So I get a call from my brother, he's visiting Spokane and he's locked himself out of his car. He doesn't know anybody else here and doesn't have the money to afford a locksmith... and for that matter neither do I. So where do we turn? Youtube, with a video that looked somewhat like this.
Within minutes I learn everything I can about unlocking a car door without keys or any sort of hardware. I learned that I was fortunate for wearing a pair of hi top converse that day because they have super long laces. And while it took us a good hour to really grasp the concept, by the end we got the car open and were able to get him on the road.
More and more the world is moving into a model of knowledge being at our fingertips, and Youtube is a place where someone can go from being a novice in something to an expert in a matter of moments. If we really want to help students in the classroom, we have to teach them not so much knowledge itself but how to access and analyze knowledge to determine its value.
If you search "picking a car lock" or "unlocking a car door without keys" on Youtube, you get dozens, if not hundreds, of results. And some of them provide unnecessary, overly complicated, or ultimately useless information. So instead of teaching our students how to unlock a car door for them to lock away for a rainy day, maybe we should teach them how to know what to look for and ultimately how to tell if it is a good source of information.
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