This Is Not News

My students have to find an article about “how the world has changed since 9/11/01” and bring it in tomorrow. It’s meant, in part, to be a way to break free of the idea that I have to curate every experience, but I admit I have a little trepidation. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on the Internet, y’know? Some of it is written by people of questionable talent, honesty, and/or sanity. And I find that a lot of my students don’t differentiate between different sources – indeed, many of them don’t pay attention to the actual website where they get a piece of information. It all comes from Google. I find myself wanting to teach my students my media habits born of a pre-Internet youth, pre-Google young adulthood, and trying-to-keep-up-with-it-all 30s. (Remember portals, anyone?) Should I? Am I sharing wisdom gained through years of experience, or trying to force a new generation into the same world of gatekeepers that I’m comfortable with? Maybe there’s no way to do the first without a little bit of the second, but at the moment I feel like it’s still worth it to try to impose just a little bit of order in the Information Age’s Wild West.