We want to send a HUGE thank you to listener, Megan Ondricek, for volunteering to help us catch up and create transcripts for our past episodes (starting with episode 9 below) and provide this important resource to our community! Amanda: Welcome to episode nine of the Librarian’s Guide to Teaching Podcast! I’m Amanda. Jessica: And I’m Jessica. Amanda: On today’s episode we are so excited to talk to Barbara Fister to discuss the new Project Information Literacy report called Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms. It was released on January 14 and Barbar is a co-author on this really interesting report that has great data and recommendations for librarians, educators, and anyone interested in the future of information. Barbara Fister is a Scholar-in-Residence at Project Information Literacy and co-researcher on PIL's latest study, "Information Literacy in the Age of Algorithms: Student Experiences with News and Information, and the Need for Change." For three decades Barbara coordinated the library instruction program at Gustavus Adolphus College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. In addition to collaborative teaching with faculty across the curriculum she has developed courses on research methods, book culture, first term seminars, and most recently launched a new course on Clickbait, Bias, and Propaganda in Information Networks. Jessica: Welcome Barbara thank you so much for talking to us today! Barbara: It’s great to be here! Jessica: We were both very interested to read this report when Project Information Literacy first promoted it and it does not disappoint. There are so many insights into technology, student behavior, information literacy, and education in general. So we are excited to talk about it. I guess first, could you give listeners a quick summary of the report for those who may not have read it yet just to frame our conversation? Barbara: Yeah, um, so if you don’t know, I don’t know how familiar your listeners are with Project Information Literacy, but for 10 years, a little bit more than 10 years, it's a independent non-profit research institute with Alison Head as the principal investigator and she's been leading these studies of student experiences of information - college students - and their experiences of information now for ten years. This one came about after the last study last year which dealt with, it was a big study, that dealt with students and their experience of news, how do they consume news. And so this is a kind of follow-up, it’s a smaller, qualitative study that looks at how students relate to the algorithmic networks that we experience so much of our information through these days. So it was really a chance to talk to students about what do they know about it, what do they think about it, and how does it influence their experience of information and selecting and evaluating information. So it was a qualitative study with 103 students in 16 focus groups at different institutions and we also interviewed 37 faculty members at those institutions and analyzed what we heard from them and drew out some kind of key takeaway points from those conversations. It was really interesting for me, it was the first time I had worked on a project information literacy research project and it was just very cool to see this team pull all this information together. So, we had, like, four takeaways from this research. We found for example students do take defensive measures when it comes to their privacy. Much more so than the faculty who we talked to, actually. They learn from each other, um, they are very interested in figuring out how things work from peers, rather than expecting to learn any of this in the classroom. Um they are highly skeptical of information and actually just not trusting information was a bigger problem in many ways than their skepticism which is well developed um, and they had this ambivalent feeling between um, feeling both sort of resigned to dealing with these algorithmic systems that they feel powerless to change or influence but also really frustrated with the way that they take their private information and use it and influence what they see. Um, so those are some of the takeaways that we found as we talked to the students. The biggest surprise to me, and this came both through the conversations with the students and with the faculty members, is that there really isn’t much conversation about this in the classroom. This isn’t their experience of what we call information literacy or even the critical thinking that their professors talk about. Um and that seemed very surprising to me because the faculty were very concerned about this for the most part, like, “Wow, this is really big problem, this is a big social issue, we need to really think about this as a society, it has so much impact on everything right now.” And then when I asked what are you doing in your classes it was like, “Um, oh well, oh, um, hmmm… we do critical thinking. We talk about peer review.” [Barbara chuckles]. But not really drawing the connections between what was really concerning to them and how students learn about information in their courses. And from the student perspective we also heard kind of a dismayingly, um, a sense that what they were learning in their schooling, both in K-12 and in higher education just didn’t really relate to the way that they experienced information in the world in their daily lives, um, so that was a big wake-up call for me personally. Jessica: Yeah I agree I think that was definitely one for me as well, I mean, I do probably 99% one shots and have for my whole