Another reason libraries are vital

I finished reading one of my Christmas gifts, Educated, on Friday evening. You can read my thoughts on this memoir by Tara Westover over at bookconscious. This morning I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End of Normal” and it got me thinking about why Educated has resonated so strongly with readers of all kinds (I’ve had more people recommend this book to me than any other I can think of). And why Educated illustrates the importance of libraries, even though Westover doesn’t necessarily say so (although she mentions several libraries in the book).

I watched a brief interview Westover did with Bill Gates, where she talks a little bit about divisions in our world and describes the potential of education as “this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.” She also describes the way some schools become “an instrument of that division” because of the way “we self-segregate, and schools become reflections of people’s homogeneity.” In other words, depending on where a child grows up, they may or may not learn the same history as a child who grows up somewhere else, even in the same city or town.

Now, I’m not saying everyone should learn one official version of history. We need what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude” — where the many threads of being human in America and the world are included in the overall fabric of the history we learn, instead of the majority controlling the narrative. And education, ideally, should present that plenitude, instead of whatever the dominant narrative is. And what Westover was discussing with Gates is that if we really meant what we say about providing a good education for all, we might actually have less division. Because if you know someone’s stories, they become familiar, and you begin to see how they are also like your stories, and how they are different, and since we are born curious, you also start to wonder why.

This morning, I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End Of Normal” and I think one reason Educated is so powerful is that Westover’s experience, while extreme, explains the divisions we currently face. Knowing only one version of the story of humanity, particularly one that justifies fears in the face of a changing world, leads to what Kakutani quotes Richard Hofstadter as calling “the paranoid style” that Westover’s father embodies. If people then reinforce their views by limiting the scope of information they take in to what they agree with, as Kakutani notes that many people whose world views rely on “alternative facts” do, you can end up with extremes.

Westover provides some hope that anyone who can read and think (potentially, most people) can discover for themselves what has happened in human history and is happening in the world now. So people who are insulated from reality can potentially learn that their “truth” has been mediated and their accepted narrative controlled – but the scary flip side is that if enough people don’t ever learn that we end up where we are now with nationalism on the rise all over.  You probably know where I’m going with this if you’ve read Nocturnal Librarian before: libraries and librarians can help counter division because we help make it possible for people to expand their views and embrace narrative plenitude.

Information literacy, the skills and habits that allow people to find, evaluate, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem, is at the core of what academic libraries do. We teach students to consider the ways information is mediated, what mechanisms are in place to safeguard facts while still presenting persuasive arguments in journalism and academic writing, and how to recognize and critically assess those. Public libraries also foster information literacy, and they act (when they are at their best) as some of the last egalitarian public spaces, where all citizens regardless of where they live or go to school have access to the same resources. Libraries of all kinds support lifelong learning, and collect and preserve all kinds of narratives that are part of our shared human story. They can also promote civil discourse either explicitly through programming or implicitly through their collections.

So, if you want to live in a less divided, more civil world where people know how to recognize and counter “alternative facts,” support your library!

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Opening education and ourselves

One of the things I’ve gotten very involved with in my time at a community college is helping to encourage and support the adoption, adaptation, or creation of open educational resources. I’ve written about this here at Nocturnal Librarian a couple of times, including sharing with readers what students say they would buy if they didn’t have to spend money on textbooks.

But I gained another valuable perspective at the recent OpenEd19 conference. Some of the best sessions I attended were by students, and at one of those I realized there is another benefit to OERs that I hadn’t fully understood until I heard students talk about it: if you can’t buy course materials, you feel like you are faking it in class. This is not just a problem of learning (because many persistent students get around not having a book in all sorts of creative ways, by sharing, taking photos of pages they need to read, or finding alternatives to the textbook), but of attainment — there have been many studies linking student success and a sense of belonging. You can’t feel like you belong in college if you are mired in imposter syndrome because you are just trying to get by without an expensive textbook you can’t afford.

At OpenEd I also heard some presentations on including students in solving the problem, either by including them in the co-creation of materials in the classes they’re enrolled in (known as open pedagogy) or hiring them to help faculty build OER courses. Both of these endeavors are additional ways to counter imposter syndrome with participation. If you feel like you don’t fit in the status quo, what’s more powerful than being part of changing it? Plus, students gain useful experience and a sense that they are capable autodidacts who can learn what they need when the work they do and the world around them changes and they need to adapt.

