NetSmart Smarts


NetSmart, by Howard Rheingold, focuses on information literacy; it goes beyond research or synthesizing data. NetSmart reveals different types of literacies such as Attention, CRAP, Collaboration, Participation, and Net Smarts literacies. 

I found a lot of Rheingold’s information overwhelming, but not in a negative way. It was overwhelming for me to think of the different literacies and how to amend what I have been teaching or practicing myself for years. How do I start fitting in “attention” when I work with team leads on their leadership skills? How do I help employees find useful resources while having them use the CRAP test?

It’s a delicate balance of not giving them too much but also subtly enforcing each literacy. The balance and responsibility of teaching those literacies is what overwhelms me. But, if this program has taught me anything (which it has taught me a lot), I know that I don’t have to change my practices overnight; it’s a gradual change to continually think about how to implement in our professional duties.  

The two I would really love to focus on are collaboration and CRAP detection. First, the audience I work with didn’t grow up with technology, and they view technology as making like “more efficient,” but they don’t view it as connecting humanity (ironically). Having them understand the different levels of collaborating online and over the internet; cooperating using different platforms; finding communities online; and using social media appropriately would be helpful as engineers who work remotely and usually communicate via email, slack, etc. Learning the CRAP detection would be incredibly useful to the engineers I work with as their research derives from “new” and “upcoming” technology. There’s research around the technology, but that information isn’t made readily available to us (or them). So how would they go about understanding whether it’s true or not? Not only that, but as we get older, we have to filter what we read in the news, social media, etc (go on an “information diet,” if you will). Teaching both collaboration and CRAP will make the engineers more efficient in communicating and in navigating the social media/ internet/ online research world.

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Comments

  1. PHD-HairmanNovember 24, 2019 at 6:15 PM

    Empathy for your learners and reflection is a huge part of being a great educator. Technology changes so fast that we cannot keep up, but some schools always seem to have just "one more thing" and it seems like it every quarter instead of at the beginning of the new school year.

    I am also working on collaboration and CRAP detection in my class, since I do not do too many projects in my class. I have found that pairs work the best in my class, because I've tried three and four member teams and it was not successful. I remind my learners that in college or the workforce they will have to work in larger teams, so it's important to be a good team member. They also need to not trust the first thing that comes up on their search, because not everything on the web is real.This is a big challenge in my class because they just want to get done and get a grade. It's up to us as the role model/teacher to model that behavior.

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  2. Caitlin CordovaDecember 3, 2019 at 6:43 PM

    I always enjoy reading your blogs because I learn about the application of DDLS principles in an environment other than a PK-12 classroom. This may sound strange, but it is reassuring that adults need guidance with Collaboration & CRAP detection too. It is reassuring in the sense that these are skills that must be taught; we do not magically acquire them with age. The primary and secondary classroom is a great place to start, but this is a lifelong learning process. I wonder what information-using will look like in 20, 30, 40, years?

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