library career but even that take away and the combination of the fact that the report also said that, kind of, the research that Project Information Literacy had done on student behavior over the past 10 years - that their learning behavior hadn't really changed over that time either - and it really made me consider, well, what am I doing in my one shots that I could change to make more of an impact on both of those issues. [7:00] Barbara: Yeah it’s an interesting point because a lot of the report, the first section is really kind of looking at what do we mean by the “age of algorithms,” um, what does that entail, but then also looking back at what do we know from 10 years of this Project Information Literacy research and some of these issues that keep popping up are, well, for somebody that has been has been involved in information literacy for 30 years is really kind of depressing [Jessica chuckles] that uh you know we haven't really changed a whole lot. One funny thing too, and this is kind of a minor footnote, but I noticed um one of the Project Information Literacy studies looked at what kinds of assignments are students given and so much of it is this traditional term paper, like research paper, that’s very kind of rigid in its design and has things like, things have to be cited a certain way and the margins should be a certain limit, and so on. And so, um, like 80% of the assignments they looked at were of that traditional type and then I found a study from the mid-1980s saying, “Guess what? 80% of the assignments are the traditional research paper” and we found a survey from 1960-something, ‘64, I forget what it was, saying “80% of assignments are the traditional research paper.” So that - that’s a real challenge for us, I think, because we haven’t really in spite of all our work, and in spite of a lot of faculty creativity, we still haven’t really nudged away from that kind of traditional box that we use to define research for college students. Which is troubling, and not really helpful in an age when so much information is coming at us and is being mediated through some methods that are changing the way that we relate to each other and society. Jessica: Right Amanda: Yeah. It kind of reminds me of a conversation that we had on a previous episode about critical digital pedagogy. Um, we were talking about sometimes online learning can be rigid and they're very particular about their assignments and, um, we were talking about well how can we create these, you know, critical assignments and one of my recommendations was to make it a low-stakes assignment because um faculty don’t know how to assess these crazy dynamic critical, you know, out-there projects that don't fit into that specific rigid paper mold, um, can be a challenge. And you know we’re trying to break that mold but as you’ve said, you know, over the years, you know… It's funny I was working today on chat and a student was asking for help with citation and said I'm not finding the sources that I want that I need to use but I'm finding other sources outside of the “approved resources” I'm allowed to use. And it just made me think like, ugh let me talk to your professor! [Jessica and Barbara chuckle] So uh, I definitely think it’s still a challenge for sure. Barbara: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah. Amanda: So um, you know we talked a little bit about the summary and the takeaways, um in another part of the study you guys make some recommendations. So which recommendation do you think would be the most difficult to implement? [10:29] Barbara: Yeah um, I’ll tell you it was kind of scary trying to come up with recommendations. [Jessica chuckles] After all of this to kind of figure out where should we go with this? And I really wanted us to have recommendations that had some practical value, because I know how hard it is to do information literacy instruction in the... all these, sort of, structural impediments that you run into when you’re dealing with departments and faculty and all of these conflicting incentives, um, just being able to talk to faculty can be a challenge much less really change things. Um, so we tried to keep some things that maybe people could look at and say, “You know what, we could do this thing, we could start something in here” as well as some bigger picture ideas. Of the 4 recommendations one of them is aimed actually at the journalists and the journalism organizations. In part because one of our funders was the Knight Foundation along with the University of South Carolina Library & Information Science program um, ER&L which is an Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference, helped fund this. Um, a lot of individual donors, um, contributed to this report and we also had funding from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. So with Knight in mind we thought you know, we’re talking to journalists as well as to educators in higher education. So one of them is kind of for them. And does it really deal with what librarians do although I think there’s some really interesting potential to work with local news organizations in some ways because they’re very motivated to find ways to help people understand good information and find out who you can trust. So there’s some possibilities there. Of the other recommendations the one that I find most challenging I think it has to do with responding to what we heard from students, which is that their experience with information literacy across K-12 into college was so disconnected and so scattered and in many cases they really felt it was inadequate to a large