Skill in locating, evaluating, and applying information obtained from the Internet.
Checkology is a great resource for educators or any individual interested in developing the skills of news literacy. It is a free and complete instructional resource – lms for creating classes and making assignments, instructional content, skill evaluation tasks, and open-ended resources for further exploration.
Educators can designate a class, select content, and invite students into the learning environment.
We have learned that social media can be very inappropriate. While the promise of interaction for greater understanding is certainly there, the negativity of such interaction seems to have destroyed this opportunity leading to the expectations of many that political pressure must be put on social media services.
There may be an alternative. The idea of middleware proposes that a technology fix can be positioned between the user and the service. This concept is explained in this article from the Wall Street Journal. While the article describes the potential and approach in some depth, it lacks specific examples.
Work is underway on at least one approach. Jigsaw, a group associated with Google, has been working on the development of Perspective which proposes the use of AI to develop an API to screen comments before they are sent or before they are read. The link provides an explanation and an opportunity to test a comment you might send. Research has demonstrated that users will often make modifications in reaction to what are called nudges. The proposal is that such technology could be incorporated by social services, but also function as middleware.
While this technology exists and is being refined, you can already use a version of what is now available. Tune is a chrome extension you can add to screen comments you would be exposed to through several social media platforms.
Toxicity middleware may be coming to school technology equipment in the near future.
Essayist David Perrell has written a post arguing that the abundance of information offers a great opportunity for a few, but a significant problem for many. He calls this position the paradox of abundance and uses the metaphor of abundant food as a parallel providing possible insights.
As I understand the logic of this parallel (starting from the challenges of abundant food), human evolution has lagged significantly beyond the technology of modern agriculture and prepared foods. Biologically, we are not “programmed” to deal with an abundance of food especially the great variety of food not necessarily ideal for consumption. The more primitive drive encouraging consume when you can have not yet adapted to abundance. He also references a finance argument called Greshman’s Law familiar to many which suggests that bad money drives out good. I interpret this to mean, in this case, that cheap poor quality food that tastes good will be particularly attractive. For those who are discriminant consumers and Perrell suggests who prepare their own food from scratch, the abundance of quantity and quality is of great benefit. For the greater number who pay less attention to food quality and rely on purchased and at least partly prepared food, the abundance of low-quality food has led to many problems.
The essayist sees a similar situation with information. We clearly have an abundance of information varying greatly in quality including content purposefully generated to mislead and confuse. Free access allows discriminating consumers to benefit greatly, but those with less skill or those making less effort will likely encounter poor quality content. The poor quality drives out good is used to explain the penchant to consume simplistic explanations for complex things and to be drawn to emotion-inducing content. The author proposes the benefits of focusing efforts to assist through curation. He also argues the benefits of writing much in the same way to sees benefits in cooking from scratch.
I encourage reading of this essay as an interesting way to think about an obvious issue. In general, reasoning from metaphor is not a strong approach, but I can see the logic in the comparison. Describing a problem in an interesting and innovative way does not necessarily mean the core causes have now been identified and can be addressed. What about the recommendations – make use of the recommendations of trusted curators and write yourself are consistent with my own biases, but I would be challenged to offer data in support. At a more general level, writing forces extended processing and requires metacognition evaluation through translation that provides some advantages.
I don’t think it likely we will escape from the abundance of food or content. This is a consequence of the capitalism we endorse and once opportunities exist it becomes difficult to go back.
I have been interested in the problems of social media for some time. I feel somewhat responsible because I was very excited by what was once called Web 2.0 or the participatory web. There seemed like so many opportunities for engagement and learning at that time for so many areas – politics, education, human interaction on a global scale. With cell phones being so ubiquitous, it seemed a reasonable way for nearly everyone to learn and communicate. I did my best to spread the glad tidings and offer suggestions for the use of technology in classroom settings. If you are reading this, you can assume I tried to influence you. Things have certainly not worked out in the positive way I anticipated. Social media and the Internet have obviously impacted us in many ways and have generated great amounts of revenue for some. However, there are serious problems that need to be recognized and addressed.
My wife and I meet online with a group from our college days every two weeks. As part of these meetings after socialization and catching up, we have a topic for discussion led by one of the participants. It was our turn and I wanted to talk about surveillance capitalism. Several of the participants work in economics and finance with one being a college prof. By definition, we are all social media users as we are meeting with each other via Zoom. Issues with social media seemed to me to be an issue most should find interesting – the Pew Research Center in 2018 found that 68% of U.S. adults use Facebook, 35% use Instagram, and 24% report using Twitter. Even old folks like us are involved. I searched about for a short video I could offer to the group and I intended to generate a shortlist of questions that might guide a discussion. I found it difficult to find a single source that would include the multiple issues I see combining to produce the challenges I see so I picked one of the components I thought might offer a good activation. I was talked out of the idea as something that many folks may not think about and a kind of heavy talk ill-suited to casual conversation.
