When I initially sat down to write this provocation, I came up just a little blank. Of course students need to learn internet and information literacy. Of course we’re coming up short. Of course we see inconsistencies among students, implying that people across the socio-economic spectrum have different levels of access to web literacy. To put it bluntly; I struggled to come up with an observation (or a provocation) that wasn’t just reinforcement of the fact that fake news is bad.

So, I arrived here. I want to address a few separate issues here. My hope is to come up with questions as I write down my thoughts.

I also want to note that, although I don’t focus on it here, I was deeply interested in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. I want to draw attention to it despite my lack of direct engagement.

1. These readings overwhelmingly focus on a nexus of problems that the internet presents its users, but don’t substantially unpack why users are so vulnerable to those problems.

In college, I took a course about thinking, judgement, and decision making. This class, ostensibly about psychology, functioned as a crash course in the fallibility of human thought. We call these fallibilities “heuristics,” a term laden with a sort of delightful irony—the word ‘heuristic’ comes from the Greek εὑρίσκω, which means “I discover” or “I find.” It shares a root with “eureka.” At their core, heuristics are cognitive short-cuts developed over millennia of evolution. In a certain way, heuristics are brilliant, incredible facets of the human mind. They allow us to make effective decisions and judgements in as little time as possible. Yet, these heuristics in no way evolved to manage the onslaught of information that we encounter in the contemporary age.

When I think about that class in conjunction with this week’s readings, I first think my professor, Barry Schwartz, who made a name for himself giving a series of TedTalks and lectures about the paradox of choice—the idea that the more choices people get, the more paralyzed they become. I think about the fact that the sheer quantity of information—the sheer volume of sources on the internet—renders our ability to discern between sources inert. There are simply too many options; the human mind must be overwhelmed or paralyzed. So, how do we resolve this paralysis? Unfortunately, I suspect that this is where other heuristics come into play. Confirmation bias and the availability heuristic seem to be the most likely candidates. The former pushes us to choose sources that support our existing beliefs, and the latter pushes us to overestimate the likelihood of certain events or ideas based on our personal attachment or memory of them. Pile on the backfire effect (wherein people react to evidence that undermines their beliefs by clinging more firmly to those beliefs) and the self-relevance effect (wherein information that pertains to ourselves and our beliefs is more easily retained than information that is not immediately relevant), and we have a perfect storm of impossibility.

In other words, even given internet literacy, it is incredibly difficult to overcome the cognitive biases that help us make choices, retain information, and establish beliefs.

2. Given this, I found myself perseverating on the impossibility of teaching effective internet and information literacy; we’re essentially attempting to override cognitive short-cuts that are hard-wired into our brains. On the one hand, we absolutely should be teaching children how to spot problematic sources or sources that exploit cognitive biases. On the other, there’s something so tragically cynical about the fact that we have to teach young children to approach all information with skepticism rather than wonder. Of course we should be using systems like SIFT (effectively a heuristic itself) to simplify the process of identifying legitimate and misleading information.

When I teach my students how to write a paper, I devote two weeks (at least) to source finding and research. I walk them through the differences between an academic source, a news-source, fake news, blogs, opinions, and so on. I expect them to learn the difference between spurious and legitimate sources, but I also find myself cringing a little at the implications. I seem to be placing the onus of truth and truth-finding (and thus, in a way, the act of “constructing authority”) on my students rather than on the world at large.

My immediate response is that I hope to live in a world where people care about the information they absorb. That is, I do think that digital literacy is essential—but I’m not sure what the difference is between digital literacy and critical thinking. In other words, I find myself wondering what the difference is between digital and text-based literacy. I find myself suspecting that when we talk about one, we’re essentially talking about the other. Obviously, the modalities and methodologies are different (a tweet is not a handwritten note, after all, and a painting has a different provenance than a doctored or stolen photo), but the sense of it is the same; applying critical thinking to the information we absorb.

3. Finally, I want to briefly address the fact that, although one of these readings discussed race and socio-economic factors in coding and digital artifacts, none addressed the gap in digital literacy across the socio-economic spectrum. I am not an expert here, but I do want to draw attention to this lacuna.

Across the board, research has found persistent disparities in digital literacy across socio-economic strata. Lower-income students, for example, are limited to less expensive devices that do not enable simultaneous tab examination, leading them to engage deeply with only one source at a time rather than a broad spectrum. Likewise, internet access is inconsistent in lower-income households—a fact that has become aggressively apparent during the pandemic

danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft and visiting professor at NYU, noted in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review that “The internet is reinforcing already existing structural divides.” That is, new technologies amplify extant problems, especially in situations where parents don’t have the literacy (digital or text) “interpret what’s true and what’s not. They don’t even necessarily have the critical apparatus to ask the right questions about what they see” (reading this quote, I find myself asking what the “right” questions are, anyway).

So, given all these thoughts, I find myself asking a few questions:

1. What are the heuristics (or mental short-cuts) we use when sifting through the massive amount of information online?
2. When you think about the way you interact with the internet, do you encounter feelings of abundance? Paralysis? How might digital literacy engage with each of those feelings? (I’m aware this is a “bad question”—a biased one. I still think it’s important.)
3. Is digital literacy different from text-based literacy? Different from critical thinking?
4. 4. How much responsibility do we have in generating plans for literacy? How much responsibility do our students have in reproducing or producing information?
5. How can we close the gap in literacy across the socio-economic spectrum? (This is, I suspect, unanswerable—but if we could dream/dare/etc., how might we BEGIN?)
6. What are the results we want to see in such a plan?
7. Finally, who is digital literacy for?

