Daniel Levitin Quotes

It has become more important than ever that we teach students how to do research, and how to evaluate different sources of information. (Jimmy Wales, IB World, 68, Sept. 2013, p.10. )

Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.

It's more necessary than ever before to ensure that discernment and the development of a critical mind guide our take on the world and inform our relationship to the media and information.

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

Schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online - surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them.

The information you get from social media is not a substitute for academic discipline at all.

Everybody's saying, be skeptical of Wikipedia. That is true. They should also be skeptical of everything. We should all be critical consumers of the media.

Librarians are teaching the next generation how to use digital media responsibly.

If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

I'm really grateful I grew up in a house in which media literacy was a survival skill.

Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment ... surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear.... The rumors will be believed; the fiction will be thought of as fact; and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

Thanks to secondary education and the Internet, we're all knowledgeable now - if knowledge means the accumulation of facts. Curators are those who know how to maneuver around that knowledge.

The power of the Internet is also its limitation - it provides access to large amounts of information without providing guidance on how to sort out what is credible and what is not.

I'm nervous about our civic culture. I'm not sure the Internet is largely the cause of it. It's certainly the cause of careless writing. People who get used to blurbing things on the Internet are never going to be good writers.

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.

I think if you use Twitter and social media as your main source of information you are an idiot, but I think most people who use it know better, so I kind of enjoy it.

Like the saying goes, don't believe everything you read.

There is a difference between having access to information and having the savvy it takes to interpret it.

Let the greatest part of the news thou hearest be the least part of what thou believest, lest the greater part of what thou believest be the least part of what is true.

We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure.

I think, though, that we need to be armed with the critical thinking skills that lawyers and scientists and journalists such as yourself have. We all need to have those as we make our way through the day. And they're not that hard to acquire.

We need to educate young people to deal with new modes of education that are emerging with the new electronic technologies and we need to educate them to not only learn how to critically read this ubiquitous screen culture but also how to be cultural producers.

It is necessary, if one would read aright, that he should read at least two newspapers, representing both sides of important subjects.