As a graduate student in history, I was a teaching assistant one semester for a course on Ancient Rome. The professor, much respected for his wisdom as well as his knowledge, one day remarked:
“You can’t believe how quickly it can all fall. It takes only a generation to end literacy.”
Wow. All that culture, effort, control over nature and people and nations and the land and minds, economic, social, political, religious, ideological categories of society collated, coordinated and codified into language and writing – its science, technology and art – gone in one generation for the failure of the last one to pass it down to the next.
But how true. We live steeped in words and communication and yottabytes of data, some of it allegedly knowledge, a more rarified set purported as wisdom. Because the Internet makes publishers of us all, a profusion of expression in so many media forms: text, images, video, delivered on cable and radio and smart phone applications and every form of device that connects to the Internet, itself a network of networks connecting, ultimately everyone to everything, overwhelms us. And it is all thought to be good.
Or at least that is the idea. Some of us worry about the reality. That reality begins with the recognition that throughout the course of history, human nature does not appear to have changed fundamentally. The Internet – the social, legal and economic, as well as the technical aspects of this phenomenon – can never be singularly “good” or “bad,” but will span the spectrum of human experience. To it we must bring the ethics, rules, norms, passion and compassion to temper the inevitable craziness, criminality, socio-pathology and evil that live among us.
We have something quite complex with which to deal: Human nature complicated enough to have stymied interpretation down through the ages and yet we see it transfigured by the phenomenon of the Internet. We throw our humanity onto its canvas. We have a perspective on ourselves that has been otherwise forgotten, repressed or taken for granted over time. Facebook and Twitter, BlogSpot and YouTube are ways we watch ourselves form communities and communicate, come into conflict and attempt to resolve it. It is a window through which we can watch ourselves.
Whole fields of study have emerged in information and library science, communications and computer interaction departments to study these experiences, perceptions and effects. Time does not allow us to follow all of these threads. Literacy, digital literacy, information competency and information fluency, media literacy – the similarities and distinctions among these terms to which I will return later – is our topic.
My concern is that literacy in our culture is at risk. Or at least a certain kind of literacy, one that is essential to the quality of society most of us believe in: reading and writing, critical thinking, incisive intelligence and verve grounded in civic discourse.
Let’s get right to this issue: what role does technology play? Technology, undoubtedly disruptive in our age, would be an easy target upon which we could throw blame. No argument that it plays arole. The precipitous rise in violations of academic integrity may be cited as a quick kind of evidence of the collision between intelligent reading and writing skills – or I should say the lack thereof! – and the all-too-facile use that students are making of those technologies to undermine our efforts to teach and their abilities to learn. But in our haste, we may be making technology the scapegoat for a multitude of sins. There are other phenomena in our culture where responsibilities lie.
In this conversation, I hope to shed light on a spectrum of those responsibilities: some with students, some with instructors, much with the political and cultural climate in which we live. Together these issues that are in confluence with technology. It is that confluence that explains what troubles and excites us about the future of literacy, not only statistically – how many people can read and write – but what people do with those skills, whether they actually use them for critical thinking, to exercise incisive intelligence and with verve for civic discourse.
Without irony, then, I will make the case for why higher education must invest meaningfully in information literacy to see that future flourish with the promise that has brought us all here today. Let me presage the conclusion: The only way we can make for a bright future in higher education given the pressures we are under and the challenges that we face, is to subordinate technology to foundational values that have grounded and sustained us for millennia.
To ask what is “digital literacy” is to ask first from what “literacy” derives? It is inexorably intertwined with history -- articulated self-consciousness. Archeological evidence from the Mesopotamian Valley suggests that trade fostered the first forms of this kind of communication. That makes some sense. As hunter/gatherers transformed into early agricultural societies, social organization inevitably came to assume greater degrees of specialization. Trade among members of the community as well as with outsiders would naturally emerge as a primary activity. Transaction records go hand in hand with the rise of governance structures, the establishment of laws written down for the dual purpose of memorializing and communicating them, all together with the first recorded reflections on human origins and significance.
The role that literacy plays in that overall effort is to give expression to the inclination we have to ask the questions anew for each generation: Who are we? Why are we here? How do we tell our story to the next generation? Well, what is our story? It depends, doesn’t it, on what perspective we take, who is doing the telling, how it is being recorded, preserved, “curated” if you will. Once we acknowledge that combination of determining factors, we stumble upon an insight that we cannot ignore.
