This weeks symposium was a definite improvement on last weeks, as there was far greater discussion and great pints made by both the tutors and several students. Unlike last week’s copyright centred questions, this week’s questions really benefitted from the symposium structure – even if it sometimes felt that Adrian had a definite idea of how the conversations would end.
One of the questions was based on how we can judge the validity of information on the internet. Several good answers were given here, some even in the form of anecdote, as it was ultimately said to judge by the amount of sources supporting the information, particularly well trusted sources such as The New York Times. Another good argument was that by actively consuming media from the internet we will naturally gain a greater understanding, which was reminiscent of some of the points made in Adrian’s Network Literacy reading.
A large part of the discussion then ultimately centred around content vs form, as strong arguments were made from different perspectives on whether our understanding of print is really that much stronger than our network literacy. My conclusions on this argument were not definite, as I agreed that our network literacy is far from as strong as our print literacy, but I felt that some of the arguments for that point were perhaps flawed.
And there was more talk about how weird books are.