It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.
A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.
Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.
Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.
I never thought I’d say this about the NYT, but that was a great article!
“But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.
“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!†Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.â€
Unnecessarily cynical–so rest of commented deleted-ed.
Now if they would only teach them to recognize opinion and heavily onesided articles in “mainstream media” such as the New York Times it might be worth paying extra to keep librarians around. Otherwise, I fear the library will be replaced by the internet and the blogs because after all, however suspcious the information therein might be, they are both no worse than most mainstream media, and at best provide a wide variety of viewpoints, so one can be guided in figuring out what is fake and what is not.
agreed, clueless