However, once started I kept thinking about a way to offer others some insight into what might seem a troubling but opaque topic. I had decided I could not identify a single source that would accomplish what I wanted to accomplish so I tried to identify key elements of the online environment that are involved in determining what I think is our present situation. I decided to focus on video resources.
What follows is a list of videos that explain individual components that combine to produce the challenges and complexity of our present online social world. In an effort to identify what I see as the individual components, I have designated a term or phrase and you will find that term or phrase highlighted in the following list. In many cases, I came to these topics and individuals based on individual books that I read. My bias for exploring what I consider personally important topics is to read rather than watch, but I understand others don’t consume information in this way. Most of the names identified below are also authors and be could search for more detailed presentations.
Components of the social media mess explained for those who don’t like to read
Donald Trump has added a new dimension to his complaints and proposals for his reelection. The President of the United States warned of a national education crisis on Thursday: the “ideological poison” of “radical” history education. He has proposed the development of the “1776 Commission” to address what he sees as flawed history instruction. I have seen this movie before.
I am not a great student of history and have often noted with some pride that I got through college without taking a history course. This was a significant challenge as my major professor in graduate school taught the grad course on the history of psychology and was a noted scholar focused on the history of the emergence of “life span developmental” psychology.
The limitations of my formal education aside, I have some insight into the exact issue that Trump raised and I have read a good amount on the topic and the role K12 history courses should serve.
My focus as is so often the way anyone becomes interested in a specific issue originated in a unique way. Much of my early interest in technology (say late 1980s) was focused on how technology tools could play unique roles in the hands of students. I was interested in David Jonasson’s concept of mindtools [https://frank.itlab.us/forgetting/learning_mindtools.pdf] and from this Cindy and I proposed “technology integration”. Our efforts extended Jonasson’s list of technology tools to include other tools such as digital probes and photography. A core concept in Jonasson and our argument was that students at all levels should have opportunities to engage in age-scaled tasks that explore content areas. We adopted “Do …” as a way to explain what we thought was both motivational and would enable authentic learning. For example – Doing biology, Doing writing, and to explain the background for my present focus, “Doing history”.
History seemed perfectly suited to personally authentic tasks as one’s community and family provide a history within which students are embedded and tasks can be created to enable investigations and authoring related to such histories.
Without any formal background in history, I found inspiration in my own personal experiences. I grew up on a farm and for some reason I was allowed to explore the contents for our attic. My father was a radar operator in WWII in the South Pacific and he had old equipment in the attic. Battery operated radios and a ham radio. He helped us string a wire from the house to a nearby tree as an antenna for the ham radio and when he had some time would sit with me and write down the content of Morse coded messages we could find. He also had a shoebox of 620 negatives he had made while stationed overseas. These negatives are large and you can contact print them (you don’t need an enlarger). He would create collections of photos in the field his comrades could send home to their families and make a little money. I became interested in photography.
The connection? At some point, I began creating technology-enabled, exploratory environments and my first prototype created in HyperCard was “Grandma’s Attic”.
The idea was that learners could have access to a simulated attic providing access to artifacts associated with a family with certain characteristics (e.g., I was working in North Dakota and focused on groups settling the state – e.g., Norwegians, Germans from Russia). The resources of the attic – letters, diaries, photos in a photo album, newspapers, magazines, physical objects such as a spinning wheel – could be examined in an effort to put together impressions about the family. Historians are trained to apply what is often referred to as the historians’ craft (often a college course) which involves techniques for collecting information from the type of resources described here and making objective observations that could be used to make arguments about the lives of people associated with and creating such artifacts. So doing history offers a great opportunity to problem-solve, engage in critical thinking and argumentation, and other potentially generalizable cognitive skills in addition to acquiring the facts and stories of history.
The concepts of doing history and authentic learning tasks scaled to K12 student capabilities resulted in Cindy and my writing and receiving several significant grants – a Technology Innovation Challenge grant and Cindy’s Teaching American History grant.
It is the preparation for writing these grants that I connect with Trump’s claims about the failed purpose for all K12 students taking history courses. Educators are expected to accomplish so many things and this list just seems to grow. The great controversy with learning history has been whether it is about teaching what might be called Patriotism and a shared perspective of the cultural background we all share OR whether it should be what I would describe as what historians study and write about – what actually happened in the past and what are the consequences of these past experiences as the American people have moved through time. This difference of opinions has been described in many ways. I remember reading this book as I helped contribute to the others working on these grants. If Trump’s complaints about how students are being influenced by their exposure to our history interests you, I would recommend the book to provide context.
