A discussion in our digital literacy course

My colleague Asif Devji and I are doing the Digital Literacy course at the University of Manitoba and I thought this interchange might be worth posting

To give some context:

We were asked to read several online papers on Information Literacy and suggest ways we might include this in our classrooms. That lead to Asif Devji's response and our discussions below

Asif

As an exercise on information literacy, I might ask my students to visit the following web site: http://www.nytimes-se.com/After they checked it out, we'd have a discussion about what they found there and about the reliability of newspapers as sources of information.I'd then inform them of the source of that site:From democracynow.org (Nov. 13, 2008):
“Yes Men” Spoof NYT, Denounce Iraq War in Latest Hoax
And the Yes Men have struck again. On Wednesday, hundreds of thousands of copies of a fake edition of the New York Times were handed out in New York and Los Angeles. The front-page headline declares an end to the Iraq war and an admission from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction. Other fake stories report the congressional passage of universal healthcare, the public ownership of oil giant ExxonMobil and the use of evangelical churches to house Iraqi refugees. The paper is said to come from the Yes Men, a group responsible for several hoaxes meant to highlight corporate and government complicity in unpunished crimes. One previous prank had a Yes Men member posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to announce responsibility for the Bhopal chemical disaster, forcing the company to remind the world it had done anything but. The Yes Men say the hoax resulted from a collaboration of many people, including a few New York Times staffers. Activist Jordan White was among those handing out copies of the fake newspaper in New York’s Times Square.
Jordan White: “Well, see, the thing about this is, is that, you know, we just got a new president elected. It’s a very big year, and it’s a big promotion for change and stuff like that. And, you know, it’s just the sort of thing of like, I don’t know, maybe that—could we achieve it? Maybe it’s so, maybe not. But it’s something to kind of look forward to.”The paper also pokes fun at the New York Times editors, who apologize in a fake editorial for echoing the Bush administration’s faulty claims on Iraqi WMDs in the lead-up to the Iraq war. It also contains a fake resignation letter from columnist Thomas Friedman, who says he has no business to ever write again after vocally backing the US invasion of Iraq. The prank edition of the New York Times is available online at nytimes-se.com.This could open up an interesting discussion on the hoaxters, their motivations, and the hoaxes they were hoaxing It would also lead to some (re)consideration of available authoritative information sources...and their vested interests.

RationalBob

Asif:The reason this spoof is so humorous is because, lkke in all great comedy, the kernel of truth that rears it's head and makes you sit somewhere between gut-wrenching laughthe and head-pounding sobbing. Lennie Bruce and George Carlin (among others ) were masters of this visionary style of comedy. The glimmer of hope in some of the 'fake' headlines is what draws people in, only to realize much to their chagrin that it's not ( as they were hoping) true. There is something really sad and disconcerting about this breif glimmer of hope that things could be as in this paper. Alas it is not to be so and we trudge back to reality and the "REAL" news headlines which never seem to change or enligthen. I think this is a great jumping off point then for students to analyze newspapers as complicit in the status quo instead of being a critical and informative medium , a watch dog for society which is shamefully inadequate today.In my optional tech classes I had to drop my media literacy unit as too many kids were dropping the course due to the "ELA" component, a death knell for my courses if I continued. Sad!

Asif

Hi Robert,That "brief glimmer of hope," which momentarily allows us to 'believe' something we know is not true, is scary.It says something about our current technologies of simulation, and how easy it is to create a 'reality' or a 'truth'.It is also encouraging, because it shows that we are able to 'see' things from alternative and even contradictory perspectives -- Another world is possible and Yes we can describe politics of change based on conscious articulations of alternative visions of reality/truth and the future.

RationalBob

Asif; I love your optimism. I truly hope that it will be, as Siddharaj Dhadda says in the movie FLOW:For the Love of Water,"the century of the common man" since our current unsustainable and undemocratic systems create a demand for something different if homo sapiens are to survive. Yes another world is possible, but it will come I fear, as history tends to keep repeating itself, at a tremendous cost to the least fortunate in the world: those without the money or the infrastructure of 'knowledge-based' economies. This is implicit in every document I read from the UNESCO or UN but no one seems to addressing it.It's a case of "treat the symptom's not find a cure." The current power/control structures in the world represent to me an enormous hurdle which almost makes discussions about Open Source and Online or distributed education moot. Not that we can't strive toward these ideals, but I think a very critical eye must be focused on those who exert the control or who dictate knowledge to the uncritical minds of the world. Remember "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." Mayer Amschel Rothschild, 1790 As always, nice chattingCheers!

