the sites according to six categories (valid, speculation, controversial, uninformed, misrepresentation, and invalid) and then comparing findings with others in the class, students are simultaneously immersing themselves in practices of the scientific community and gaining critical thinking skills.
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A primary goal of this course is learn how to evaluate a scientific paper or web site without adequate training in the relevant scientific field. We began by establishing six categories for evaluating scientific work:
- Valid: Most scientists would agree with the thesis, data, and conclusions drawn in the paper.
- Speculation: Most scientists would agree with the paper's thesis, but the thesis statement lacks strong experimental evidence. An example of this would be wormholes in spacetime: they are predicted by well established theory, but have never been experimentally observed.
- Controversial: This category refers to scientific, not social controversy. More than one scientific theory exists to explain the evidence. There is usually a lack of consensus within the scientific community on the subject.
- Uninformed: The author is often not an expert in the field and is reporting only part of a larger story. The omissions in these papers are usually due to ignorance, rather than malicious intent. Many student papers posted on the Internet fall under this category.
- Misrepresentation: The author may present a correct statement, but it is either taken out of context or misapplied. The author is often deliberately trying to mislead the reader by ignoring other important evidence not presented in the paper but well known in the field.
- Invalid: Most scientists would disagree with the paper's thesis.
First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we
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