Each society will deploy literacy in service of its ideal. If our earliest records of literacy are about trade, it is because trade is what defined the core dynamic of that society. If in early Chinese civilization, literacy grew out of what we would call “civil service,” it is because attention to social order has long been the hallmark of China’s civilization. If literacy in Ancient Egypt reflected the glorious reign of the Pharaohs, we know that that society attributed divinity to leadership. Literacy assumed a very different meaning in Ancient Greece. It was all about the shining new example of governance: democracy. In Ancient Rome, literacy reflected its “grandeur,” a kind of beauty that only aggressive empire building and prodigious wealth can display.
What does literacy means for American society? Historically we took our lesson from Ancient Greece: literacy was about citizenship. Different insofar as our government from the beginning was a republic and not direct democracy, literacy nevertheless has been regarded as the necessary tool for governance. Citizens must educate themselves about the issues, positions and people for whom they will vote to represent them in government.
Everything about the history of education comes down to that point. Why were schools bursting forth in the republican period and proliferating throughout antebellum society? To be the means that would meet political ends. Education for girls followed in tandem especially in higher education after the Civil War, and public schools emerged as the norm by the end of the century. Why is higher education the jewel in the crown of American society? Today’s colleges and universities are the greatest institutions of learning ever, trans-historically and cross-culturally, the culmination of our founding ideals of freedom, liberty and equality in service of society. Whatever else is imperfect and tarnished about the United States: yesterday, today or tomorrow, higher education remains at the pinnacle of our experience.
So why are we now in a tizzy about literacy? As literacy rates rise globally, they fall in the United States. Illiteracy or sub-literacy, it should surprise no one, is often found to be at the root of many social ills, crime not least and drug traffic the most. Illiteracy and sub-literacy are a reflection of an alarming financial and class disproportion, a trend that is growing rapidly. If the trend, propagated largely by tax policy in the last twenty years, continues unchecked, American society will surely assume the bimodal shape that current sociologists have depicted: a lot of money in the hands of a few people and families at the “top” of the society and many people in need at the “bottom.” Through waning or lack of employment opportunity, a drumbeat of market pressure to buy consumer items and more recently licenses and services, often if not always in a posture of debt through credit cards resembling a sophisticated form of debt-peonage of the post-civil war era among ex-slaves in the south, and a middle class that is taxed to death – because no other principal class is paying taxes in the society – a bi-modal society of rich and poor is bound to emerge.
This news is bad for literacy. Literacy in the United States is bound up with the rise of the middle class. In fact, if you asked me “what is the single worry” on my mind about American society, I would pin the tail on this donkey. I place it in bold relief because it has a profound influence on just about everything else I will say.
Information literacy studies find a digital divide that has a logical and deep explanation in this economic landscape. People without access to connectivity or computers – whether they be my Appalachian neighbors five miles down the rural road in Tompkins County where I live or five miles from here in urban poverty – will undoubtedly lack digital or information literacy skills. Often people with even poor bandwidth or quickly outmoded devices have had no or inadequate training to use information technology resources skillfully.
Moreover, even a cursory glance at trends in contemporary higher education in the United States shows that we are entering at least a two-tiered system of haves and have nots, those who have the luxury of a liberal arts education and those who go to college for some form of vocational training. I suspect if we took off our blinders -- blinders we willfully keep on because we don’t want to see how we have devolved from the more egalitarian post World War II ideals of higher education into the bimodal, shrinking middle class social structure of the twenty-first century -- we could not fail to notice this two tier system. It is not the failure of administrators. It is not the failure of educators. It is not the failure of students. It is the failure of a society to value education as a social good. Rather than regard education as foundational pillar of citizenship, it has become a brand name to brandish or bandy about in a commercialized and commoditized marketplace, on the one hand, or a certification to get a position or a raise on the other. In the meaning we confer on education we seem to be in transition of what literacy meant from Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome.
Higher education faces a combination of challenges today. First and foremost, the concept that education is a public good is on the wane. What are its effects? For over a generation now, private college tuition has risen faster than inflation to the point that on average it costs in the ballpark of $50,000 per year per student, a sum that has become the subject of concern, if not invective, from parents and students who graduate with degrees that do not provide jobs that safely allow them to pay back the debt.
Meanwhile, public support has decreased significantly. Most states hover in the single digit support; only Alaska, which has a different trajectory, remains at the high level of 38%. Large state systems such as California and New York want more local control, which is understandable, but may also contribute to the tendency toward a frightening divide within the state systems between universities and colleges, rich and poor. That divide spans out to include one between a liberal arts education, which increasingly seems like a luxury few can afford, and a vocational degree, which creates employment expectations but offers no promises that it will teach a student how to think. Furthermore, there appears to be a false dichotomy emerging between the two. What ever happened to the notion of embedding critical thinking in all forms and levels of education?