The online environment for learning

I love the asynchronicity of the course I am doing but one can really get far behind. One of the questions I was going to post is that if we as a community of (paying) learners are finding it hard to engage and maintain connectedness( and the assumption is that we have the requisite skills to read, synthesize, evaluation and assess and give back to the community since that is ultimately how we learn in this milieu), then how is it that we are going to get secondary/1st year students to engage. Their immediate gratification stage lasts into 1st year post secondary, maturity and skill levels are often times nonexistent or are at such low levels that frustration and disengagement ( as the path of least resistance ) are the choices made. This is not even tenable in a public system now let alone a for profit institution such as a university where students can rack up huge debt just trying to get basic skills they didn't receive due to apathy, laziness, poor attitude or lack of competent programming/teachers.It's all good a fine to take the utopian view but the reality 'on the ground' leads one to a somewhat more skeptical view. I think that by putting the onus back on the kids at 1st year level you will get them to engage or drop out. At my level when we take 'all comers' so the funding can remain in tact ( and this is the over-arching focus no matter what we as teachers espouse) this simply will not be the case for using these democratic online social tools. We are answerable to the community and society as a whole and in general it appears that their wishes are 'paths of least resistance for their kids.

Digital Literacies Incorporating Information Literacy in Course Design

The following is how I would use information in the articles mentioned to modify my current Applied ICT class to incorporate 'information needs' in a task-based learning environment. I concentrated on the papers by Pilerot and Hiort ad Ornais for developing a design course for engineers; Sandy Campbell's 21st century defining of Information Literacy paper and Carol C. Kuhlthau's keynote address to the Aberdeen Business College in 2007 as well as several papers by Dr. Merrill ( found here http://madlat2009.wikispaces.com/Workshops#w1)
Comments on specific points will follow after my outlining of course revisions needed.

Unit: Databases development (MS Access). I currently use a text book from Lawrenceville press and many on-line resources that are shared only on our intranet. Research and information is thus pre-screened for content and consequently somewhat stifling for those wishing to challenge themselves. By going to an on-line research task based model............... (* these students have been very few in my many years of teaching at the secondary level as databases are a sober, business-oriented topic, mandated by Manitoba Education Culture and Youth to meet the needs of businesses have little 'buy in' by students.)
Never the less, we must provide as many best practices and learning objects as possible in order to accommodate the various learning styles.This then I believe, would preclude parental or student disengagement for any classic or newly invented reasons and would lead to true personal learning environments for all.


Assessing Prior Knowledge
Information Needs are seldom realized at the high school level as concentration levels can only be maintained for short periods of time. Most information gathering I have seen from individuals in grades 11 and 12 is fact-based, knowledge level.
The limit of student prior knowledge in the area of databases seems to consist of some online searching and some use of mathematical operators and logic. It is therefore contingent on me as course designer, to not only create and sustain interest but to make the task-based work relevant and provide both intrinsic and external rewards.

Course Design and Assessment
My Applied ICT classes is 65 minutes daily, which would be divided into 2 X 15 minute instructional or theory blocks with the remaining 35 minutes devoted to team database work. The first two time periods can be any combination of: online research; teacher-lead investigations; questioning by team peers or other team's members with regard to database comparisons; text book or other readings as assigned by the teacher or other team members. This patterned process would be repeated each day to provide continuity and consistency of expectations in order to 'make the process more efficient (in terms of less effort spent)
Teams would be limited to 3 persons and would change members every month so as to take students out of their comfort zone and provide differing peer evaluation/collaboration groupings to mimic real-world experiences.
On-going online critiques of each other’s databases (tables, queries, etc.) would provide not only peer review and valuable timely feedback to other team members but also the critical thought required to justify a team's choices for the design of their database schema, field naming, data type selections, naming conventions and other database best practices. This should help contextualize the database for both individuals and the respective teams and create a competitive yet collaborative learning environment.
The reading and interpretation of in-class and directed online resources to complete increasingly more complex database development tasks should help embed the Information Literacy required so that it becomes seamless by semester end.

Emphasis would be put on using intuition and imagination in creating database design and populating these databases in order to bring forth student use of generic valuable information that may have context cross-curricular connections and result in unique ideas

The on-going, iterative and progressively more complex process of database development tasks would be assessed for not only content but also for the process by which the information has be collected and applied to the development of each team’s database. This would be primarily by peer review with minimal instructor intervention so as to encourage group autonomy,independence and self-confidence

To tap into student’s prior knowledge and make it the learning of new concepts relevant, the unit would start using either a simplistic Hockey database or Music collection database model for analysis. For Canadian students this should provide enough familiarity at a knowledge level to be a jumping off point in the creation of entities and attributes for the current task help them use these concept in the application of similar tasks later in more complex, team generated databases. There are already many practical Dbs in existence which can be demonstrated and or explored online or offline ( freedb songs db and numerous hockey databases for example). Offline content can be provided for home computer use by distribution on CD/DVD of pen drive should the students require more time to analyze or review concepts

The team task-oriented approach would also allow for a community of practice to evolve where fact-based students could interact with students who expect more reflective aspects in their study; the latter challenging the former to rise to this more affective domain of learning both by modeling and applying team pressure to accomplish a superior database in relation to other teams.(as per Pierot and Hiort af Ornas).