Because it changes, doesn’t it? Another powerful session I attended was presented by a panel of librarians talking about the need for community, because for many of us working on opening up our campuses to these practices, our job descriptions or responsibilities don’t actually include this work. The panel also noted that we librarians also sometimes face imposter syndrome when we’re at the table with faculty, instructional designers, and learning technology staff. I went into the session thinking I just wanted to hear about the need for community but I didn’t actually need that “other stuff” and came out realizing, yes, I do. So, I’m going to work on owning that “other stuff” and getting comfortable with the messiness of choosing to do something that I’ve mostly learned on my own and added to my role not only because it’s a priority on my campus, and a priority for making higher ed more accessible for students, but because I am perfectly capable of pursuing professional interests without having been granted expertise by anyone else.

Like our students, I can create my own agency and efficacy. And if I do that with them, all the better, because we’ll learn from each other as we go and strengthen each other’s sense of belonging. I hear a lot of people talk about how hard it is to actually have community at a community college because people (faculty as well as students) are not there very much — they come to class and then head off campus to other responsibilities at work and home. But open educational practices, it seems to me, can counter that by drawing people together around a shared purpose in a way that packaged curriculum can’t match. Opening education can and does change our work, our learning, and our world. And if that work doesn’t belong to all of us, what does?

**update — here’s what happens when a student feels people in higher ed (librarians in this case, I am happy to report) are actually listening: https://openstax.org/blog/true-champions-oer-movement

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We’re fine without fines

I had an interesting conversation today with a student worker who wanted to know if we charge for replacement ID cards. I said no, and that even if there was a policy in the past, I was not in favor of charging students extra for things, especially since most students have little money. I pointed out that it’s possible a lost ID is at campus safety, so it might be good to ask the student to check there before having a new one made, but otherwise, just make the replacement. The student worker said they hadn’t heard a librarian say anything like that before.

We also don’t charge fines at my library, although if a book is never returned we do bill for replacement. one of our staff has been calling patrons with bills, and she said today that they don’t always believe there will be no charge if they return a long overdue item and some have even said they don’t return it out of fear of a big fine.

When I worked at a public library, “fine free” was becoming popular. In 2017, NY Public Library System president Anthony Marx wrote about some forays into fine amnesty and fine free borrowing for kids and noted that in response to those who worried about what fine free tells people about responsibility, “what is truly the greater moral hazard? Having fines or not having fines? In my view, teaching kids that the library is not an option for the poorest among them is absolutely unacceptable.” Indeed. It has always really frosted me when kids can’t use the library because of fines.

Because it turns out, library fees and fines are regressive. And now the Chicago Public Library has become the largest American library system to go fine free. Library Commissioner Andrea Telli had a similar response to the question of whether eliminating fines erodes accountability: “Libraries don’t necessarily want to be in the morality business, and we don’t want to make the assumption that if a book is late or someone can’t pay for a fine, that they’re delinquent or bad in some way; they may just be in a place in their life where they can’t pay the fine.”

Exactly. It turns out the value of returned items is often higher than that of fines collected, and that fines don’t deter people from returning items late — they just prevent people from feeling the library is for them. Which is not in line with the values of librarianship, or of human decency generally.

If the administrations that provide our funding want fines to be part of our budgets (which is not even necessarily the case — in Chicago, fines never went to the library), we need to help them learn about equity and inclusion, and stand with our colleagues who point out that we’re fine without fines, but excluding our patrons because they can’t pay is not fine.

 

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New semester, same challenges

We’re about to enter week two of the fall semester, and even though a new term always provides some of that fresh start feeling, some things never change. For example, printers are always surprised that students are back and generally respond by jamming, making print jobs disappear, or otherwise malfunctioning. Students are sometimes surprised to realize they have no idea what their login information is to get into the various systems that can tell them what time their classes are and in which rooms, who their professors are, and what they need to know about their classes, either because they forgot their logins over the summer or they are new and aren’t even sure they know what it is or where to login yet. Ditto on how to get into or find their college email.

Students don’t always arrive on campus digitally literate, or in other words, able to use the technology we expect them to in college (which is often some of the same technology we all had to learn at work, never by osmosis). Just because they can text and use apps doesn’t mean they can navigate various portals and systems that contain the vital information every department on campus thinks they should immediately take in. They may have limited experience with email and word processing and other productivity tools, and they’ve mostly, at least at my community college, never seen a learning management system before (like Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle).

