How to educate the Homo Interneticus?
With regard to ICT, media and learning, what problems can we observe in our world?
a) We observe an increasing number of online bullying (online mobbing)
cases where children and teenagers at schools spread *information* about
other kids and those information are emotional colored, telling not
the truth, and blaming people.
- b) We also observe that people use information, images etc. of other people without knowing how to handle copyright issues.
- c) Third, plagiarism is increasing, where people use the information of others without citing them (stealing people's ideas).
- d) And a fourth example is about using information and to know about its quality. Same topic, but different information can be uploaded by different competitive firms, or people from different religions, or people with different ages from different generation, and researchers from different disciplines. They all have information but from their point of views.
The media-constructed reality approach focuses on the awareness that people live in a media-constructed world where we have a difference between a social-constructed "reality" and "reality given by different media" (objective facticity). To know this and to handle this in the "classroom" and in different learning spaces is one aspect of media competencies.
- Yes, we need to educate the Homo Interneticus. But how?
Some people say, we need to understand how informal online learning takes place because it seems there is a great success story behind. In the age of Social Media, all information are online, sometimes difficult to find. But in informal online learning, how do we know that learning took place? Is there always a problem what we want to solve when we learn informally? What does this mean for formal schooling? Instead of learning through textbooks, to what extent do we need characteristics of informal learning in formal teaching institutions? (Collins & Halverson, 2009, "Rethinking education in the age of technology")
- How to teach and how to learn learning in the digital age of Social Media?