Up on Memeorandum at the moment (on the tech side)- a pointer to a discussion about the gatekeepers of the new media.
This is an interesting subject and one that I’ve been considering from the educational angle. While the techie-boys (and unfortunately they are mainly young males) go on and one about the imminent bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble, those of us back with at least one foot on the ground are considering exactly how ordinary web users are getting their ideas.
Hang on. Is there such a thing as an ordinary web user? Can you classify according to age and gender? Are all ten year old boys doing Neopets and chatting on MSN? Or is that the domain of sixteen to twenty year old girls? Who is busy on TradeMe? A wide swathe of ages and certainly both genders if my family and friends are “average”. There may be trends emerging – younger people prefer instant messaging, ie texting and MSN Chat over slower email – but the internet on the whole is a great leveler. Flickr, deli.ici.ous, Google everything …
Back to gatekeeping. In his critique, Stowe Boyd asks “who are the gatekeepers?” He says we should all be our own, but then adds, “The reality is that we are unequipped — we do not have the time or resources.”
Then he goes on to discuss the four methods of getting ideas and knowledge and how authorities emerge – by dint of good writing, which is then picked up and worked over by others (much like I have picked up his post).
My issue is that there are a lot of self-proclaimed experts out there and people who have been able to work out systems and ways to get themselves to the “top of the charts” so as to speak. After all, get on Digg, Memeorandum, Slashdot orBoing Boing and, hey, you’ve made it. Right?
Back to what I consider to be my job with teachers. I think we have to look at evaluation and assessment in a new light. We need to look at systems of evaluating and assessing ideas and opinions as well as knowledge and facts as they are presented to us as adults. Back when I was in the MMP programme at Waikato University, the late (and great) Nola Campbell drummed into us the basics for evaluating a website. Is it dated? Is it acknowledged? Are there references? Simple stuff (and there is more) but powerful if we apply them to the other “stuff” that is thrust in front of us. A newspaper columnist, a talkback opinion, a website about monarch butterflies, the Wikipedia …
It’s not about the popularity of a topic (or the inverse popularity as in the case of Web2.0) it’s about carefully crafted authority. It’s about not accepting (or the Luddites dismissing) the internet as the only source of good information. It’s about accepting that books can only be as good as the editors who worked on them and the authority that published them. It’s about assessment and evaluation.
After all, it was Aristotle that said,
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Links: here and the earlier discussion can be found here.
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