I come down on the side of learning the facts of our history much in the same way I argue we need to understand and act on the facts of science. Certainly, history would be one of the courses in which issues such as slavery and enduring inequalities of all types should be considered. Denial of the facts of our past is not what education should be promoting.
An analysis of the aims and goals of teaching history
A recent article from the Blue Skunk blog (Doug Johnson is about my age and has been blogging about as long) laments the decline of newspapers and the willingness of everyone to read original journalism. He identifies the lack of willingness to pay for a paper or two as a significant issue. There are many great books on the decline of newspapers in the last few years (I happen to be reading Merchants of Truth by Jill Abramson at this time) and all describe the struggles of news sources that employ journalists to collect the news from original sources in an era of declining revenue and free outlets that are mostly opinions and retelling of the content generated by others. There are compounding factors such as the lack of patience for investing time in long form reading and a focus on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Buzzfeed, etc. leading individuals to assume they are informed when they are not. Doug urges us to invest in actual news sources as a commitment to reading the news and keeping journalism alive.
Johnson’s post caused me to think about my own reading. I read a lot and a great deal of long form content (books, news articles), but I don’t subscribe to what might be described as a major national news outlet. I subscribe to the Minneapolis StarTribune which I read digitally and we pay for an Apple News+ subscription which offers to a wide selection of magazines, the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, but not the New York Times or Washington Post. I read articles from the Post and Times when articles not part of the subscriptions are available or until I have exhausted my monthly allotment.
I encourage others to look at two news aggregation services which I use and describe below.
First, is the Apple news aggregator and Apple+ (Apple+ is $10 a month).
This site offers access to a wide variety of quality sources. Try the link even if you are not interested in the paid level. The site seems to work better using Safari and I would recommend this browser if you are interested in the paid level (it knows who you are across devices and this seems to make access easier).
I would also recommend Google’s aggregation site – news.google.com. This site is interesting in the way it organizes content by topic with multiple sources per topic and if you are willing as a way to explore the same story from multiple perspectives.
Google news also makes it clear whether a story is available with or without a subscription to a particular service saving the time and frustration of trying to read content you will not see in full.
A recent post on the Langwitches blog prompted my own extension. The Langwitches post identifies multiple past posts by the author focused on new literacy skills.
Are there really new literacies or is an attempt to generate interest by relabeling? Yes, educational “thought leaders” are not above relabeling to attract attention. I like Leu’s way of making the case for being open to a perspective arguing for the development of different competencies. There is no doubt we spend a great deal of time online and a significant amount of this time is dedicated to finding, processing, and sharing information to learn.
I have spent considerable time over the years writing about learning with technology and how it is different from reading to learn.
Of the research I have read and assigned to my students, Donald Leu has done the best job of identifying and making the case for the skills that differentiate online literacy from more traditional ways of thinking about literacies. I provide several references to Leu and colleagues at the conclusion of this post.
Leu’s model reminds me of the structure for information problem-solving librarians described as the Big-6. I don’t find many educators who have heard of this stage model that identifies stage linked skills, but I use it in the way I describe the multiple proficiencies important in learning from Internet resources. If you take the time to explore both Leu’s list of new literacy skills and the Big-6, I think you see the similarities.
Among the issues that Leu and colleagues identify as making online, self-directed learning unique are the following (I am interpreting here so my summarization may not be exactly what the original authors had in mind):
– We typically go to the Internet with a goal in mind rather than working with content designed to identify goals for us.
– To meet our self-defined goal, we must know how to find relevant information.
– The information we encounter in our search may require the integration of ideas across sources and the elimination of flawed or erroneous ideas.
– Not all information will be presented as text so we must be capable of mixing information encountered in different formats.
– We often are working with others or perhaps to counter the arguments of others to make use of the information we are collecting so sharing and integration of our own work others is necessary.
One of the interesting directions that Leu’s work has taken his group to investigate has been to demonstrate that the implementation of these skills at present varies as a function of income differences. The 2016 article I cite focused on this issue and demonstrated that income gaps exist after accounting for income gaps in traditional reading comprehension. Aside from arguing that education has not closed this gap, the independence of the skills indicates that present literacy development practices are not sufficient to assure online learning competency.
Leu, D. J., Zawilinski, L., Forzani, E., & Timbrell, N. (2014). Best practices in teaching the new literacies of online research and comprehension. Best practices in literacy instruction, 343-364.
Click to access Leu-D.J.-Zawilinski-L.-Forzani-E.-Timbrell-N.-in-press.pdf
Leu, D. J., Forzani, E., Rhoads, C., Maykel, C., Kennedy, C., & Timbrell, N. (2015). The new literacies of online research and comprehension: Rethinking the reading achievement gap. Reading Research Quarterly, 50(1), 37-59.
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