Howard Rheingold, author of "Net Smart: How to Thrive Online," discusses how we can train our attention and develop new literacies that will help everyone make the most of our networked world.
The five literacies covered in Net Smart are: Attention, Crap Detection, Participation, Collaboration, and Network Smarts. We touched on most of them in our conversation.
The importance of critical thinking (00:50)
Literacy, and the difficulty of acquiring it in a time of rapid change (2:25)
It is less expensive to learn and teach network literacy than it has been to build the tech infrastructure that necessitates it (4:07)
Attention and mindfulness, the first literacy (4:25)
Crap Detection, and how to fact-check emails, websites, authors, and other sources (5:52)
Net Smart as an invaluable how-to guide for discerning truth from hoax (8:40)
Participation, the third literacy, which then becomes Collaboration, the fourth. (9:30)
Participation introduces you to ways to collaborate. Collaboration only benefits those who know how to use it (11:00)
The importance of assuming that others are acting in goodwill, and choosing to be hopeful (12:34)
Howard Rheingold on being optimistic (14:17)
The similarities between lucid dreaming and Net Smart's meta-cognition (15:03)