All of this disappointment in the ideals for which probably many people in this room dedicated their life’s work only adds to the distress that we are “Academically Adrift.” Just yesterday the authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, opined in The New York Times that students study and learn less than they did a generation ago. This morning I opened the Chronicle of Higher Education and the lead article is entitled “Crisis of Confidence Threatens Colleges: 1 in 3 Presidents See Academe on Wrong Road.” And I don’t know if this news is good or bad, but the lead article in Inside Higher Ed this morning is “Is Faculty Life as It Once Was Officially a Relic?” Quite honestly, I cannot remember the last time I read an uplifting article in either the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed!
As if that were not enough disappointment with which to deal, when we look to government we find regulation at every turn. An entire volume could be devoted to this topic, so allow me to make only two points. The first is that regulation is most certainly driving up both the cost and the price of higher education, that is the amount of money it costs to run an institution and the amount of money institutions must therefore charge students for tuition. Second, for-profit education, which is hungrily taking bites out of not-for-profit higher education’s “market share,” is exponentially compounding the regulatory problem. Self-regulation, the Carnegie categories for one example, has maintained a certain degree of quality assurance, if you will, within higher education over the last half-century.
Although the following statement is a generalization, I am willing to stand by it: for-profit education has taken advantage of the good will that self-regulated higher education has built up over that time, and used it to its own profiteering advantage much to the detriment of students. It is not a wonder that students have turned to consumer law for redress. A generation or more ago students staged sit-ins and held protest movements to express discontent with administrative policy. Gone is any pretense of the implicit parietal relationship that undergirded those protest movements. In their place is a cold, market exchange of expectations: I, the student, pay good money. You, the institution, provide me with the training and certification that results in employment upon graduation.
Education is no longer a life-long process. It is a commodity to be bought and sold. In the meantime, wronged "consumers" are asking government to step in and monitor the wrongs committed largely by for-profit actors, although when the Department of Education lowers the boom it makes no distinctions. If we in the not-for-profit sector thought regulation was already at the high water mark before these events, we better recalibrate. It is about to get much, much worse. And of course the economy in general and the unemployment rate in particular, which is not changing much even as the stock market recovers, are factors outside of the control of either for or not for profit education and have made the entire calculus of responsibilities more difficult to master.
Okay, enough big picture, let’s get down to brass tacks as my 7th grade teacher, Sister John Margaret, used to say. I will now focus on the details of digital literacy. Strictly speaking, “digital literacy,” as it is called among educators, is knowledge of the technology per se, “packet-switching,” which is the magic at the physical layer of the network, and instruction on how to use devices that run on semi-conductors that transmit “digitized,” or broken into bytes, information. Obviously, the technology alone is not earth shattering. It is the uses to which we have put it, the “applications layer,” or the way those uses have changed our business practices or personal lives.
Napster and Facebook, sexting and YouTube blow our minds not because we are fascinated by the source code, but by the ability to access music, find friends from high school, see someone’s body parts on a cell phone or watch as a cat does acrobatics two clicks away from saying it ain’t so. That laws cannot keep up with these uses has become well known. The peer-to-peer debacle taught us that lesson. Sexting continues to teach us in the saddest way when we find teenagers who have acted badly, to be sure, by sending photos of ill-clad girlfriends to 200 of their closest friends and then wind up on sexual predator lists circulated nationally.
That cultural norms, such as privacy, change as a result of what we do with this kind of technology should also not come as any surprise. We are still in an uproar over what students post on Facebook. Neither the kerfuffle of outrage over the last several years of students’ partying posts nor Mark Zuckerberg’s much touted “privacy settings," were enough to settle the confusion over what is the right approach to social media. Do I go completely vanilla so no one believes my profile? Do I not create a profile, in which case people might think I have something to hide, am boring, or at least a little creepy? How much is too much, or not enough, or the right kind of private and public persona?
The National Labor Relations Board has recently ruled that Facebook is like any other public forum. An employee can express themselves about workplace matters and cannot be fired for cause. But what if they criticize their boss, let’s assume the criticism is true, and the boss retaliates not by firing them but by further minimizing their hours, giving them the worst shifts or placing them in the lay-off queue no matter what the workforce performance? Could the same fuzzy uncertainties be raised about the difference in a grade between student A and student B over a Facebook or Rate-My-Professor posting? How do we resolve these queries?
