Friday, July 6, 2012
Comment on...mayasgold Newsroom
Agreed: cable news and the internet makes it easy to exist in an echo
chamber of your own views (or views you are likely to agree with). It is
certainly interesting to flip back and forth between Fox and MSNBC.
School must be the place for a reasoned investigation and discourse.
Students have to be taught how to be critical readers and viewers, but
it is a difficult task. It takes going beyond the soundbites and talking
points from both sides. Teachers must try to rise above their own
preconceived notions and biases. Verifying facts may take extra time and
effort; however, deciding what sources to trust for analysis may be
difficult. We have to show students how to take a wide view and that the
goal is not necessarily determining what network to settle on as a
winner. The Left sometimes overdoes it, and sometimes the Right gets it
right. Luckily, Jon Stewert is not above skewering liberals.
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To my thinking, there's not enough difference between the political left and right in the mainstream media to make a dramatic difference in anyone's thinking. It's sort of a false dichotomy, in which neither party fulfills its purported position when it comes to taking a stand on issues. What intrigued me about Newsroom is the concept that someone might take a *journalistic* stance, in which political leaning is not the purpose. I think the Daily Show does this, but it's not journalism! It's social satire, maybe.
ReplyDeletePart of the goal of the AP Statistics curriculum, (Any Stats curriculum for that matter, including the stats unit taught to 9th graders) is to teach them to really think about where the information they are being asked to evaluate comes from. I spend a lot of time talking to them about how surveys and experiments should be conducted and how data can be twisted to say just about anything you want it to. Since I have started teaching Stats, I find that whenever I read a newspaper, magazine or watch the news and I hear/read some snippet, I am very skeptical and I ask, Where did that info come from? I hope my students will be asking the same thing.
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