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This site contains presentations, publications, lessons and training materials developed over many years. The site is continually updated so I hope you'll come back often. All content is freely shareable and linkable, but I'd love to hear your comments about any of it. You can always find me at sine@udel.edu.

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November 27, 2006

Managing the Free Flow of Information

Here are three interesting quotes I heard today.

The first is from Sasa Vucinic of Media Development Loan Fund, a New York nonprofit organization providing low-cost financing to independent news businesses in emerging democracies.

"More than 80 percent of people live in countries without a free press. In other words, more than 5 billion people can't trust what they read in the newspaper, hear on the radio or see on TV, and do not really know what is happening in their own country."


The second is the article "Blogs And Wikis Move In As E-Mail Overload Becomes Unbearable" from Information Week, which says that businesses are using these new formats to manage the transmission and receiving of information.

The third concerns schools and Social Networking sites from an article in eSchoolNews.

"More than three years after social-networking web sites such as MySpace and Facebook first began cropping up online, school leaders still struggle with how to set policies regarding the use of such sites both inside and outside of school--and many school systems lack these policies altogether, according to a recent survey."


I was struck by the three counterpoints. In the first, we have a group that is actively attempting to increase the free flow of information so that people can access and harness information for their own daily lives. In the second, the free flow of information has become so overwhelming that new strategies are needed to manage it.

But the third story was the scariest, we have already claimed that our students are Digital Natives who understand how to utilize the technology to manage their lives and information. They have clearly embraced social networking as a way to operate in the digital landscape. With 3 years behind us, educators are still baffled by the whole phenomena. Surely, there is a way to bridge these three ideas and harness the technologies to lead and support students to manage information.

Posted by Pat on November 27, 2006 2:36 PM