Information Literacy

A couple of Twitter conversations merged. With @gippopippo I was discussing ink-on-paper v. digital. With @derrallg I was discussing teaching kids the media skills they will need to survive.

@gippopippo bemoaned the loss of the ability of students to read books and newspapers. @derrallg noted how colleges search FaceBook as part of the admissions process, but schools rarely teach this (see @willrich45).

Another issue from that day, if you teach students that they can not blindly "trust" the internet, must you not also teach them that they can not blindly trust textbooks, libraries, books of any kind, newspapers, teachers?

A bit of history: In the lead up to America's invasion of Iraq, The New York Times unleashed a torrent of false information. Fiction spun from the mouth of Dick Cheney as effortlessly as if his wife was writing her soft-core porn. Now, many blogs were telling the truth. But if, thirty years from now, a historian were to go back to "the newspaper of record" from that time, they would find almost nothing true.

Other things The New York Times has gotten wrong? A couple of years ago they repeated a joke from a cartoon on The New Yorker's cover as a front page news story. Just this week they declared a big difference between "practicing" and "non-practicing" Catholics on the issue of President Obama addressing the commencement at the University of Notre Dame. 46% of "practicing Catholics," The Times said, opposed Mr. Obama speaking. 55% of "non-practicing" Catholics favored his giving the address. Now, I'm no math major, but...

In other words, The New York Times can be wrong. Yes. Print can be wrong, despite John Calvin's firm belief in the societal value of fixed text. We all know that information on the "internet" can be wrong, and we warn our students about this. If we are good, we tell them to check authorship, credentials, the source of the website, the motivations, and we ask them to find corroboration and/or dissent. But do we do this as actively when a student pulls a book or newspaper off our school library shelf? What about when a student reads a textbook? What about when a student listens to a teacher?

The technology of communications and the forms of communication are symbiotic. Without the development of charcoal and ink writing would never have taken off. Stone carving being very slow and difficult and writing in the sand is, well, writing in the sand. Without various paper technologies (be it papyrus, sheepskin, or paper), reading would not have taken off, since only so many people can crowd around a single temple reading hieroglyphics.

Similarly, the novel is a development which could only have followed the technology of Gutenberg. Prior to this easing of publication problems, stories had to be in memorable form for oral transmission - thus poetry or song or drama. And without the popularity of the novel, press technology and paper technology would not have advanced to a point where journalism could begin. No Ben Franklin or Thomas Paine without Thomas Malory and Daniel Defoe. And without the growing popularity of journalism there might never have been the call for steam-powered rotary presses and machine-made wood-pulp paper which allowed the "penny newspaper" to become both popular and highly profitable, and thus allow journalism to reach the masses.

In each case, an emerging communication form creates a demand for a new medium or method of publication. The new medium or method of publication, in turn, creates an opportunity for new communication forms. When Samuel Morse introduced the telegraph with "What hath God wrought?" he was using new technology to send an old phrase. But his technology, and the way in which it was paid for, quickly created, "Meet in Phila Tue Noon at Sta Stop" - and how far away are we then from "C U 2nite"

Still, at every point, old forms adapted. When literacy was introduced to Greece Homer's tales were written down. Yes, this changed them. They no longer flexed with the time and place, the armaments described became set at the moment of writing - they are completely inaccurate for the time of the Trojan War - and the vast library of locally associated characters - what my son describes as the 8th Century BC's equivalent of the "How you doing Pittsburgh?" in today's concerts or political speeches - also became locked in. But the stories spread more widely than the original poets ever might have imagined.

All these technologies give and take. Gutenberg's destroyed many European languages, and enforced all sort of evils. But it also spread knowledge and literacy and allowed thought to flow in remarkable ways. We can imagine that post-Gutenberg technologies will do the same.

What has not changed is the key question of cognitive authority. What allows us to begin to trust a source? This is essential for every level of education. But we are handicapped here, especially in northern Europe and the United States. As Protestant societies we have inherited a belief in "the book." Not just the Bible, but "the book" in general. Because Calvinists and Lutherans controlled the printing and distribution of books, it was logical that they would promote the notion of the truth of ink-on-paper. Catholic culture, of course, did something similar where they "reigned," but with a critical difference. Texts in Catholicism were not intended for the masses, and were always considered open to interpretation through localized debate and retelling.

So it is indeed, in the U.S., in Protestant Europe, an "article of faith" that text is true, "If we agree with this premise, (that the Bible is divinely inspired) we must then consider the fact that ‘these writers themselves, with considerable unanimity, agree in ascribing their religious insight to the grace of God’."

Over the half millennia since Gutenberg the imprimatur of authority has expanded from the church to the crown, and then to "crown authorities" - authorized publishers - and then to publishers which carried various forms of perceived authority - whether academic - Cambridge University Press - economic - think Pearson or Bertlesmann AG - or, and here we see the beginnings of our present world - those who have won their authority by being reliable - think The New York Times. The Times did indeed win its authority in a chaotic environment. Turn of the 20th Century print journalism was as wild as the internet seems now, but the giants fell because because they were not very good - consider The New York World and The Journal competing over fabricated Spanish threat stories - and The Times was better (there are those who will argue that the turning point was the sinking of RMS Titanic - only the NYT, of New York dailies - got the story right).

