Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity To Intellectual Fitness
by Tara Brabazon /
2013 / English / PDF
2.4 MB Download
Imagine if a student spent as much time managing information as
celebrities doted on dieting? While eating too much food may be the
basis of a moral panic about obesity, excessive information is
rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously,
plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is
balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and
information literacy, students and citizens wade through low
quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable
intellectual challenge, imagination and questioning. Digital
Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness probes
the social, political and academic difficulties in managing large
quantities of low quality information. But this book does not
diagnose a crisis. Instead, Digital Dieting provides strategies to
develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the
irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal. In April 2010, and
for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors
than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than
search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher
education? If students complain that the reading is "too hard,"
then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that
assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage this
challenge is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive
responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in
the long term. Digital Dieting: From information obesity to
intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and
applicable strategies to move students and citizens from searching
to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
Imagine if a student spent as much time managing information as
celebrities doted on dieting? While eating too much food may be the
basis of a moral panic about obesity, excessive information is
rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously,
plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is
balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and
information literacy, students and citizens wade through low
quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable
intellectual challenge, imagination and questioning. Digital
Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness probes
the social, political and academic difficulties in managing large
quantities of low quality information. But this book does not
diagnose a crisis. Instead, Digital Dieting provides strategies to
develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the
irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal. In April 2010, and
for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors
than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than
search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher
education? If students complain that the reading is "too hard,"
then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that
assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage this
challenge is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive
responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in
the long term. Digital Dieting: From information obesity to
intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and
applicable strategies to move students and citizens from searching
to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