extent. They were, you know, like, “well we have these checklists but they don't really help us out with the way that the internet works today.” Or, “you know, they keep telling us to trust .org instead of .com.” That was bad advice 20 years ago and apparently it’s still happening in various places. So I think it would be really helpful to try to get together and build some kind of cohesive program across the entire educational experience with students in mind. And, you know, Canada, the UK, Australia, they have this kind of thing embedded in their education system but we don’t because we don’t do education that way. We’re all rugged individualists around here. [Jessica chuckles] So you know we have some suggestions for maybe ways organizations can work on this and this can be really hard. Um, but maybe on the local level people working information literacy can maybe call a meeting with some teachers working in the local school system and maybe some people involved with adult education in the public library and say, “What are we all doing? What kind of words are we using, what language, what strategies, how can we help each other out, how can we, kind of, build a scaffold for our students so that what they learn in the school system carries through to what happens in their entire education and where do you see the need for students?” Because I think there's a lot we can learn from each other and we could do a lot better job if we had those bridges of creating a system that students would find more coherent and meaningful. Jessica: Hmm yeah definitely that was one thing I was thinking when I was reading the recommendations I was thinking, “Oh this would be amazing if this could happen!”, but just knowing what I know that all these areas are just so siloed that it's like how do we break down the silos to make this happen and I was thinking about, you know, well has this been shared it needs to be shared so widely with all these people, but that’s a good point that you make that if the donors are involved you would hope that the donors are also sharing it with those that they know in journalism and higher ed and then even lower ed as well. Barbara: Mm-hmm yeah yeah. And there has been a lot of initiatives to try to promote, um, all kinds of literacies especially since 2016 and the fake news crisis with the attention people are paying to it. And yet, we don't really have a good sense that anything has been the “silver bullet” that has really worked. Um the Stanford History Education group came out with a study not too long ago, one of several studies they've done, of students and how they, um, deal with what they call civic online reasoning. And when it comes to like evaluating things they find on the web, they’re really not good at it. They also studied how historians evaluate what they find on the web. They’re really not good at it either, they don’t really have the sort of heuristics for dealing with the kind of information that comes flooding at us. The people who they studied who did get it was um fact checkers and they had some strategies to help them very quickly, like, you look at a source and then you go out and find other sources and compare it to them. You don’t do that in-depth analysis and go through long checklists trying to figure out all kinds of things about the source without first doing that kind of comparative work. So um that it was depressing because they did a study and said you know what we’ve been doing so much work in schools now to try to do news literacy and boost people’s ability to make assessments of what’s true and what’s false online. And it doesn’t seem yet to be working terribly well. Jessica: Yeah Amanda: Yeah. You know what’s so interesting that you mention local level and kind of building that bridge in the K-20 because I am currently living that challenge. I have been a part of, um, a committee it's - we call it a user education committee. And it's been a project that we try to do every few years I mean I've been on this committee for like 7 years now and every few years we’re like, “we have to reach out to, you know, the K-12 teachers we have to let them know what's going on in college and blah blah blah…” And it's just we start it and then it never goes anywhere. And it’s so frustrating because you would think it’s so simple but it’s just... it’s hard to get off the ground. Barbara: And we have very different cultures and we have different incentives and different barriers that I think make it really difficult to do what seems like a pretty simple thing but it’s really complex, so, I do think that would be quite, quite the challenge of these recommendations. The one that I think, I feel, would be most fun or exciting is the last one, which is to see this as an opportunity to think about algorithmic literacy as education for democracy. And think about ways that you can find people at your institution who are coming at this from different perspectives and pull them together and try to build a way of educating the community about some of these issues. And I think for librarians and for our instruction programs it's a real opportunity to show leadership because people really are concerned and they're really baffled; they’re like, “I have no idea what to do about this.” Well that’s a great time for us to step in and say, “You know, well as information professionals we do have some ideas and here's some things that we could work on.” Um, I know last, um, the last time I sent out an announcement to the faculty who were teaching the first term seminar. We used to send out “connect with a librarian, we can do these