Remember those commercials?
My muse for this post was a clever but meaningful post by Miguel Guhlin yesterday. In a small font at the end of the post, he links to a service called Newspaper Clipping Generator which allows you to create a reasonably authentic looking clipping of any newspaper article you wish to create. So, the little “trick” he played on his readers teaches us an important lesson about reading the fine print. It also raises issues of authenticity in the digital age.
Consider also this little video I learned of today through Twitter:
Digital Diet by BeFunky Cartoonizer from BeFunky on Vimeo.
It’s like Photoshop made easy. And it also points out how easy it is to “fake” or significantly alter images.
There are other examples of web-based services like this. It has been my experience that people tend to use them to play tricks or jokes on friends or colleagues. But, the number of really thoughtful and intelligent people who fell for Miguel’s joke points out how easy digital deception is.
Information literacy? Digital literacy? 21st century literacy? Nah, but be careful out there folks!
In regards to your Miguel’s newspaper post.
Honestly, I was flabbergasted by the amount of edtech people who fell for it, who got incensed by it, and who were defending Miguel.
I don’t know what bothered me more: the gullibility or the lack of truly reading the print before responding.
Either way, the edtech network has not proven (especially lately with the twitter phishing issues) to be practicing what they preach on internet literacy.
Hey Jon just dropping by to wish you a Happy Blog Birthday. For some reason I wrote it on my google calendar to remind myself to do this. Cool. Oh jeepers this sounds so stalker-ish….but I seriously did want to do this. Something you wrote sometime back made me think of adding it, so this is my official act of that calendar date reminder. Keep up the god writing and sharing of thought provoking material.