Fraudulent writers, predator publications, and fake news stories all take advantage of sleepy reading behaviours.
RRCC.ca is all about thinking while reading.
RRCC.ca wants to help college students (and anyone else who's interested) be informed by our modern information and communication technologies (ICT)—rather than misinformed and disinformed by people who take advantage of easy prey.
This website is an invitation not only to read and reflect on what we read, but also to connect with and create content that means something to us. Read, reflect, connect, and create!
There is nothing revolutionary in the content you'll find on RRCC.ca. We’ve simply brought together the usual information on how to read critically that teachers and librarians all around the world want college students to make their own. If it becomes as familiar to you as riding a bike, that's perfect.
What makes this site different, we hope, is our simple language and look. One image per page at most is our motto. We like short paragraphs, too.
These pages also take advantage of the medium presenting them: there are plenty of links to great pages and videos created by colleges, universities and others that help us learn more and better.
Let’s look at the four words we chose:
Read! We spend a lot of time reading all kinds of sources for plenty of different reasons. College students need to become critical readers to find good texts and get what's good from them.
Keep in mind that the word “text” doesn't just mean traditional printed written materials. It means any media or sources that convey meaning—from tweeting and texting to research writing and publishing, including blogging and YouTubing!
To become highly effective readers, we need not only basic literacy and lower-order thinking skills—the usual skills for basic reading—but also some higher-order thinking skills. To get there we need to...
Reflect! If you’re using this website as part of a course, you’ll soon be reading and studying different types of texts; however, in addition to using common reading strategies like skimming and scanning, you’ll be “reading” in a broader and more reflective sense. In other words, you’ll be learning to better read between the lines as you’re describing, analysing, evaluating, and reflecting on some of the critical aspects of the texts you’re working with.
This 5-minute video on Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy does a great job at showing why these skills matter. It also explains the differences between lower-order and higher-order thinking skills.
As the video makes clear, the ease of publishing on the Internet has created opportunities to express ourselves as never before. The result though is a sea of information of varying quality. To produce quality content ourselves, we first need quality ingredients. We need great thinking skills to separate the good from the bad.
Connect! Whether our program is Police Technology or Marine Biology, Physics or Chemistry, Design Art or Filmmaking, finding connections between our life experiences, personal and collective, and what we read and study both at school and beyond is an important act.
It’s at this point that we better understand the significance of another person’s words.
We’re then able to more consciously decide what we’ll keep with us and build on as we move toward having a fuller understanding of our world and the contributions we can make.
Create! Once we’ve come to understand all the elements of the bigger picture and are applying the necessary reading skills, we’re truly ready to engage in a variety of activities, individually, in pairs, in small groups and large ones.
We’re ready to summarize, comment, present, blog, review and write hopefully meaningful words that will find appreciative readers.
Bon voyage!
