We’re still teaching history using only print texts even as kids are being historicized online by Holocaust deniers and Lost-Causers. We’re teaching science in an era when online anti-vaxxers gain traction by using scientific language to deceive and intimidate. 

Sam Wineburg, The internet is sowing mass confusion. We must rethink how we teach kids every subject.

Couple good pieces out — one by Sam Wineburg, and an interesting response (expansion?) by Larry Cuban. The point, at least as I read it? Misinformation on the web is not really a subject — or, in any case, not only a subject. The web, after all, is an environment, a domain in which most professional, scholarly, and civic skills are practiced. Yet the structure of how we teach most subjects treats the web as either an afterthought, or worse, as a forbidden land.

If you know me and know this blog, this issue has been my obsession since before this blog was launched in 2007. Back in 2009 I dubbed the practice of ignoring the web as a target domain as “Abstinence-only Web Education“:

…what [the term] expresses [is] my utter shock that when talking to some otherwise intelligent adults about the fact that we are not educating our students to be critical consumers of web content, or to use networks to solve problems, etc — my utter shock that often as not the response to this problem is “Well, if students would just stop getting information from the web and go back to books, this whole problem would go away.”

Now I do believe that reading more books and less web is usually a good decision as part of a broader strategy. But most of what students will do in their professional and civic lives will involve the web.

My younger daughter, for example, is presenting to the school board tonight about how the integrated arts and academics magnet program she is in supports various educational objectives. When trying to understand what those objectives mean — from critical thinking to collaboration — she is not reading a textbook or going to a library. She is consulting the web.

And I am writing this at work as part of being in an informal professional development community, and you are reading it to maybe help you with your job.

These issues seem a million miles away from Pizzagate and blogs that tell you that sea ice is increasing and climate change is really a hoax. But they turn out to be adjacent. What happens if my daughter’s search for critical thinking lands on one of the recently politicized redefinitions of that term, which she ends up presenting to the school board? And you’re here at this blog, trusting me — but there are of course other blogs and articles that are written by people in the employ of ed tech firms, and those by people that have zero experience in the domain on which they write. Giving your attention to those sites may actually make you worse at what you do, or lead to your manipulation by corporate forces of which you are unaware.

Or maybe not! Maybe you’re good at all this.

Still, I keep coming back to that part of Dewey’s School and Society where he talks about the problem of transmission of knowledge in a post-agrarian society. In the first lecture in that work, Dewey talks about the way in which industrialization has rendered the processes of production opaque. In an agrarian society, he notes, “the entire industrial process stood revealed, from the production on the farm of the raw materials, till the finished article was actually put to use.” In such a world a youngster could simply observe, and see what competent practice looked like. To understand where things came from was to understand one’s household, and not much pedagogical artifice was required. With the introduction of complex, specialized and opaque systems, however, there was no opportunity to learn by looking over a parents shoulder, and so a more designed approach was required.

Two things occur to me re-reading that. The first is not necessarily a new media literacy insight. But that networked opacity we deal with — the complex network of actors and algorithms that lead to a piece of information or propaganda being displayed on your screen — is a very similar problem. There’s a part of that lecture where Dewey talks about how students that investigate the production of clothing walk through domains of physics, history, geography, engineering, and economics due to the complex set of historical, geographical, and other factors that have determined the way in which clothing gets made. The point he makes is that you can organize the curriculum around clothing, and the disciplines become meaningful.

I’m not proposing to do a complete retread of Dewey’s progressive education in 2019. We’ve learned a lot since Dewey about how people learn; that’s good and we should use that. But narrowly, what Dewey saw in clothing in 1899 I see in web literacy today. Here is a going social concern that combines sociology, psychology, history, engineering, algorithms, math, political science and so on. You don’t have to adopt unmodified Deweyism to see the opportunities there for integrative education. Elucidate the circumstances of production for this thing students are using most of their waking life. If you’re a high school or an integrative first-year program put together a year on it, and try it out.

The second point is on skills. Dewey noted that when professional knowledge moved out of farms and into factories and offices children lost the ability to observe competence in action. Work — and the skills associated with it — became hidden.

That’s still true today, but there’s another angle on this. Even in offices our skills are quite hidden because of the ways that this work evades third-party observation. Where there is an artifact of work — equations, code, writing, etc., a co-worker can ask “hey, why are you doing that in that way?” And where more ephemeral processes are public — soft skills exercised in a meeting for example — they can also be learned.

But web skills have the double whammy of leaving very little trace, and of being intensely private. And this makes transmission and improvement of these skills much more difficult, and creates a situation where there is a lot of hidden need. More on that in a later post.

OK, maybe you’re just here for the video. I would be. Watch the demo of Check Please, and then continue downpage for the theory of change behind it.

Watched it? OK, here’s the backstory.

Last November we won an award from RTI International and the Rita Allen Foundation to work on a “fact-checking tutorial generator” that would generate hyper-specific tutorials that could be shared with “friends, family, and the occasional celebrity.” The idea was this — we talk a lot about media literacy, but the people spreading the most misinformation (and the people reaching the most people with that misinformation) are some of the least likely people to currently be in school. How do we reach them?

