Standards
Educators are sensitive to standards and often want to know which standards will be addressed by a given classroom activity. If you are presently preparing to be a teacher, example materials you create may require that you indicate the standards that are addressed. Information literacy is clearly address by the ISTE standards for students (NET*S).
Our description of the Big 6, an analysis of information problem solving skills, made note of the fact that these guidelines were developed by the library community. It should be no surprise that the American Association of School Librarians has developed very specific standards relevant to this topic (Standards for the 21st-Century Learner). Janet Murray has created an interesting web site showing the similarities among the Big 6, NET*S, and AASL standards and proposing activities associated with the overlapping topics.
Finally, while this suggestion does not involve standards, the taxonomy of online comprehension skills and strategies proposed by Drs. David Reinking and Donald Leu (Internet Reading Comprehension Skills and Strategies - Note this is a video) offers a task analysis that identifies the multiple skills they propose adolescents need to locate, evaluate, synthesize and communicate using online information. The specificity of this list may give you some things to think about when engaging young learners with online resources.
Are we or our students willing to critically evaluate the web content we use?
If you were to wander the aisles of a large bookstore, you would likely be able to find the following books:
- Infotopia: How many minds produce intelligence (Sunstein, 2006)
- The cult of the amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture (Keen, 2007)
- The dumbest generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future (Bauerlein, 2008)
As you can probable tell from the titles, these books address the topic of learning from Internet sources. Several offer a very unfavorable opinion and all express concern with the willingness of those who make use of Internet resources to critically evaluate web content. This issue we want to highight in this case is not so much that we are deceived in accepting flawed or erroneous information, but that we often focus on resources that meet our own biases.
Before attempting to explain potential mechanisms accounting for this tendency, let us see if we can present an example that may convince you that this issue is a genuine concern. We assume you can self identify as Democrat or Republican. We would then ask that you also identify which of the following news sources you follow most consistently - Fox News or CNN. We are anticipating that Republicans are more likely to prefer Fox News and Democrats CNN. If we really wanted to educate ourselves regarding current events, would this be the way to go about it? Risking the misapplication of what has become a commercial phrase, is this really the way to obtain information that is "fair and balanced". An important question in a free choice information environment might be - Do individuals made choices to expand their personal perspectives or do they make choices that shore up their existing beliefs? Do individuals seek information that makes their understanding more nuanced or more extreme?
Social psychologists have long described biases in the way we seek out information. Festinger (1957) described something called cognitive dissonance and human efforts to see their beliefs and values as consistent with the world around them. How might this be accomplished? Seek experiences that are consistent. Researchers have demonstrated than in issues such as politics, we prefer to access information consistent with our positions (e.g., Rhine, 1967). You may see the phrase confirmation bias used to describe this phenomena.
Sunstein (2006) wanted to make the case that collaborative behaviors within a group can be used to build group understanding. This focus might best be suited to group involvement in a wiki or how individuals build personal knowledge by following multiple bloggers. Sunstein notes a bias in how individuals collaborate. The problem concerns the tendency to collaborate with individuals of like mind. Bloggers tend to follow other bloggers with a similar perspective. Wiki participants collaborate around topics from a similar perspective. There are several problems. The first is something called group think (Janis, 1972). An established group often accepts the position of group members too easily and may be reluctant to raise objections. Second, bloggers tend to get on a topic and often repeat or support positions taken on a given topic. Sunstein describes this situation as the "echo chamber". In an echo chamber relationship, positions can actually become radical.
Do such problems represent inherent limitations of participatory content environments? Keen's book title "Cult of the Amateur" offers his response to this question. He is particularly concerned that expertise and formal processes such as editorial review in the production of Internet content are downplayed. If we are biased in our selection of resources we use to education ourselves or are unable to critically evaluate those resources we locate through unbiased search, the promise of the Internet as a rich repository of information must be viewed with some caution. We believe educators need to understand these issues and take them seriously. We anticipate these concerns will continue to be hotly debated.