It used to be that news only came from a few vetted sources, the news on radio or tv and the printed paper. With the advance of technology, the news is literally at our fingertips coming from the world over and from countless sources. It’s also given rise to people only getting ‘certain’ news based upon what they’ve clicked before and those ever-present algorithms. Join Janna and Nate from the Nomadic Professor, as they discuss media literacy, something becoming more crucial to us as we teach and empower our children to become aware of the world around them.
In college, Nate Noorlander double-majored in philosophy and history teaching. After a stint as a project manager with a disaster repair company, he moved to Beijing, China, where he taught IGCSE and A Level history at the Cambridge International Curriculum Center of Beijing Normal University. He also spent time touring in India and trekking in Nepal.
Worn out by the Beijing air, Nate moved home with his family and taught English and history at Mountainville Academy, and then the American International School of Utah. At AISU he developed mini-courses in boredom and awareness (probably close to what many people call mindfulness) based on Heidegger’s ideas about technology, and Nicholas Carr’s ideas about what the internet does to our brains, areas of study that (perhaps ironically) he finds compelling.
Done in this time by life in the beautiful mountain west he returned to Beijing, where he taught IB History, IB English, and Theory of Knowledge at the Yew Chung International School of Beijing. When Covid-19 hit he was coaching the boys' basketball team and gearing up for an end-of-season tournament in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, ignorant of what was coming. The trip was canceled, his family just made it out of Beijing on a flight three times its usual cost, and he stuck it out in the shuttered city for another six weeks. When life didn’t change, he left too. Since then it’s been all history with The Nomadic Professor.
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Nate: So all of our content, whether it's American history, or something else features the professor on location, all over the world.
Janna: All right, so fun fact the Nomadic Professor himself is a homeschool dad, correct?
Nate: Yeah, that's part of the ideas sort of, we're in a time where technology and the structure of our educational options allow us to kind of break out of the brick-and-mortar classroom.
Janna: And so we've talked just personally about how to make sure that our children who are being homeschooled are able to navigate well
Nate: You also brought attention to the way media acts as a filter for what you hear and what you don't hear. So that's a unique phenomenon in and of itself, because what feels urgent, what feels critical, what feels like it's worth your attention in a given moment, what stories have gained traction, as opposed to, you know, and gain traction for reasons that are not always related to their significance or their importance
Janna: The bottom line is dollars in so like you had said, Well, of course, this story that I was talking about, why is that going to get dollars maybe in their algorithms that bring sadness to our world.
Nate: There are honest actors who are just trying to survive and not deceive people, but they need their businesses to stay afloat. And so they can't just operate on purely altruistic impulses.
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