WHY LEARN HISTORY (WHEN IT’S ALREADY ON YOUR PHONE)

Renowned historian Wineburg makes the case for improving students’ "online civic reasoning"—being able to judge the reliability of what they encounter on the Web—through "historical thinking": an approach not just for learning history, but an orientation to the world in general that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters the tendency to confirm our biases. Marshaling impressive research and drawing from his professional experiences (including his own successes and failures), Wineburg shows what teaching methods have or haven’t worked, the pitfalls of Internet-based research, and ways to teach students to distinguish the valuable from the specious in the world of online information.