I proposed a model: we teach the students that we have, and then give them web tools to teach the influencers. As an example, we have a technique we show students called “Just add Wikipedia”: when confronted with a site of unknown provenance, go up to the omnibar, add “wikipedia” after the domain to trigger a Google search that floats relevant Wikipedia pages to the top, select the most relevant Wikipedia page, and get a bit of background on the site before sharing.

When teaching students how to do this, I record little demos using Camtasia on a wide variety of examples. Students have to see the steps and, as importantly, see how easy the steps really are, on a variety of examples. And in particular, they have to see the steps on the particular problem they just tried to solve: even though the steps are very standard, general instruction videos don’t have half the impact of specific ones. When you see the exact problem you just struggled with solved in a couple clicks, it sinks in in a way that no generic video ever will.

Unfortunately , this leaves us in a bit of a quandary relative to our “have students teach the influencers” plan. I have a $200 dollar copy of Camtasia, a decades worth of experience creating screencasts, and still, for me to demo a move — from firing up the screen recorder to uploading to YouTube or exporting a GIF — is a half-hour process. I doubt we’re going to change the world on that ROI. As someone once said, a lie can make it halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its Camtasia dependencies.

But what if we could give our students a website that took some basic information about decisions they made in their own fact-checking process and that website would generate the custom, shareable tutorial for them to share, as long as they were following one of our standard techniques?

I came up with this idea last year — using selenium, a invisible Chrome browser you can run on the server — to walk through the steps of a claim or reputation check while taking screen shots that formed the basis of an automatic tutorial on fact-checking a claim. And I ran it by TS Waterman and after walking through it a bit we decided that — maybe to our surprise (!!) — it seemed rather straightforward. We proposed it to the forum, won the runner-up prize in November, and on January 15 I began work on it. (TS is still involved and will help optimize the program and advise direction as we move forward, as soon as I clean up my embarrassing prototype spaghetti code).

But here’s the thing — it works! The prototype is so so far from finished, and the plan is to launch a public site in April after adding a couple more types of checks and massively refactoring code. But it works. And it may provide a new way to think about stopping the spread of misinformation, not by by generic tools for readers, but by empowering those that enforce social norms with better, more educational tools.

https://twitter.com/holden/status/1095823896207450113

There’s a lot of things that set our approach at the Digital Polarization Initiative apart from most previous initiatives. But the biggest thing is this: we start from the environment in which students are most likely to practice online literacy skills, and in that environment attention is the scarcity.

The idea that scarce attention forms the basis of modern information environments is not new. Herbert Simon, years ago, noted that abundances consume — an abundance of goats makes a scarcity of grass. And information? It consumes attention. So while we name this the information age, information is actually less and less valuable. The paradox of the information age is that control of information means less and less, because information becomes commodified. Instead, the powerful in the information age control the scarcity: they control attention.

Again, this is not an observation that is unique to me. Zeynep Tufecki, Penny Andrews, An Xaio Mina, Claire Wardle, Whitney Phillips, and so many more have drilled down on various aspects of this phenomenon. And years ago, Howard Rheingold put attention as a crucial literacy of the networked age, next to others like critical consumption. It’s not, at this point, a very contentious assertion.

And yet the implications of this, media literacy at least, have yet to be fully explored. When information is scarce, we must deeply interrogate the limited information that is provided us, trying to find the internal inconsistencies, the flaws, the contradictions. But in a world where information is abundant, these skills are not primary. The primary skill of a person in an attention-scarce environment is making relatively quick decisions about what to turn their attention toward, and making longer term decisions about how to construct their media environment to provide trustworthy information.

People know my four moves approach that tries to provide a quick guide for sorting through information, the 30 second fact-checks, and the work from Sam Wineburg and others that it builds on. These are media literacy, but they are focused not on deeply analyzing a piece of information but on making a decision of whether an article, author, website, organization, or Facebook page is worthy of your attention (and if so, with what caveats).

But there are other things to consider as well. When you know how attention is captured by hacking algorithms and human behavior, extra care in deciding who to follow, what to click on, and what to share is warranted. I’ve talked before about PewDiepie’s recommendation of an anti-Semitic YouTube account based on some anime analysis he had enjoyed. Many subscribed based on the recommendation. But of course, the subscription doesn’t just result in that account’s anime analysis videos being shared with you — it pushes the political stuff to you as well. And since algorithms weight subscriptions highly in what to recommend to you, it begins a process of pushing more and more dubious and potentially hateful content in front of you.

How do you focus your attention? How do you protect it? How do you apply it productively and strategically, and avoid giving it to bad actors or dubious sources? And how do you do that in a world where decisions about what to engage with are made in seconds, not minutes or hours?

These are the question our age of attention requires we answer, and the associated skills and understandings are where we need to focus our pedagogical efforts.