Information Overload

As a history teacher, I teach about how the printing press changed mass media forever, so this assignment allowed me to reflect about how I use mass media in my life. Recently, I watched the History Channel’s Mankind: The Story of All of Us and it mentioned the printing press as well as how the invention of the camera changed mass media in the 20^th century. The camera was used in the Congo to take pictures of the horrific conditions and exploitation of the natives during the rubber trade.

For the first time; mankind could capture images of our world, reproduce, and share them. The invention of photography and the means to get them in front of people; held more power than their inventors dreamed. Photos don’t blink and they don’t go away. The photos of the Congo helped to stop the deadly rubber trade. Mass media was a new power in a modern world (History Channel, 2012). Now more than 100 years after the camera was invented, we see hundreds of images a day through the internet, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. There is an excess of mass media and images in our modern world but it is important to self reflect on how we manage and use the information?

This week’s assignment made me look at how I manage the media that I surround myself with in my own information diet. I use twitter to gain fast quick information from a multitude of different news outlets ranging from celebrities, Olympic athletes, global newspapers, authors, and my peers. This week, in order to broaden my informational scope, I chose to follow three new twitter handles that are outside of my comfort zone. I am now following Lumosity in order to use the web for good purposes by strengthening my brain. In addition, I am now following FlippedLearning and FlippedClasss because flipping the classroom is something I want to try but I am also nervous to do because it is something new and outside my realm of teaching. There seems to be many benefits from flipping my classroom as a result I would like to research and gain more information so that I would be comfortable flipping my classroom in the near future.

Majority of my 9^th grade students have a smartphone in their pockets, ready to be scroll through their own twitter feeds. However, I became extremely worried about my students’ mass media consumption this week when I took them to the library and they could not find the publisher, city of publication or date of publication in a book. Nicholas Carr description of the technology revolution reminds me of my students’ excessive technology behaviors. Technologies drive us to crave an information diet of quick, easy and immediately forgettable facts, and that we cannot learn to self-regulate in a tech rich environment (Carr, 2011). I agree with Carr that my students’ constant use of technology has only penetrated their desire to use more technology.

How can I judge my students when I am reading my twitter and googling for answers too? I validate my informational technology actions that I have been to college; I had to go to the library to research topics to find static information. I feel I can distinguish trivial and important information unlike my students. I need to prepare my students and create real world assignments so they too can understand the value of research and information. My students and I need to meet somewhere in the middle by using technology to gain good important information through authentic meaningful assignments.

References:

History Channel (Producer). (2012). Mankind: The Story of All of Us [Television series]. A&E Home Video.

The Economist. (Nicholas Carr). (2011). Flash of Genius:Dark Side of the Information Revolution [Video webcast]. Retrieved from http://fora.tv/2011/06/07/Flash_of_Genius_Dark_Side_of_the_Information_Revolution_

2014. Twitter, Wikimedia Commons. [image online] Available at:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Twitter_icon.png [Accessed: 16 February 2014].