Why we need to focus on true information literacy skills

Angela Maiers posted a wonderful blog, “In Google We Trust,” in which she cites a recent study from Northwestern University researchers who found that many college students have no idea how to conduct or evaluate good searches on the Internet.  Rather than pay attention to the sources of the information, they tend to rely on simple page ranking, often just accepting the first thing that shows up on the screen.  The full study can be downloaded here.

This is a topic about which I have been speaking since the 1990′s! I put it in the context of 3 skills for functional literacy today.

1. How do you find information?
2. How do you evaluate its relevance?
3. How do you evaluate its accuracy?

Students may have the first skill under control, but need guidance on the others. These are skills that, in the past, were the primary domain of librarians. Now we have become our own librarians, but have skipped developing the rest of the essential skills.

What was interesting to me about the study was that it focused on college students – an age group we think should know better.  But how can we expect them to figure all this out on their own without guidance from us?  Yes, an appreciation of relevance probably grows with age, but accuracy?

Are we teaching students to be conscious users of information, or to just accept what they see in print or on the screen?  In the old days of textbook delivered curriculum we never asked students to question the authorship of their textbooks.  Instead, we just taught from them assuming they were valid.  This helped build the concept that, if something appears in print, it must be true.

Of my many reasons for disliking textbooks, the reinforcement on this assumption is one of my hot spots.  I recall reading an astronomy textbook years ago that said that Jupiter was the only gas giant without rings.  It then went on to explain why Jupiter didn’t have rings.  All very interesting, except that photos of the rings of Jupiter had been sent to Earth by Voyager in 1979, well before the book was published.

I could go on all day citing cases where textbooks should be placed in the fiction section of bookstores.  I won’t even start asking if US History books (most published by British companies like Pearson) may have cleaned up some of the British behaviors during the Revolutionary War.

But back to our point.  The Web is a powerful resource – probably one of the best ever assembled in history.  The truth is there for those who find it, but to find it we need to teach a new set of skills to young people, and failure to do so carries a high penalty.

Why does Apple want to kill education?

Today Apple unveiled a free iBooks 2 application for the iPad that brings interactive textbooks to the popular tablet computer.  According to Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, ”Education is deep in Apple’s DNA,” which is confusing to me since texbooks are a major component of an education that has been flawed since the late Middle Ages, and one would think that Apple’s DNA would recognize that schooling and education are sometimes at odds with each other.

“With iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn.”  This quote is pure and utter garbage.  What is new about canned content from Pearson and the other companies drooling at the prospects of finding new ways to view children as bodies with wallets, and education as the memorization of mindless material that, most likely, can be found in better form in ten minutes with a well-crafted Google search?

He said the iPad is “rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world” and 1.5 million iPads are already being used in educational institutions.  This should make us cry.  Apple has clearly lost its soul.

Back in the early days when Apple really cared about education, a variety of creative ideas were encouraged both inside and outside the company all centered on the idea that computers let us do things we simply couldn’t do before at all.  Languages like Logo were supported, along with other creative tools such as Hyperstudio, and some internal projects as well (especially Cocoa which spun off and became Stagecast Creator).

Then along comes the iPad – a potential game changer being driven into schools by the students themselves.  Scratch, an amazing programming environment for kids (and grownups) developed by Mitch Resnick’s group at the MIT Medialab, was REMOVED from the iTunes store.  And now, the offerings of the old guard publishers will be featured.  The message is clear – “school is fine the way it has always been – now buy some new toys that require no changes in the system at all.”

This didn’t happen by accident.  Careful thought went into Apple’s perspective on how tablets should be used by children.  Today they decided that the iPad should be a costly version of the Amazon Kindle Fire.  while this may be a lucrative move on Apple’s part, it destroys any semblance of Apple caring one whit about real learning.  It is as if Dewey, Piaget, Papert and other giants in the field had never been born.

The bright spot is that the MIT folks are currently working on bringing some of their creative projects for kids to the Android platform, so this is not a condemnation of tablet strategies in general, only of Apple’s astounding march to the 19th century (as so aptly put by my friend and colleague, Gary Stager).

I bear no ill will toward Apple, only sadness in their decision to sell out the nation’s youth to curry favor with the very publishers that have done everything in their power to hold education to the past – at any cost.

This is a sad day indeed.

Internet Censorship

I live off my copyrights, so the protection of intellectual property is important to me.  But the pendulum is swinging so far towards restriction that the the Senate is poised to vote on a bill that would end the internet as we know it.

If it passes, the “Protect IP Act” (and its companion bill in the House, “SOPA”) could put people in jail for uploading a video to YouTube and would severely limit our right to free speech.   Copyright infringement is already illegal, so adding more stringent laws seems ill-advised.

This bill has been rushed through Congress because big corporate interests like Comcast, Pfizer, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have spent millions of dollars lobbying for this censoring legislation.

I told my senators to protect our free and open internet and oppose the Protect IP Act. You should do the same. You can sign the petition at the link below.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/internet_censorship/?r_by=-2288543-6rnzmcx&rc=paste1

Will 2012 be the year of the “ultrabook?”

The Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show opens on January 10, and there are rumbles that this show will feature lots of ultrathin laptops similar to the Macintosh Air.  Last year was supposedly the year of the tablet, but the rollout didn’t take place until months later, leaving Apple with the market pretty much to itself.  Of course that has changed, with everyone from Toshiba to Samsung offering quite powerful tablets at reasonable prices.  Schools, in particular, seem eager to jump on the tablet bandwagon and, while a good case can be made for this, my guess is that much of the early enthusiasm was generated by the freshness of the product category.

And some of these tablet installations are huge!  The Brazilian State of Pernambuco is placing an order for 130,000 tablets as a trial run for high school students to use!  Other projects on the drawing board are larger than that.  Everyone who can create code is getting up to speed on the Android OS and educational apps of all kinds are in various states of preparation – apps that go way beyond e-books or other applications reflective of the outmoded educational practices found today.

So, if the tablet is just now starting to emerge as a big seller (and it is), what is the rush to create a new class of ultrathin laptops that will cost a bundle, and do nothing you can’t do with the laptops we already have?  My guess is that this move is just to embrace an idea and hope it becomes a trend.

We saw this with Netbooks – a technology I endorsed when it came out.  Netbooks never achieved their potential because the price differential was not big enough to keep people from buying full-sized laptops.  The death blow, though, was the tablet – a truly portable device that can be used while walking around.

And that brings me to an important point.  I was an early fan of the Netbook, and it didn’t take off.  I am a current fan of tablets, so what are the chances I will get this one right?  I think my chances are pretty good.  The relationship kids have with tablets is different from the one they have with laptops of any kind.  That is true for adults as well.  Yes, tablets do not currently offer the rich variety of software found on laptops, but that is starting to change.

CES may be where the dreams of Ultrabook designers get shared, but I’m sticking with tablets as a dominant platform for the foreseeable future.