But the default in higher education is to assume they can master all this at the same time they are adjusting generally to the freedom and responsibility of college. Some of our students are fresh from twelve years of public school where they had very little freedom and nearly no personal responsibility other than to show up and follow directions. Others may have worked and have some experience making sure they get where they need to be on time and manage their tasks independently, but even these more worldly new students are often in the same boat as recent high school graduates when it comes to digital literacy — they may know a few more tools, but not those specific to higher education, and possibly they worked at places where they had limited access to technology outside their very specific responsibilities.

The library and learning commons staff find ourselves helping students who’ve been told on the first day of class to print a module or syllabus without really knowing what that means — not where to find those, not what they are, not how to print the on the mysterious campus printing system. I’ve been thinking about this digital literacy gap ever since hearing Ben Remillard, a doctoral candidate at UNH who also teaches at a community college and has experience working in student success programs in learning commons settings, speak about it at LAANE last fall. His point was that simply expecting students to grasp what we’re talking about when we tell them to start using their “EasyLogin” to get into multiple systems and tools doesn’t work. We wouldn’t onboard someone into a workplace that way, so why do we expect students to just start using everything at once without any training?

This is closely related to another perennial back-to-school struggle for librarians: convincing faculty to wait to schedule information literacy instruction until a few weeks into the semester, once students have had a chance to get familiar with all the digital tools and systems we throw at them, and they have a research assignment to work on. I always get requests to come on the first day of class or sometime in the first 2-3 weeks to “teach databases.” My gentle response is always that it might work better for students — resulting in better work for their faculty to assess — if we schedule information literacy instruction for later.

And that we don’t really “teach databases,” but instead teach students to seek, find, assess, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem. Because if we start by talking about databases when they don’t even know what that means yet, we’ve lost them. They’ll think using the library is too hard. I hear it often: a student will say that all this info lit stuff is fine for other people, but they can never find what they need that way so they “just Google.” I suspect no one has ever taken the time to help them see that the same skills they use to “just Google” can be honed until they are able to use them to successfully tap into the many collections of information — which is all Google is, really — they now have access to in college. And it’s hard to teach people to identify their information need before they have one, so tying this kind of work to an actual assignment is much more meaningful.

I am not one to let the perfect get in the way of the good; if it’s not possible can’t get on the schedule to work with a class unless it happens in week one, I’m there. At least letting students know who I am, how to find me and my library and learning commons colleagues and how to get in touch with us, and a teeny bit about our resources is better than never getting a chance to meet students and reveal the wonders of the library website to them! But I do think that until students have a chance to get comfortable with all the digital tools afforded to them as college students, they won’t be able to fully absorb everything we librarians have to say about information literacy. And until we help them see what they can already do with technology and how it relates to the new tools they’re expected to use, we can’t close the digital literacy gap and help them succeed.

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Information pollution

I’ve been trying to be more active on Twitter, in part because a lot of open education people and librarians share experiences and thoughts there. This morning I saw a thread that a librarian I follow had retweeted, originally posted by @Viveka, that got me thinking about something that came across my desk from the ALA’s Center for the Future of Libraries in their newsletter Read for Later a couple of weeks ago. The Twitter thread was about a bot tweet that was making its way around Twitter, trying to drum up outrage about the way Disney has cast the forthcoming live action Little Mermaid movie. I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to grant this message any more attention but the gist is that it’s written to divide people and drum up racial strife while saying on the surface that it’s not about race. Which sounds like something a human might actually do — claim not to be racist but then make a point that attempts to divide people over race. But Viveka notes in the thread, “we know it’s a bot because it behaves unlike any human” and then goes on to explain the tells that make this so.

If you are not as observant as Viveka or just accept the content at face value without interrogating this tweet too carefully — and let’s face it, that’s mostly how the majority of tweets are read, quickly and without much thought — you might miss it. Viveka points out, “It has the right hashtags, the petition link works, call to action is clear.” Which might make it seem real enough that in the seconds it takes to skim it, most people would either ignore it, engage with it, or feel moved enough to click the petition.  But it’s been posted “about every ten minutes, as a reply to other tweets mentioning the movie or the actess” (@Viveka).

A bot can do that, a human can’t. Which is why I went back and re-read the New York Times article by Cade Metz & Scott Blumenthal that appeared in Read for Later, “How AI Could Be Weaponized to Spread Disinformation.” Metz and Blumenthal write about two AI companies that are making fake news generators that are getting better and better at mimicking human writing openly available — so that researchers know what we’re up against, as more and more content like the thread above proliferates. Why does it matter what people think about the casting of a Disney film? It doesn’t, but the humans behind this bot creation probably have an interest in dividing Americans over cultural issues. Perhaps so we will vote emotionally, or so we’ll be busy arguing while our government cages children, or tries to start a war somewhere, or . . . you get the idea. And AI makes it more likely that we’ll have trouble identifying what’s bot generated and what’s not.

