4 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2019
    1. Professors rightly object to its use for final papers, but see it as a valuable jumping off point for research,

      The irony of an entry on the "Reliability of Wikipedia" posted on Wikipedia notwithstanding, the author(s) do make the point that I have heard directly from my professors and instructors; that Wikipedia is a good starting point and the footnotes and bibliographies can often lead to more accurate resources.

    1. “The first step is admitting that everyone, from students to doctors, uses Wikipedia,”

      Good advice, since it's not designed to dismiss Wikipedia out of hand, but acknowledges the fact that it is the de facto source for online information second (probably) to Google.

    1. Fairness includes offering a balanced, reasoned argument, not selected or slanted.

      "Fairness" has weighted connotations and can be easily confused with unbiased opinion. The FCC once had a policy that allowed for diverse views to be broadcast thus facilitating open discourse while allowing divergent views a quorum for public evaluation. In this context, one must consider the facts as they're presented and look for signs of deceptive argumentation: straw man, ad hominem, or fallacies of false equivalencies all of which can sound analytical, but are antithetical to fairness.

    1. Digital literacy is not about the skills of using technologies, but how we use our judgment to maintain awareness of what we are reading and writing, why we are doing it, and whom we are addressing.

      This excerpt brings to mind a video-editing course I taught at a local art college. The students came from various backgrounds and skill levels, so I had to access their individual approaches to storytelling before we could even attempt an assembly of clips. We watched a lot of films from different genres and countries. Our discussions about how frames are stitched together to form "visual grammar" revealed that no two editors assemble a film the exact same way. Mastering the skills of visual communication allowed the students to than work toward mastering the software; but had I concentrated on just teaching them the mechanics of editing (which my faculty head insisted on) there would've been less compelling edits and more of the same cookie-cutter results. We also kept a careful eye on our student "audience" responses to help analyze what worked and what didn't. The culmination of all this was a focused deconstruction of how movies are spliced together to form the experiences that we enjoy.