I really appreciated learning about the resources and reading the articles on open access education. I had never used Open@CUNY prior to this week and I was amazed at how thorough it is. I will definitely share it with students. While reading and going through this week’s materials, I kept thinking about their relation to Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and particularly about how Open Access affects individuals from  different roles within academia and people outside of academia. Certainly for students, Open Access textbooks are a “godsend.” In theory, the same can be said for professors who want their students to read certain books or articles without restriction since OA/OER lifts the financial strain that serves an obstacle to learning. However, as Leslie Chan points out the economic conversation (e.g., cost models, etc.) are overshadowing the conversion about OA’s core principle of free access to knowledge. The costs of production are not something that can be totally ignored even if authors and universities are happy to make their research and books free to access. Chan states that “the irony is that while Open Access was supposed to improve the two-way models of knowledge access and dissemination, what we are seeing is that some models are creating new divides. For instance, these days, many OA models are now requiring that the authors themselves pay the (often exorbitant) fee to make their work openly accessible. The problem with this model is that it is simply re-solidifying the status quo, even more restrictively” Having authors pay exorbitant fees is certainly problematic for the democratic production of knowledge, it is likely to alienate any who cannot afford to share their knowledge. However, according to Peter Suber “most peer-reviewed open access journals charge no fees at all”. There are a few that may charge publication fees but they seem to be in the minority and based on the informative powerpoint from Jill Cirasella, when publication fees are charged by OA journals, they normally are not paid by the authors. Crisella mentions that a benefit of OA is that it is not exploitative. Indeed, if authors have to pay hefty fees this will limit access to and production of knowledge as we do see happening with traditional journal publishers. I was shocked to learn that when a paper is published by a typical well-established journal that the author/s essentially forfeit copyrights. I have published a few things when I did research and my PI never shared this apparent fact which is an apparently common practice. I actually tried to find some of the research I worked on after I ditched research for a career in teaching but I had to pay to access it so those articles were “forever lost”- or so I thought. This week’s readings made me try again and I am happy to report that most of my old research work (i.e., papers I co-authored)  is now OA, freely available probably more so because it’s old than any other reason as my PI was definitely the type that might shy away from OA due to career concerns.  Chan describes the issue that arises of “whose knowledge is considered most “legitimate.”… encouraging a definition of openness as a process rather than a set of conditions that need to be met. It is an adaptive and dynamic process, and one that is always changing…people have their own careers to worry about. And it is often their own careers that take precedence over their principles. And because they do well in their careers, they also advise their students to follow the same trajectories and not to take risks. So, it’s a cycle”. Those that fear change or fear being seen as less rigorous as a result of being published in OA journals rather than traditional journals are misguided in their anxiety. As noted by Suber, “open access journals can be first-rate: the quality of a scholarly journal is a function of its authors, editors, and referees, not its business model or access policy”. Those who worry that their careers will suffer by going OA are simply misinformed and need to get with the times. I suspect they are clinging to the old ways because they came up under the “banking concept” of Education that Paulo Freire criticized for its “attempts to control thinking and action, leads men and women to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power.” Open Access, in principle, contradicts the banking concept directly by extending control over thinking and action by allowing free publication (action) and free access (thinking) of authors and ultimately encouraging more creativity as views and research are shared freely. However, because we are in a capitalist system- the conversations about OA itself conceptually, socially, academically may get hijacked by conversations about what the business models should be, as Chan criticizes, which they are missing the point of how OA does/should/can invite “diverse stakeholders’ participation in knowledge production processes”. I do believe that the public has a right to view and learn from research and/ or resources that were funded by taxpayer dollars (also private dollars but at least taxpayer dollars); however, as was noted when we covered MOOCs & POOCs, having access does not ensure development of content knowledge or an even an educated public. I think that we need to consider a highly diverse stakeholder group when we think about open access education. Of course thinking about the college student is first on our mind as being able to pay for a textbook may be essential to learning content for a given course but making knowledge accessible to the general public and all of the stakeholder types that that entails has a different value and may need to have different forms of accessibility. Schools (at least every high school I ever worked in) tend to conflate intellectual ability with pursuing college,  and I have at times found myself questioning why we educators tend to push every student to pursue higher ed almost in a way that suggests that professions which don’t require degrees are made up of intellectually inferior/incapable people.  I think that part of Open Access as a movement requires us to delve into this bias which is common among the academically elite (although it may not be openly stated) otherwise we would not have any researchers avoiding OA publication and favoring long established fee-charging journal publishers because of fears about their careers, they would not have to choose their careers over their principles.

What does it mean to make knowledge accessible to the public, not just the academically engaged public of students and professors, but the rest of it? 

Who are the stakeholders that should be considered when implementing OA education?

How do/can we manage the knowledge production process within OA so that it is democratic enough to challenge the banking concept of the student-teacher relationship while at the same time “improving the two-way models of knowledge access and dissemination” that Chan cites?

How can we as educators and students do this while also allowing an open and ongoing “talk about the value — in particular the nonmarket social value — of public higher education” that Robyn DeRosa highlights.

If we do, a DeRosa implies we must, “begin to explore the distinctions between a knowledge commons and a public education system,” what do you think that the distinctions would look like? 

If our goal is an educated (not necessarily credentialed) public capable of digesting information in a way that makes us all (or the majority of citizens) immune to misinformation, how do we establish this using OA/OER for a “knowledge commons” vs public education system?