Gaining Perspective

I've been thinking more lately about 2.0 tools and the importance of bringing new and different perspectives into the classroom. Beginning this summer and now extending lately through my trip to Shanghai, I've been wondering about the "homogenizing" of the information sources that are often used in classrooms and schools.

Take for example, any popular, well designed, heavily marketed textbook; especially one that may be in a field such as history, international perspectives, or a current events class. Many of these books have been bought by the millions across North America. Is there a danger in this? While I understand the vetting process that textbooks go through, the committees that design them and write them as well as the rigorous process of approving them for use in a jurisdiction, it still is beginning to concern me that often large multi national publishing houses control this entire process. Whose version of the stories of history and international relations are we getting? While certainly everyone wants their textbooks to reflect "their version" of history, is this dangerous and nationalistic in a globally connected society?

This is where online information is rising to the forefront of my ideas of gathering information in a classroom. Online, we can access newspapers from around the globe. We can examine current events and the stories that concern people wherever they live. Online we get the voices of real people as well; something we don't hear in textbooks.

These sources can be concerning because they are sometimes too real for people's liking. Some people are uncomfortable with real accounts of world events because they may be unsanitized for classroom use. Sometimes they deal with topics that may be unsettling or uncomfortable for us, but I ask, is this not what education (notice I didn't use the word "school" or "schooling" but education instead) is all about? Getting us outside of our comfort zones? Getting us to look at the world in new ways and from new perspectives.

Ethan Zuckerman has written recently about the idea of a plug in for a browser that would, over time, aggregate the number of stories from each place or region that you access on our machine. For example, it may over time simply give you stats about the stories you are reading" 60% are from your home nation, 12% are from nation or region X, 15% are from "Y," etc. Then as a consumer of information you could do something about that, make some decisions about choosing new information sources or expanding out where you access our information from. I think this kind of data is essential for us to alter our behaviours. What would we do with data like this about the information sources we use in our classrooms? What about the information sources that our kids are accessing in class? I think it would be a great tool to have to be able to talk to kids about. Where are you getting your information from? How many sources do you have? Would people from another region or place have that same perspective on that story? Why don't you go take a look at what other people are saying about that issue.

Image Source: The Perspective: http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3132/2505959411_f44c512c5e.jpg

Tags: perspective, textbook, information, classroom, global, learn2cn