In other words, The Times built its reputation, its authority, as bloggers do today, as members of social networks do. They gave accurate, useful information when more "important" rivals did not. Then they re-inforced that authority, through years and years of "being better than..." But then, because of the nature of that Protestant culture, "we" began to think of them as right not because they were right, but because they were The New York Times. They had that imprimatur.

But now we have other choices. We need to know, for example, that when the government speaks, we still should have doubts. When our most "authoritative" newspapers speak, we still should have doubts. Say, the London Metropolitan Police declare that a man has died of a heart-attack during a G20 protest. Say, that is reported as true by The Times of London, The Telegraph, even The Guardian. Now, line that up against the word of one anonymous American businessman. Yes, an American businessman who decides to communicate through the left-wing newspaper.

According to all our traditional understandings of cognitive authority, Ian Tomlinson died of a heart attack. Except, of course, he did not. He was killed in a random, unprovoked, police assault.

And non-traditional "citizen-journalists," and less authoritative sources, proved that. This is vital. If you fully subscribed to the traditional, the taught-in-school" understanding of cognitive authority - that is that reputations are won through approval of those who already hold authority (the PhD system, as an example), Ian Tomlinson would have died of a heart attack and The New York Post of Alexander Hamilton would be New York City's dominant information source - no matter who might manage to own that brand.

So what do students need to know? They need to know that cognitive authority does not come with a job title, or a publisher's mark. Just as they need to know that the actor wearing the white coat in a TV commercial may not be a medical authority. They need to be able to discover, in the non-linear form of real life (and the web) how to assess information - no matter the source. You can start in your classroom. If you aren't lying to your students, give them laptops or mobiles and let them look up what you tell them. True? Sometimes true? Debatable? Biased? Help them make the arguments.

You can do this with books, even novels. What can they discover about the world in which Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby? Why would he have described himself as "a member of the lost generation"? Why did he write a novel proving both the allure, and the fallacy, of what we call "The American Dream"? What did other writers of the time say? Was Fitzgerald particularly popular? A best selling author? Were English teachers requiring this novel in 1927 classrooms? Why not?

Need to build Fitzgerald's authority? Perhaps do this via his short stories. Build up his "street cred" for your students, just as he built it up with America's literati of the 1920s. No, let your students build up his reputation, by giving different stories to different students and letting them recommend them around the room. Don't think of this as "chaos." It is not. It is how humans construct both knowledge and society outside of imposed hierarchies.

You can do this with newspapers. Why would a story about the same thing read differently in The New York Times, The Guardian, The New York Post, The Daily Mail? Why might a search with Google's blog search produce differing things? How might they decide what's accurate? Listen, if you are not training this kind of information literacy, all your talk of an "educated citizenry" rings hollow. Without these skills, your students are in trouble.

Along the way, of course, you get to introduce your students to the wide world of literary forms. Every one has its purposes, its truths, its fictions, its powers, and its flaws. Why did Homer create the poetry he did? Who was he serving? Why? What counter narratives might exist? Aeschylus? Virgil? Ovid? Scott? Dickens? (Dickens, of course, was a blogger when it comes down to it). Who publishes Toni Morrison? And why? Why would that same company sell you Tom Clancy's books? Why would they hide that fact from you by using a different name?

And certainly, who is writing right now? And how? Can they find new fiction on line that they love? Can they share it? Why do they like it? Is it being "sold" to them in a variety of ways? Or are they discovering it? Novel, history, textbook, newspaper, blog... what motivates the author, the publisher? And what does that mean to them as readers, as consumers?

What this all means is that we're honest with our students, and that by being honest we create better readers, more engaged readers, more critical readers, and readers more appreciative of the best work of the writer's art. They'll know why, faced with same series of events, one writes poetry, another a novel, a third a news story, and how those all contribute to our knowing.



And I think they just might learn to love them all.

- Ira Socol

Narrative and Literacy

Stephen Dedalus is not really James Joyce. We know that, right? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a work of fiction. So is Ulysses. Surely the facts of Joyce's life inform the characters in his books, but Joyce is not asking the reader to become involved because he is a celebrity or has lead a strange life, he is asking the reader to become involved in a great narrative - fictional tales which contain truths far greater than the miniscule details of one person's life.

Nick Carraway is not F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nor is Dick Diver. Pip is not Charles Dickens. Clarissa Dalloway is not Virginia Woolf.

We know these things because we know how to read. Really read. That is, we know how to take in a narrative as the author offers it, and we know how to seek the truths we might find therein. We know what storytelling is - an act of framing the world in a specific way. And we know what good storytelling is - an art of framing the world in new ways, in ways that create more questions than answers.

"We" know these things, but sadly, many do not.

Pity Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times, the book publishers of the United States, the agents, the ghost writers. Pity them all. They lack these skills. No wonder so many of those 'in power' are so threatened by something like Wikipedia. If your literary analytical skills are so poor that A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man would have to either be "all true" or "all fiction" you surely cannot separate the accurate from the questionable in a Wikipedia entry.