So why is this a library issue? Libraries of all sorts encourage information literacy, or in the case of school and academic libraries, teach it. Information literacy is a set of skills and habits of mind that allow people to seek, evaluate, and use information effectively and responsibly. Will we be able to keep doing this work if, as Metz and Blumenthal quote OpenAI researcher Alec Radford, “The level of information pollution that could happen with systems like this a few years from now could just get bizarre.”

I’m not sure. Yes, we can keep teaching people to examine and consider information carefully but we have to be careful not to go so far as to convince them to trust nothing, as danah boyd cautions in her article “Did Media Literacy Backfire?” which I re-read every few months to remind myself how hard this work is. Will the media be susceptible to information pollution in the same way social media is? Is it already, in the “balance bias” of its coverage of major issues like climate change?

There are no easy answers. I believe information literacy is a help, but knowing how to do something doesn’t mean someone will do it. Ultimately the fight against information pollution is a matter of will — we have to spend more than a few seconds scanning something online before deciding whether it’s valid or not. I’d like to think libraries have a role in encouraging that, but in the end, it’s probably up to each of us to be smart information consumers.

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Research methods and networks

I was delighted to be selected as a 2019 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship scholar. IRDL “is designed to bring together a diverse group of academic and research librarians who are motivated and enthusiastic about conducting research but need additional training and/or other support to perform the steps successfully.” At the week long institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, I met the other 22 scholars and spent each day learning research methods, having consultations with qualitative and quantitative research experts and the two project directors, and basically geeking out over libraries and library research. I learned so much about research methods; I feel confident in my research design and methodology and equipped to carry out my work, which is to create and study a program in which peer Learning Success Mentors share information literacy and learning science tips with new students at my community college.

But the most important thing I gained is a research network. I would have taken a research methods class (although not in a week and not in such a beautiful place). But getting to know other people who are interested in which design will best answer a research question, how to write an in-depth interview guide and develop a codebook to analyze the transcripts, when to use regression theory, and why this matters to librarianship is not an experience I could every have had without IRDL. Knowing I can call on my fellow IRDLers and starting in July, my mentor, an experienced research librarian who will support me through the year’s work, is also pretty awesome.

The coming year will be difficult — I’ll be working harder than I ever have, trying things I’ve never done, working to deadlines, all on a project with a lot of moving parts that may not turn out as I hope. It’s pretty daunting. But so was getting on a plane to LA, being away for nine days, worrying about whether I’d be able to hold my own at the Institute. And in the coming year, the best part is that each of my fellow IRDL scholars will be doing what I am doing — holding ourselves to getting the work done, and standing with each other as we prioritize our research among all the other demands on our time. They are an amazingly talented group. I feel like I upped my game just being with them all for a week. Plus, I earned some pretty cool badges (yes, literal ones, not virtual).

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It’s great to be home, and I am excited to be on this research journey in such good company.

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Open beyond the campus

I just got back from the Northeast OER summit (conference #3 in 2 months — my brain is stuffed with ideas). It you’re unfamiliar with it, the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation describes Open Education as “the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” Anyone who knows my past as an unschooling parent knows this makes my heart sing. OERs are open educational resources, which means all the stuff we create and share to make open education happen — in the higher ed world, OER often refers to textbooks and other course materials. It also refers to Open Pedagogy — the idea that students can be co-creators of knowledge.

I introduced myself at the first Community College System of New Hampshire OER Taskforce meeting as a librarian and OER nut. I embrace this work because it speaks to my values. I make no apologies for seeing a social justice role in librarianship and education . . . let me digress on this for a second.

I know that this makes me susceptible to what Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” but I don’t think libraries, and even more so, formal education, are beyond critique, as those of you who’ve been with Nocturnal Librarian know — I think that like democracy, the idea of libraries as egalitarian places where all are radically welcomed is something we strive for, but I am well aware that as a profession we often do not uphold this, we have definitely got problems with regards to asking librarians to do more work without more compensation, etc. I embrace the values associated with radical welcome and access for all, and the potential of libraries to embody them, while acknowledging we have work to do. I’m at a community college because I value access to education and I believe public education should serve all publics (it doesn’t, especially when it’s under-resourced but that’s another post).

