Blog Post 4: Reflections and Readings

From Class 

I loved enjoyed hearing everyone’s screencasts in class! As we discussed, there is such a diversity of ways that people signal “this is a safe space to learn,” or “this is something I’m excited about and I’m excited to share it with you!” It was helpful to hear that, despite the diversity of particulars of delivery or inflection, that our participants/viewers in the classroom all reacted positively to that sentiment and intentionality. It’s a great lesson to take with us going forward – that taking the time to make others feel comfortable and included, and to communicate we are excited and to remember to root for our learners, are all things that folks respond to deeply.

It was a little nerve-wracking to be on display myself, but I found it to be another good reminder that it’s not really about me when it comes to learning, so much as creating opportunities for others to learn and trying to do my absolute best to improve and develop as an instructor. I was talking to a classmate just now about instruction, specifically tech instruction, and admitting that this is something I find incredibly difficult - how do you not just be a friendly or encouraging face, but succeed in helping a diversity of learners feel as empowered and excited about technical skills as possible? I expect that it’s going to be a long, long, and indeed never-ending process of getting better at this personally!

One thing I’ve been trying out in this course is keeping a file of notes on my computer specifically for Instruction Ideas. Some of the items on this list right now:

• “Try over and over to think, what does a newcomer think when coming to the site?” 
• “I appreciate you giving this a try” 
• Tell people up-front what to expect, how to behave in class, where bathrooms are, etc. 
• Imagine you’re giving your screencast to your grandma 
• Lean into the discomfort of the work 

I’ve started adding notes from other parts of my week that complement what we’re learning in class. For instance, from my Information Visualization course:

• When helping people learn a new tool, and deciding what tool to focus on, think about the floor and the ceiling: 
• Floor - how easy it is to get going 
• Ceiling: how powerful/how much you can specify 
• Seek out the appropriate balance of the two for your learners. 

I loved this floor/ceiling concept!

I also wanted to highlight Nora’s comments about teaching sex ed. I found the concept of asking questions about information and data in the context of something as specific, and as personal and awkward, as a sex education course to be incredibly powerful. I’ve been thinking about project-based learning a lot, and how to break down data literacy efforts into much more specific projects in which data literacy can support that work, rather than the other way around. (I get into this more in the next section.) But I just loved the idea of having those tough conversations about sexuality and identity and embodiment and bringing to them a real honest conversation about “how do you know the things that you know? Where do your preconceived notions from? And it’s okay, we all come with those notions, but let’s explore them together!”

From the Readings 

“Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.”

Ooof! I have to admit, going into this report I was hoping to be told “it isn’t quite as bad as we think,” or “we need to update our understanding of youth behaviors for the late 2010s!”

 In 2013-2014, I worked with a research team on several studies about how youth use digital media – and at the time, there was a lot of interest in emphasizing the creativity of this digital media use, the “hanging out, messing around, geeking out” model. Admittedly, many of these researchers had grown up with the promises of the 90s internet as a postmodern expressive space, and were still eager to find these optimistic models in youth digital media behaviors today (I started reading Usenet newsgroups and browsing the Internet in 1995, at the age of 6, so in a sense I belong to this cohort too!)

The Stanford History Education Group’s 2016 report is a pretty astonishing rebuke of that perspective. Some notes:

• Methodologically, I loved the Beginning, Emerging, and Mastery level structure used in the example about MoveOn.org’s gun owner report polling.However, the fact that “only a few” students were able to critically reflect upon the polling company behind the poll numbers, and less than a third were able to identify political influence from either MoveOn.org or the Center for American Progress, is definitely troubling.
• While the numbers are dismaying, I appreciate that this report provides a strong framework for what increasing the depth of critical reading online might look like, and that these frameworks are age-appropriate.
• As future librarians/educators/etc., we should also supplant this micro-focus (how to make changes to instruction on an activity level) with macro-level changes. How might librarians lead this effort for increased data literacies (or some other phrasing of the concept)? What does collaboration look like between faculty in particular departments, staff tasked with guiding the overall development of students, and librarians? Is this an opportunity for a new type of interdisciplinary center, along the lines of college writing centers? Or is that overkill? 

Re: The News Literacy Project -- here’s an excerpt from the Mission Statement: “The News Literacy Project (NLP) is a nonpartisan national education nonprofit that works with educators and journalists to teach middle school and high school students how to sort fact from fiction in the digital age. NLP provides these students with the essential skills they need to become smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens.”

I do think there’s value to generating curricula/activities/resources targeted around critical news consumption, especially given the concept of Fake News and its deleterious effects are so widely known at this point. However, I am uncomfortable with the rhetoric of defining learners as “consumers” and characterizing the goal of these efforts as developing “smart, active consumers” alongside “engaged, informed citizens”.

What if instead of assuming that smart consumption leads to engaged citizenship, we advance activities that are firmly about civic engagement and participation, or community-level information projects such as local history projects, or meaningful social media participations like creating and moderating social media platforms for local organizations – and what if these projects became the context in which students learned about critical and reflexive use of data? There are definitely some promising threads at work in NLP. I love the concept of the Facing Ferguson project, which appears to be a collaboration between Facing History and Ourselves (whose programming I participated in during high school!) and NLP.

What would it look like to support classrooms in engaging with more resources like Facing Ferguson? (I really do love this unit, wow!)

Edited to add: Here's a South by Southwest Education 2017 panel discussion about Facing History: listen here