So, let us give a decent burial to the idea that those who consider themselves the best readers in America are actually, effectively, literate. And let's accept that burial as a sign that most of what we know about teaching literacy has been proven completely wrong.

Take these two quotes from today's New York Times article about the latest "memoir hoax": '"I believed the teller," Ms. Hurst [the agent for the book] said. "He was in so many magazines and books and on 'Oprah.' It did not seem like it would not be true."' And, "Susanna Margolis, a New York-based ghost writer who polished Mr. Rosenblat's manuscript, said she was surprised by his description of his first blind date with Ms. Radzicki. "I thought that was far-fetched." she said. "But if somebody comes to you, as an agent and a publisher, and says, 'This is my story,' how do you check it other than to say, 'Did this happen?'"

All those completely fooled by the narratives of Kaayva Viswanathan, Margaret Seltzer, Misha Defonseca, James Frey, and now, Herman Rosenblat, are not just greedy, and they are not just lazy and sloppy. Instead they are tied - by failed or out-of-date educations - to antiquated notions of cognitive authority, and thus antiquated notions of literacy. And because they are tied to these antiquated concepts, they can no longer function in the world.

Agent Andrea Hurst is completely dependent on "publisher" authority. This is the notion that certain sources need not be questioned because of their basic authority. So, if Oprah is the source, "it must be true." You know this theory. You see it in teachers and professors who accept a citation from, say, The New York Times or a book published by Cambridge University but not, say, Wikipedia, or a self-published book.

Susanna Margolis is dependent on the "personal recommendation" authority. Someone she respects sent this author to her, and "how do you check it"? she asks.

Both are, of course, victims of a society that no longer knows how how to interpret fiction, or narrative at all. There is significant evidence that ancient Greeks knew that both their Olympic God myths and their Homeric Legends were both important and fictional (why did Bronze Age warriors fight with Iron Age weapons?). And there is significant evidence, from Creationists to Oprah, that many 21st Century Americans can longer make these intellectual leaps. Those fooled by Herman Rosenblat's concocted Holocaust romance are drawn to 'memoirs' for the same reason many American readers are, they do not read well enough to process the many complexities of narrative without being told in advance that something is (simplistically) "true" or "false."

But these publishing industry leaders also lack basic literacy and knowledge skills. They are victims of the "straight line" reading the National Endowment for the Arts so prizes. I might read Ulysses with a map of old Dublin open here, and a Joyce biography open there, but this kind of 'multi-tasking' is considered 'distracting' and 'dangerous' to many of those who control and teach reading. So no one involved in publishing Angel at the Fence or Love and Consequences or Misha could 'distract' themselves for the four minutes necessary to doubt and look up even the most basic facts.

Might you doubt that - in reality - outsiders could throw gifts to Death Camp inmates over a fence? Or the idea of a girl being raised by wolves? Could you stop and check a high school graduation record? Could you simply put a passage or two into Google to check for plagiarism.

These are among today's basic skills. We need both the ability to understand that "narrative is narrative" - and every bit of every form can be doubted without devaluing it - and the ability to check out what we are learning in order to provide context.

When I read a highly proclaimed "reading study," for example, I investigate who the authors are, looking for the lens they see the world through. But even if the study is highly biased, I still look for observations which I find of value. When I read a novel I still check out what might be 'real' - Gatsby's Valley of the Ashes is a wonderful description of Flushing Meadow in Queens, NY before Robert Moses got his hands on it, and I take in the author's deep cynicism about the "American Dream" without expecting him to be some kind of distinguished social historian.

This is reading fully contextualized into our world. It is not the old blind allegiance to genre or publisher or position in the Dewey Decimal System that formed the knowledge structure of the past two hundred years.

Instead it is a new structure which understands that everyone who tells a story is telling that story from a point of view and for a reason, and a structure which gives us the power, through contemporary technologies, to add those vital contextual clues to our reading.

Narrative is that essential human "thing." And the collection of narratives we absorb builds our sense of the world. Yes, for example, I've read biographies of Huey Long, and I've read Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, and I've read enough articles about Robert Penn Warren to know that his novel is "half Long and half Mussolini," and I've looked at other histories of Louisiana and FDR - and all construct my knowledge of that moment in American history, and nothing distracts me from the brilliant poetry of Penn Warren's opening chapter as I heard it read on Audiobook, the stanzas built to the rhythm of the tar joints of an old southern highway being traversed at a hundred miles an hour.

How is reading being taught in your school? Is it a disconnected set of skills? Is it divided into "truth" and "untruth" (non-fiction and fiction)? Or is it taught within the contexts of how we can build our knowledge? Is it taught as a "task" (decoding, phonics)? Or is it taught as an intellectual process of joining new information to old questions?

I think reading is a precious thing. I think it is an essential thing. I just wish our schools would recognize why it is precious, why it is essential, and would help our students learn to really read, rather than fumble phonetically in a "fluent" straight line to a simplistic answer, checkable through multiple choice.

- Ira Socol
still struggling with pain-med induced incoherence, but trying to keep my brain going anyway.