Digressions over. All this is to say, I love OER because it is in line with other things I love — learner directed learning, collaboration, community, equity, justice. So it was an awesome conference, and I was excited to be with other librarians, faculty, instructional designers, learning technology directors, etc. And I got some ideas I think I can transform into action pretty easily, which is always motivating.

One of the things I’ll work on right away is getting other OER interested folks on my campus together informally in a “community of practice” —  we don’t take enough time to do the kind of sharing that happens at a conference. Yesterday I was in a workshop on Creative Commons licenses and copyright and after hearing Meredith Jacob‘s presentation we broke into tables by interest and talked. It was really fruitful, and although we ended up ranging beyond open licensing, copyright and fair use, we learned from each other and built community. I want to recreate this if I can on my campus.

Another really cool thing I heard was a presentation by Grif Peterson of P2PU, which connects people who want to learn something together in learning circles which meet in public places — often, libraries. They describe themselves as “a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education.” Again, those of you who know me can imagine how this delights me! Grif presented on learning circles with Kelly Woodside, a consultant and trainer at the Massachusetts Library System. Kelly’s awesome job involves collaborations between different kinds of libraries and non-library allies like P2PU. I loved hearing what they had to say, and I’m hoping to find intersections among our work — Kelly and I already talked about One Book projects that bring college and public libraries together, like the one I am co-chairing in Manchester with the director of the city library. I see potential intersections between P2PU, higher ed, and public libraries, too — if a small library in NH wants to host a learning circle but is understaffed, facilitating is the kind of real world experience faculty might like to incorporate into courses and students might like to try, so I’m hoping to connect people around this idea.

What interesting connections have you made at a conference that got you motivated? What possibilities do you see for Open Education in your community?

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Conferences, end of semester, and summer projects oh my

I’ve noticed in my few years in academia that the year steamrolls until by this time, with just a few short weeks left until spring finals are over, staff, faculty, and students alike are running even in their sleep to keep up. Have you woken up at night to scrawl a note or set a reminder on your phone lately? Me too.

It doesn’t help in the library world that we seem to load all our conferences into a window from late spring to early summer. I’m sure this has to do with making sure people can attend before they are off for the summer if they are faculty or are on a 180 schedule. For those of us who work year round, it is probably a well-intended attempt to get us all fired up for that mythical time in the summer when we are “free” to do projects.

I’ve never really seen summer projects get completed, at least not the long lists we all make in the winter during planning meetings. I’ve got several large projects on the horizon myself, although I am trying to be reasonable and actually said no to something last week. I also have the inevitable end of the academic year  hiring committees,  plus co-chairing One Book One Manchester, our community wide read, with the city library director. I’m still distilling the notes from attending the Association of College and Research Libraries 2019 conference in Cleveland a little over a week ago, and I’m going to a few other learning opportunities or mini conferences in the next couple of months. I have some amazing opportunities coming up to do research, work on student success efforts, and participate in collaborative work on Open Educational Resources on my campus and in our community college system.

This is all super exciting — I’ve never had this many professional development, continuing education, and collaboration opportunities at once, nor so much institutional support for my growth as a librarian and educator. I’m fortunate. But I’m sitting here tonight wondering why the end of the academic year is this stacked up. Why don’t we have conferences in March? Why don’t we set more reasonable expectations for what can happen in the summer (when many people will also take vacations)? Why don’t we (ok, I) take on one project at a time?

For me it’s been a perfect storm, as I say, of support and opportunities that are too amazing not to try. But one thing I heard often at ACRL 2019 was that we have to caution against being overwhelmed by expectations, we have to help ourselves and those who work for us by setting boundaries such as actually taking lunch breaks, not working late or going in early every day, and managing to say no sometimes. I also heard an interesting talk by Fobazi Ettarh about not succumbing to “vocational awe” by making librarianship out to be the saving grace for everyone and everything on our campuses. Ettarh suggested being a “bad librarian” can be good, by which she meant, have a life outside of work, don’t sacrifice your social life or your well being to serve librarianship, and call out libraries and librarianship for the things we don’t get right, as well as celebrating what we do.