To encourage ingenuity and inventiveness and more critical thought, the guidelines of each task can be extended or even ignored if the students can justify their choices and can argue their reasoning for the changes or abandonment.
Built into my new redesign of this course would my own kind of Project Sails checklist to ensure that information literacy is being acquired and and is helping with the decoding, critical awareness and appropriate usage of the information gathered for use in the database development tasks


Because the students are the designers of the databases, they would be expected not only to learn but also to teach principles of good DB design to others in their various groups thus showing deeper understanding beyond the often fact-based knowledge that is usually associated with technical computer-oriented courses.
Initial successes with simplified database design and principles would scaffold to more and more complex tasks in creation of:
1. simple to progressively more complex tables and relationships between same
2. simple to progressively more complex queries
3. simple and more complex reports from multiple sources
4. migration of all this data to a distributed on-line delivery maintenance system
The implementation of the course would be along the lines of Dr. Merrill's 5 First Principles of Instruction and Task centered Instructional Strategy

I think I would develop the course using the Guided Inquiry methods as well.Student work would constantly monitored and assessed by the facilitator and peers in a feedback mechanism that would insure greater thought and complexity in database design and queries than the preceding tasks. The 'instructivist' manner of the course would lead the students finally to a culminating task for the creation of an 'On-line Course Database', bringing to bear all the preceding knowledge and skills to create and populate said database and create complex forms, queries, and reports would against the collected data.



The Williams and Murphy papers stated that students tend to require immediate and then sustained periodic reward to remain engaged in the learning of more and more complex and higher order concepts. As the class evolves into a blended environment I can foresee using both the free Moodle and WizIQ application to provide feedback every other day on the individual team progress ( via the email ) or weekly via an on-line Q+A sessions (WizIQ). Also a Wiki would be set up as a repository for previous years question and answer (FAQ for often asked questions) and an are to highlight both creativity and also failures ( as we learn from both our own and others ) with anonymity insured by the instructor.

Digital Literacy Thoughts

I just started a new course at U of M in the Emerging Technologies stream. It's the only way I can seem to keep following the topics in the emerging technologies field. If I find it hard when I have a great interest in it, I think it must be very hard for those with just a 'passing fancy' to stay engaged. I guess as a latecomer the field and not employed strictly in the research field or the post secondary halls of academe, I find it hard to mantain the same pace of engagement after the course course is completed.
Because I cannot upload images to the Moodle environment of the Digital Literacy course, I have decided to post my comments here and put a link in the course.Here are some houghts on a couple of points in the papers we read for the week 2 forum (links for those who wish to read them at the end of this posting)
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I felt that the statement in Kuhlthau's paper ".......the importance of the interpretation of the information and the constructive process of formulation a perspective from information .......' summed up the key issue I have in dealing with this course and all other information gathered for critical information inquiry: to wit how does make sense of the voluminous amounts of information presented in the Digital Literacy field , add something of merit to this knowledge through rumination and present it to the constantly connected critical audience/community of practice without either seeming either trite, silly or both. I think it is this public display of one's faculties that deters many from contributing to many on-line postings. While I have a thick skin for such things, I can see the reticence of large numbers of persons who would feel uncomfortable or would be unable to grapple with the synthesis and analysis of very specialized data. In fact, I stopped reading the EDSL article is it was too heavily into verbiage and added little more to the articles I had already read. It wasn't that I couldn't understand what was being said, it was that it was becoming redundant to me. Others may have not been able to decode it at all depending on their skills.Therein lies the dilemma: in our own personal paths on the continuum to Information Literacy the skills, knowledge and cognitive abilities cannot assume to be well defined or even exist at all without some judgement by an independent body. I think we are a long way off from the acceptance of a community of learnings 'certification of credentials' as being accepted as sufficient for employment in many disciplines or careers. Hopefully this will come sooner rather than too late for our collective well-being as a species.
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Sandra Campbell mentions, as do in many UNESCO documents on Information Literacy and Open Source Education, that we cannot dismiss (as the business parlance goes) the 'externalities' of the third world such as access to electricity, computers or infrastructure. If the 1st world students at high school level are merely approaching Information Literacy with ubiquitous and easy access to a myriad of free learning resources, how can we presume to appropriate the terms of 'Free access to all' when the means are so far out of reach. The proponents are such small cogs in the wheel that the infrastructure nor the economics will accommodate their ideals. Was stated, there are many types of Information Literacy but the knowledge as applied to to economic growth trumps all other forms given today's global marketization of the world's economies. Inuit and indigenous peoples all over the world loose in this post-industrialist knowledge based economy because they lack( or see no value in) those skills that do not suit their immediate needs.
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Here are the links to the readings I chose:

Defining Information Literacy in the 21^st Century:
http://www.ifla.org.sg/IV/ifla70/papers/059e-Campbell.pdf
Information to Meaning: Confronting Challenges of the 21^st Century.
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kuhlthau/docs/I3%20Conference%202007.doc
Design for Information Literacy:
http://www.ck-iv.dk/papers/PilerotHiort%20Design%20for%20information%20literacy.pdf
Dr. Merrill
http://madlat2009.wikispaces.com/Workshops#w1