The Information Diet - Implications For Students

This week we read the Information Diet by Clay A. Johnson a book all about how we consume information and things we can do to build healthier habits and get away from our over-consuming ways. In this book Johnson splits his ideas into three parts, first he outlines the problem (that too many of us only consume information that support our own views), then he goes into ways in which we as individuals can fix this, and finally he extends these outward and talks about the scalability of these issues. I learned the most from this book in reading the ideas that Johnson outlined in the second part where he thoroughly discusses what we can do to consume information in a healthier way.

A lot of this information I was already vaguely aware of because as a social studies teacher I think a very important part of my job is teaching students how to be good consumers of information. There were several sections that really articulated some of the ideas I try and share with my students, for example in chapter 7 on data literacy… “Now the problem is not a widespread inability to read and write, but the vast sea of textual, audio, and video data that we wade in every day. A new skill is necessary-one that helps filter and sort through the information” p.79. This really hit home for me because I see the filtering and understanding of information as one of the skills that my students have a lot of difficulty with. This also connects back to our learning earlier this semester when we talked about the ends principle and how our task as teachers is to create 21^st century citizens. Students need to be ready to participate in their communities as adults, and figuring out how to consume information in a healthy way is a central part of this.

One thing I am curious about is how my students consume information. I am tempted to do a survey with them to see what types of information they consume, how frequently and if they have done any thinking on their own about how much time they spend on their devices or online. I feel like the younger generation gets a lot of criticism for spending so much time online, I think it could be a valuable experience for me to try and get information out of the students I’m teaching to figure out what their ‘information diets’ look like. I could then use this information to help support them, draw attention to areas that are troubling and try and make them more conscious about bad habits and how to fix them.  

Also for your listening pleasure here's a podcast that I stumbled upon this week about how to spot misinformation online.