Digital moves to information fluency when the focus moves to media. But no matter how facile the technology to manipulate or flashy the format, within the halls of academe, the norms, policies and goals of the academic community prevail. It is, let us acknowledge, a world in but not of, the market and legal world of regular society. Where “law” lays down the floor of rules, academia has “policies.” For example, copyright infringement is a legal and policy violation; plagiarism is an academic concern. It goes to the root of our enterprise: original thought and acknowledgement of the work of those shoulders upon which our institutions have stood for centuries.
Thus, information competency or media fluency – whatever the specific term -- creates an expectation that a student use information technology resources responsibly and intelligently for academic purposes. If no other issue announced the need for this education, academic integrity did. The kind and quality of plagiarism that instructors detected increasingly in student work over the last decade went from water-cooler conversations to alarm bells rung in faculty meetings throughout the country. It was there that decisions about investment in detection software took place. The long spectrum of plagiarism made the issue difficult to address. Some plagiarism could be chalked up to intellectual sloppiness, technological facility of search, cut and paste functions as well as a lack of education in the K-12 sector establishing appropriate boundaries and expectations for what constituted proper academic research, thought and expression.
Innocence soon blurred into malevolence as we learned of paper mills where a simple Internet search function and a credit card would suffice for much of a student’s grade. Campus intranets on which instructor’s manuals served up the answers to homework problems sets exist on almost every campus, and the texting of answers during exams among friends or fraternity brothers became de rigeuer. Legitimate use does not mean just because you can do it you are allowed to do it, but often that message comes as the result of an incident, not before it.
It was for all of these reasons and my collective experience guiding students through tutorials on digital devices, copyright, plagiarism, and privacy issues in particular, that I sought to create at Cornell University a Digital Literacy site. We have devoted specific chapters to those particular issues. Collaboration with my colleagues at Cornell University Libraries added a chapter on research that seeks to take students deeper than Google, introduce them to academic databases of the world and a wealth of information that lies in the digital bowels of our vast collections.
The most important lesson is the evaluation of sources. When I was a student, we took so much for granted. Collections librarians acted as gatekeepers for quality, and reference librarians directed way-word students, such as myself back in the day, to the correct card catalog, floor or section for me to explore. There were no rabbit holes to fall into given the physical layout and intentional control that librarians had over their space. Now it is more a matter of educating students on how to discern with intelligence and critical inquiry not only what they find on the Internet, but also where they are looking and what lurks behind “search.”
Underlying evaluation practices, such as peer review, must be explained even to undergraduates, so that they can connect the dots of citations and locations of their placement in relevant journals as a measure of quality. More critical still yet is getting them to understand the business models that undergird popular Internet search engines. Google’s AdSense is #1 case in point. If a student does not know that advertising dollars are why a Google search is “free,” and that as a result, placement of information is paid and therefore NOT an indication of its intrinsic merit based on an objective, not-for-profit, peer reviewed scholarly review, then run out of this room and tell your students today. And by the way, if anyone wants to know the difference between Google’s mission statement to “organize the world’s information” and ours, in a nutshell, there it is.
Now that we have excoriated students, let’s put the mirror up to ourselves for a few minutes. Has the Internet thrown us – faculty and administrators -- for a loop because we do not want to acquire basic digital skills? If lassitude is not the problem, are instructors befuddled about how to transfer established formats for teaching and research into newer media? Are the challenges to libraries in collections, curation and scholarly publications perplexing us into paralysis?
No matter, may I offer a quick and dirty reply? Create a serious and robust information literacy program. Run all of your faculty and relevant staff through it. Not just Loyola, but this is my sincere wish for every college and university. And don’t be surprised if a course on information literacy raises profound questions about (at least) undergraduate pedagogy (because it tends to have the greatest degree of passive learning). Challenging that paradigm might be the real obstacle to the use of technology that innovative educators face in our halls of academe, because the genuinely transformative potential that technology has on teaching and learning scares the pants off of personality types invested in incumbent methods and power models threatened by these new modalities. Remember: technology transfigures us, but that does not mean we always like what we see.
Not because it is better than any other program but because it was the experience I had, I want to share the one at Cornell with you. My participation was as both coordinator and faculty member. Out to Berkeley we went, a steering committee of librarians, faculty and IT people, to learn from the masters about the “cluster” formation to create primary research, active learning projects for students especially in large classes. We heard from students about the relevance that these assignments in their academic life. For some students, it determined majors; others, career decisions. First generation college students from immigrant families shared how those projects fit into their understanding of citizenship.