things with your class, we’d like to work with you…” And it was fine, it kind of chugged along for years and years… But we had this idea of let’s create a menu of options. We can talk to your class about fake news, we can talk about copyright, you know, a bunch of things. How do you evaluate sources, how do you… anyway, it was a long ambitious list and I sent it out and then suddenly all the faculty were like, “Yeah! We want to do all of those! [Jessica and Amanda chuckle] “Like can we do the fake news one and I wanna do a copyright one…” And then all my colleagues were like, “Oh my god what did we get ourselves into..” So we had to quickly come up with imaginative ways of talking to first semester students about these issues but it was the best fun and I think for the faculty it was kind of a wake-up call like, “oh so you're not just going to show us databases how wonderful! And you know what, you know, we didn't really know how to tackle this ourselves so this is great.” Uh it was some of the best instruction I experienced in thirty-some years, it was really fun. The other thing is, you know, talking to the students in the focus groups and when I’ve talked to students about these things in classes they’re really interested - they find this fascinating. You know how they can kinda get a little glazed looking when we’re helping them do things to manage that assignment blah blah blah, peer review blah blah blah... I’ve done this before do I have to do it again? You know, we don’t get an opportunity that often to talk about really, kind of, meaty, meaningful, ethical issues so I think in some ways if we can pull this stuff in and draw on their own experiences and their own thoughts about this…. I mean I was really impressed with the way some of the students in the focus groups would start out just talking about like, “oh yeah the ads they follow me around, it’s creepy.” But then when you started, we kind of broaden the conversation to, you know, “what do you think when people are getting different kinds of news because of the way the algorithms are feeding them and what do you think about the way algorithms are influencing things like who gets hired for jobs, and who gets a loan, how long a prison sentence you’re going to get.” That surprised them, like, “oh yeah actually algorithms are being used in these ways.” And they got really engaged. And then they would pull in stuff that they learned in their history courses or sociology, you know some course they took in racism in society or something. And we’re applying all of that knowledge in some really interesting ways to information problems, so. I just think there’s some great opportunities to do some meaningful information literacy work that engages them in those questions. And...and... isn’t going to hurt at all when it comes to doing what they need to do for those courses. Um, although yes there will be times when do they have to use a peer-reviewed source and they’re not allowed to use those other sources but I think it could at least put those things in in conversation with what they're actually experiencing in the rest of their life and maybe give us a chance to talk about what is peer review, why does it matter. Why does scholarship matter, why does it matter that experts weigh in on these things and do so in a way that follows certain ethical guidelines. How does that relate to other kinds of information? So I see great potential here actually, for making life interesting. Jessica: Yeah. So, um, Amanda do you want to ask your question? Cause I think that leads more into what she was just talking about. Amanda: Yeah sure! So, we, you know, it really depends on the environment, but uh, what are some of the first steps librarians should take to start to implement algorithmic education into their classes? We know some of our listeners, you know, teach credit bearing courses over a semester. But the majority of us do one shot instruction. So, how do we get started in incorporating this, um, into our instruction? Barbara: Yeah, I think you're right, there's some real kind of structural and power relationship barriers to being able to do everything that we would like to do. Although I, like I say, faculty were really responding well when we said “hey we can talk about this stuff.” “Oh, great because I have no idea how to talk about it.” I know that we, um, we had, I did a session for a first-term seminar with a colleague about fake news and the teacher afterwards said, “Y'all have to have a course on this, this is really important, you need to teach a course - everybody should take your course!” And of course, that wasn't something you were necessarily prepared to do for the entire campus but it did lead to us developing and proposing a course. And it fits into students schedules, ‘cause it’s just 2 credits, um, and it's “Clickbait, Bias, and Propaganda and Information Networks” so it gave us a chance to really talk about systems and algorithms, and, um, how do you actually find your way through this, and then the students researched and wrote book chapters about the different social media platforms that they were interested in. And so it was a new course, it was not a required course but it gave us some, some chance to try out some things that we could then, maybe part of an exercise or thought into other classes as well. Umm yeah, I think, um, we certainly heard from faculty that they found it hard to know how to relate this to their subject areas, but we did - I interviewed one faculty member who was all over it, he was like, “This ties in beautifully to my subject area, I can use this to