It was also my great pleasure to walk up and introduce myself like a total fan girl to Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, ACRL’s Academic/Research Librarian of the Year, to ask her how she does it. She works in a library with 2 librarians, like I do. I wanted to know her secret to doing more with less. Her advice? Take care of yourself, so you can take care of others. Take your lunch. Go home on time. So as we enter the last few weeks of the semester I will be working hard to work less hard — to come home to my family in the evenings close to when they are expecting me. To take a real break every day. To keep myself physically and mentally rested, hydrated, and happy.  I’m going to try to give myself permission to be more like my favorite Zen master, a grey tabby called Gwen:

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We’re going to go curl up with a book now.

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Do OERs impact success or “just” save students money?

The answer is complicated. As Open Education Week wrapped up, I read a thought provoking press release and the research it discusses. The paper, by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, Rice University’s peer-reviewed OER* publisher, and colleagues Debshila Basu Mallick, Andrew E. Waters, and Richard G. Baraniuk, examines the “access hypothesis” and the trouble with studying it — unless you identify which students would not have had access to the traditional textbook, your results will be somewhat murky, because it will include students for whom access was not a problem. As the press release notes:

“Using OER could potentially make a very significant difference in course outcomes for a student who couldn’t afford the traditional textbook, and would try to make do without it,” Baraniuk said. “In short, the ‘access hypothesis’ could very well be accurate, but since it’s only relevant to a certain percentage of any class, those benefits are washed out when measuring outcomes of the entire class.”

Saving students money, however, also contributes to their success. In a far less scientific (ok, not scientific at all) survey that we did this week with a white board in our college’s main entrance, we asked students to share what they would spend money on if they didn’t have to buy textbooks and access codes. Here is a sampling of their responses:

food (another entry was “food for my children”)

paying off student debt

transportation

visiting a loved one in another state

saving money to take another class

saving for an apartment

childcare so I could study or participate in group projects

clothing and shoes

a home

So are OERs important to student success? Yes. Do they directly impact it? Sometimes. Do they make it possible for students to attend to their lives and responsibilities so that they are less stressed out and distracted by financial worries? Absolutely.

OERs matter.

*What are OERs?

“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.” (UNESCO).

OER is related to “textbook free” — a textbook free course or degree may include OERs but often includes library and other reading materials, placed on reserve or uploaded to Canvas (or other learning management systems) and used according to copyright and fair use guidelines.

What’s the difference between “free” and “open?” Open educational resources are licensed to be re-used, while free just means there is no paywall to access something. Both benefit students!

 

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The Misinformation Age

Apologies to those of you who follow both blogs, but I definitely have to share topics across blogs this week.  I’ve written a post over at bookconscious about a book that is very relevant to librarians who teach information literacy — The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread  by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall.

How do we help our students understand the level of mediation they face when they are seeking information, or even just passively receiving it? My colleagues and I spend a good deal of time thinking about this, and I think the answer is one interaction at a time. All we can do is talk to our students, in class visits, individual reference interactions, and research consultations, and remind them in the course of those conversations that information is packaged, targeted, framed, manipulated, and selectively shared, and then mediated further by search engines and discovery tools. I think helping them see that they are probably always operating within a limited view of the big picture is healthy. I’ve taken to telling classes, it’s not that they shouldn’t trust information or that they should have a mental list of “trustworthy” sources (a concept I try to get them to  question anyway), but that information literate people should try to understand where information comes from and what the motivations of the people who published or posted it are.

Obviously that just scratches the surface, but I think it’s an important start and will serve many undergraduate students well in their research for assignments. Once they know who published something and why, they can move on to ask more questions: Who agrees and disagrees with this information? Is the disagreement based on facts or opinions? What evidence supports or doesn’t support this information? Is there a balance bias in the reporting? This my latest goal, to help students see that it’s actually biased to present different views as having equal merit when they don’t (for example, because one isn’t based in fact, or is held by a very small minority but is presented as a mainstream view).

The good news is that information literacy — the skills and habits of mind that make it possible to seek, evaluate, and use information effectively and responsibly — can only help them. Some of our students may go on to take an active role in stopping the spread of misinformation or fighting it, in science, media, or policy-making roles. Others will not have an active role beyond being intentional about what they click on or share in their own networks, but they’ll know what to watch for as they consume information. Some of them will work for marketing, commercial, political or even media interests that are engaged in the work of misinforming the public, intentionally or as a result of serving their own interests above the public good. I like to think some bit of what they learn about information literacy will stay with them, wherever they end up.

I can’t recommend The Misinformation Age highly enough. I hope you’ll check out my review and either ask your librarian for it or if you’re a librarian, order it for your collection.

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