
Filters, Lenses and Prisms #41 #cong20

Synopsis:
How to navigate information overload in Society 3.0.
Total Words
641Reading Time in Minutes
3
Key Takeaways:
- We digest large quantities of information every day.
- How do we as adults teach students to navigate this information?
- In Society 3.0 – how will students process this?
- What filters, lenses or prisms can we use to help this?
About Chris Reina:
Chris is a Maker. He has been involved in education since 2002, technology since 1981 and Making since 1971. (You do the maths). 😉
He feels passionately that education is the most important thing in the world and that teaching using Maker skills is the most rewarding job there is.
Chris loves cats, kayaking, kite-flying, steampunk, pedantic semantics and knowing the meanings of ligatures, aglets, gallibanders and lexiphanic.
It is often said he is terribly modest (but not by him).
Contacting Chris Reina:

By Chris Reina
Vision. In order to see better, some people wear glasses. People can be nearsighted, farsighted, have double vision or any manner of other difficulties. All this usually means is we need to wear corrective lenses to see the world clearer.
We, all of us see the world differently. Perspective is a marvellous way to view problems, solutions, people, countries, places, times, communication and pretty much everything…
Perspective gives us different, opposing, similar and varied outlooks on the way the world works, our place in the world as well as everyone else’s place in the world.
Perspective can often only be achieved with age – however, in a world and society where information travels faster than we can think and is accessible anywhere – achieving perspective has become more important to try and achieve earlier in life.
I would say that perspective now needs to begin as early as our schooling years. (If not even earlier!) We can’t wait until 3rd level education as young adults before trying to gain this valuable skill.
Hence – vision. If we have difficulty seeing, we get lenses of some type to help that. I propose we need a methodology of using “lenses” to help us “see” better. Not right and wrong or even facts and fiction… but the dilution of information.
I live in a technological world. I use (takes deep breath): Email, Facebook, Facetime, Hangouts, Instagram, Messenger, Phone(s); Radio, Slack, Teamviewer, Twitter, TikTok, Teams, Telegram, Television, Viber, WhatsApp, Webex, Zoom, multiple news apps, and (now much less often) word-of-mouth. I swear to you, that’s not a boast, it’s a plague – but (to some extent) necessary. (and I doubly swear to you – sometimes most of them in a SINGLE DAY!)
That’s just me. I’m experienced. I know when to down technology and go for a walk (not often enough) and when my head is overloaded. Younger people don’t have the benefit of age, filters and knowing when to walk away from technology and more importantly – information overload. We all need some sort of lens/prism/filter to allow us to navigate the world of technology – not better necessarily, just clearly.
Critical thinking, fact-checking, logical fallacies, self-discipline, analytical skills, inductive and deductive reasoning, qualitative and quantitative skills are all competencies that can take years of learning, development and practice.
I believe we need to take those very difficult concepts and distill them into a tool that allows us to take the significant amount of information/data input in our daily lives and run it through a lens/prism/filter to allow us to better disseminate all that information.
I don’t have an answer, but I am actively searching for one – before my brain burns with information overload. Help save my brain and those of future generations by applying critical thinking and assessment to this issue.