A weeklong seminar, entitled Information Competency, back at Cornell a year later, produced wonderful outcomes. In my “Culture, Law and Politics of the Internet” class, students broke into four groups and gave presentations on the “Lessig” factors that influence the Internet (market, law, social norms and technology). A member of the team, who had long been involved with pedagogy at Cornell, came to video one of the sessions and noticed a difference immediately. I never once set foot in the front of the room on days students gave presentations. When I entered I sat in the back of the room. The students demonstrating the “market” factor that day were in the front, chose to maintain traditional classroom seating for the kind of presentation that they gave (a mock project manager’s presentation of a new technology) and ran the class from start to finish, including the discussion portion. Just that placement alone, he commented later, completely changed the dynamic by empowering students with the responsibility to teach as well as learn.
In another class, during the presentation of legal factors, one of the audience students posed as me on a chat channel that students had unofficially set up making comments about the presenters. Even though no one had shared either the fact or the password of the channel with me, and – get this -- I sat in the back of the room without a computer, the students believed I was making the comments! After we critiqued the presentation, we had a fabulous discussion about human-computer interactions that incorporated concepts such as authenticity, authority, trust, technology, and humor that was one of the most fascinating conversations of my entire teaching career. Had we not transformed the class dynamic, that opportunity would have never emerged.
Information Science is the home department of the course, not the law school, but that fact did not deter us from using the other half of the course for a serious moot court competition. It could not have occurred without the collaboration of Thomas Mills, Associate Law Librarian, and one of the teaching assistants in particular who, as an attorney back in graduate school and with moot court experience, was an extraordinary assistant for this task, Chris Langone. The students’ performances were truly outstanding in every sense of the term: acting as “law students,” they were every bit their equals; indeed, they were just as good as any young attorney in some cases, and dressed the part. The content matched their tailored suits and coiffed or combed hair. Excellent, because it was their experience to make or break. The academic experience was no longer an imaginary divide between the “good child” who has learned to do what mommy and daddy want them to do or the “bad child” who either cannot or will not comply, but was that of young adults recognized for their ability to learn and grow intellectually with the right quality and quantity of guidance and support. The group projects we did in the first part of the course taught them something about the Internet, but the more important lesson they learned was that I trusted them as learners. They returned the gift gloriously.
The cases involved intellectual property, communications, privacy, electronic surveillance, defamation and reputation cases intersecting with technology and the Internet. We videotaped the sessions and put the videos up on a course wiki. The wiki, by the way, was the “place” where students wrote book reviews to which the authors (whom I had invited off-line) wrote comments and responses. Needless to say, students had never before engaged with the actual authors. Once they overcame their initial shock, they excitedly compared notes with one another about the comments, and became excitedly engaged, ultimately writing much, much more than would have ever been expected or required in the “10-15” page paper of your standard 3 or 4 credit class.
But here was the lesson. I walked into the room for the last class. A student immediately raised his hand and said how surprised he was in a job interview when the interviewer asked him a question related to the moot court competition. Did everyone know that those videos were on line and viewable by the world? A fearful hush went around the room. At the beginning of the course I had explicitly discussed making the wiki open and they voted on making it public for pedagogical reasons. Suddenly, when the reality of what “open to the world meant” became a reality, they wanted to reverse the decision. My trusty teaching assistant, Ben Cole, was on-line, and we asked him to put the wiki behind university authentication. Only then did it occur to me to turn to the student and ask him what happened with the interview. “I got the job,” he reported as if nothing were wrong. “The interviewer loved the video!”
The “Culture, Law and Politics of the Internet” story is a good one, but the best in show of what Cornell University produced goes to music professor, Steve Ponds. The team he assembled with his librarian colleague Bonna Boettcher and information technology video editor Noni Vidal speaks to the power of bringing primary source materials into the classroom and the hands of undergraduates. You gotta see this: http://cybertower.cornell.edu/lodetails.cfm?id=601
I do not have a rabbit to pull out of a hat. The situation is complicated. But the situation of complex societies is always complicated. Moral clarity may be the result. If the Internet has the potential to transfigure humanity, and literacy reflects a culture’s ideals, then education is about this relationship: teaching to the whole person. I still believe in the real meaning of literacy: the intrinsic love – and I mean that word – of passing information along and sharing knowledge. I want to have a hand in that experience. I believe in cura personalis. It is a philosophy that incorporates both the means and the ends of a dynamic and powerful process. As my teacher taught me, culture is not evolutionary biology; it does not get passed down through our genes, but must be self-consciously preserved, inculcated, and transferred from one generation to the next. If that medium is through information technologies, then we must subordinate those tools for the purpose of achieving institutional goals and instill in every generation the essential fuel to keep the political engine running: the value of citizenship.