engage them with ideas that really then connect to theories about sociology and this is great.” And he was wonderful. And he just spoke in full sentences and just was very passionate about this and said, “Every student should have this.” So he was, he was very refreshing to hear that from. And I think in a lot of cases there are examples we could go in that relate to health sciences, or, um, biology, or certainly political science, statistics, there's so many ways that I think we could take one little thread and plug it in there and say, “And here's a story, you know, that came across recently that is about this issue and what do you think and how do you think that works?” I think just as a way to kind of open up conversations, um, it would be possible to pull that into a number of instructional situations. But it might take a little, a little finesse to try to figure out how to, how to bring that up and fit it in, maybe at the beginning to the start students where they are experiencing information in their lives. And how do you sort through that and what's going on with that, yes, there are these algorithms doing these things. “What do you think about that” before you move into the “And here’s what you need to do to your paper.” Jessica: Right Barbara: Perhaps that would be a way to engage them and also to, you know, kind of pull out some of the, the knowledge they have about the world they're experiencing and fill in some of the gaps that they do definitely have. But particularly if you can find in a one-shot a way to tie it to that topic of the course, the discipline at least, and I think almost everything has something that would connect in some way. And I had - one of the people we interviewed - actually teaches an information literacy course, and was making the case that you can't treat this like a vaccine; you can't teach it once, you can't even have a for-credit, credit bearing course and say, “okay we're done.” This has to be something that comes up again and again and again, because we're here once or twice, it's scary. And you don't want to deal with it, you just wanna like, back away, like, “ugh, I can't deal with that.” Um, I have to use these systems. I don't like what they're doing, but I guess I’ll just try not to remember that I'm using them and what's going out in the background. And so, you know, I really liked what she had to say which said, “Just keep bringing this up through their four years so that they get a chance to practice, and to really think about, you know, that computer they carry in their pocket, what's going on with it and what are the implications and what are the kind of information ethics around the ways that society is using data, these days. Jessica: Right, right. Yeah. [27:51] Barbara: And I think the other thing is for us is to be leaders in terms of helping the faculty learn about this stuff. If you have a faculty development program of some kind or a teaching and learning center. You know, we would be really good people at helping faculty come to terms with this and think about all of the implications that I wish my students were aware of and thinking about, because, you know, they really seem to be looking for some leadership in this area and some guidance. This is stuff that they're concerned about so maybe this is a chance for us to not necessarily just teach the students, but to really work through faculty who have such an influence on student learning that, you know, if we can help them learn about this, maybe they will be able to take some of that and integrate it into their teaching and learning too. Jessica: Yeah. And I think that ties nicely into our last question, because it seems like there's a lot of that helplessness versus I want to change things paradigm kind of in society at large, especially when you look at places like Twitter where people want to post petitions to complain and spread awareness, but at the same time they just surrendered and they're still using Twitter and Facebook and all of those platforms. So, how do we help students who kind of feel that same way of kind of they've surrendered but they're angry about it, push past that threshold of helplessness and really move to change their motivation to the next level, how can we do that as librarians and educators? Barbara: Yeah, and I think that's a really good question because it's not just the students, the faculty too are feeling really lost here. And so I think one thing that we saw students doing was teaching each other about how to protect their privacy. So, you know, bringing that kind of knowledge out and helping each other out is one way of doing it. It shouldn't be on individuals, though, this is a social issue of unequal knowledge and power between us and these companies that we rely on. So I think it would make sense to talk about what can we do, how can we change the culture and how can we, um, how can we be activists about this, how does this connect to the things you care about. And are there ways that we could bring this to, to other people, to build action about this, what kinds of legislation might be considered or is under consideration, because I think it's really important for people not to feel powerless. We held a group of people - an interdisciplinary group of people - who came together to discuss the first findings that we have in this report and one of the people was really into, you know she was saying, “We can't just let them feel helpless, we got to help them with action, you know, moving through their helplessness and realizing they have agency, they can influence society.” A lot of our students