Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Our Most Important Job

Helping students learn to evaluate available information is more important today than ever before. In the past, we as teachers were in the business of conveying content. We had the 'truth', and we chose the books that had the 'truth.'

In today's world there is more information at our learners' fingertips than there used to be in entire libraries. Unfortunately, much of that information is misleading at best and totally inaccurate at worst.

This article about the Dead Sea Scrolls is an example of how information on the internet can be manipulated by anyone with the desire to do so.


By sharing this article with your students you may help sensitize them to the possibility that what they read must always be read somewhat skeptically - and to introduce them to reliable sources of review, such as snopes.com and urbanlegends.about.com which carefully evaluate content.

A learner who develops critical thinking skills is a learner on the way to life-long learning.


1 comment:

  1. The First Amendment motion in this case is available at

    http://scrollmotions.wordpress.com /2009/11/raphael-golb-first-amendment-motion.pdf

    It's a public document and may be freely distributed to anyone who is interested in seeing it.

    See also Rabbi Zahavy's interesting comment at:

    http://tzvee.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-raphael-golb-guilty.html

    ReplyDelete