are activists. They're, they're really in touch with ideas and they really care. And so, I think, just saying, you know, “We don't have to take it. There are ways to change this. We can push against these things as a society” is really important and helpful, I think, for them too. I'm reading a book by Ruha Benjamin right now, Race After Technology, which does this really good job of analyzing how all of these technologies have a racist element or they can amplify hierarchies and racism in ways that are hidden behind a kind of weird neutrality. Instead of just talking about it as a problem, she's also really interested in solutions and so I haven't finished the book yet but she has a whole lot of... I mean she's really interested in this issue too to say, “You know what, here's some things we can actually concretely do about it.” So I think that would be also worth our thinking about as we work this into our teaching and learning plans for students. Jessica: Right. Right. Exactly. Great. Well, that's all the questions that we have for you and thank you so much for sharing all of this information and your insights into the report. And not only is the report itself really valuable and choc-full of information you had so many resources within, like the “Thinking Leaders” section and things that they recommended so we recommend that everybody read it from start to finish [chuckles]. Barbara: Don't be daunted, it's long but there’s nice little chunks you can take and there's a list of suggested readings and we're feeding new information onto the platform too so that if you want to see what are some new news stories about these issues we're trying to keep it up to date. So yeah, I hope people will get something out of it and if you're really pressed for time there is a 3 page executive summary you can at least take a look at. Amanda: Great, thank you so much! Barbara: Great. Thanks for having me on your podcast! Amanda: We're now going to share a tweet of the week. This week's tweet comes from Jesse Stommel, who tweeted about an article that was recently published about a professor who makes his students turn in cell phones at the beginning of the class. Um, this tweet was interesting to me on several levels, first because he decided not to share the article, in, in his tweet, so I had to go and find out who he was talking about at first. And then, um, I really thought it was interesting, um, how, there were so many points, wrote up about the article and I think what was interesting to me is that this is still happening in classrooms, because to me I mean there's studies and, in, in this tweet chain that we'll link to in the show notes. So many people list all of these studies that talk about how cell phones are a great way to engage with students, when it’s appropriate and in dynamic ways. Yet people are still having these conversations that, um, we shouldn't be using cell phones in the classroom. Another thing that I thought was really interesting was that people were writing comments on this article on the website of the publication, and the author, actually, was responding to people's individual comments. Jessica: Whoa that's interesting. Amanda: I thought that was kind of intense so it's been an intense week. A lot of people have been talking about this piece. Jessica: Yeah, that is, his tweet was definitely powerful and so were a lot of the responses that people had to it. And I liked some of the questions that he brought up because as you said this is a problem that's been happening for a while. And he brings up these questions like, people should be asking, professors should be asking, who are our students? Why are they here in our classrooms, what challenges did they face, getting there, what level of basic respect do teachers and institutions owe to students? How does that basic respect help them learn? I mean, I consider myself, if I was going to college, and my son was in daycare, I would want my phone to be able to make sure that if anything happened… I mean it did happen. A couple of weeks ago my daycare lost power, and they said I had to get my son in three hours if it didn't come back. So, if I was in a three hour class, what would have happened? And a lot of people were tweeting about the fact that that's, you know, it's racist, it’s against those in a different socioeconomic status, people have families and things that they need to - this is how we live now, right? So we need to adapt instead of penalizing our students in this way and as Jesse said you know have that basic level of respect for our students. It was, um, an interesting chain. Amanda: Absolutely. Jessica: And that's it for episode number nine. We hope you enjoyed it. So here's where you can find us. You can find the podcast: @Librarian_Guide on Twitter. You can find me, Jessica, at @librarygeek611. You can find Amanda at @HistoryBuff820. And you can email the podcast at [email protected]. Be sure to rate and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen! Amanda: You can also send us an email or a tweet to share your questions, um, ideas for potential discussion, or your triumphs and fails in the classroom. Or suggestions for a tweet of the week. You can also hashtag your tweets with #LibrariansGuideToTeaching.
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About the podcast:The LGT podcast is hosted by two instruction librarians interested in sharing their experiences teaching information literacy, discussing current trends, and having meaningful conversations about librarianship. Archives
May 2021
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