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Chapter 1

The Information Literacy Argument

Before newspapers, radio, and television, much of human information gathering was done on a one-to-one level, through local word of mouth. Eventually, this was supplanted by the beginnings of the analog information world, which started in earnest with ink on paper. Books, magazines, newspapers, fliers and leaflets, dictionaries, encyclopedias, folding maps, and other paper-based materials comprised the vast majority of our analog information space. Creating and distributing these materials was expensive, and large companies and international distribution channels emerged to move paper from point A to points B and C: think printing presses and delivery trucks and bookstores and newsstands and libraries.

We evolved a few other information channels as well. Telegraphs and telephones were great for point-to-point communication but didn’t work very well for reaching the collective masses. Radio and television became ubiquitous, but as with their ink-on-paper counterparts, distribution was costly. Nearly every citizen could (and did) access radio and television content, but few had the resources to create and disseminate that content via transmission towers and network contracts.

Because of these distribution inefficiencies, information had only a few sources: those few commercial and government entities powerful or wealthy enough to afford a printing press, a broadcast station, or syndication rights could transmit it. In the analog world, nearly all of us were passive consumers of whatever information those entities decided that we should read, listen to, or watch.

These analog information channels are all still in existence as of the writing of this book. But digital and online channels—the so-called “cloud” that we can access through laptops, tablets, smartphones, and the Internet—are rapidly replacing them. This digital landscape creates new affordances and challenges for us as informed citizens. In this chapter, we will examine these new ways of communicating and accessing information, and consider how they offer new opportunities for collaboration.

New Ways of Communicating and Accessing Information

With digital information that moves at the speed of light, we can communicate in ways that are unhindered by geography and time. There are profound ramifications to this collapse of time and distance in normal human interactions. We regularly connect with individuals and communities across the planet, which urgently ratchets up our need to be globally aware citizens. In the 20th century, students often learned about people in other cultures through stereotypical presentations of those cultures’ food and holidays. But in the digital world, our ability to interact with our peers in other countries requires us to go far beyond such minimal levels of awareness in order to achieve a deeper understanding and appreciation of who those peers are and how they think.

We connect more easily not only to people but also to pieces of information. In the analog world, only one person can own the original of a piece of information (such as a book, a document, or a map), and replicas may be inferior or expensive. In a digital world, however, we can all own the original, and often for free, with no degradation in quality even as quantity scales. These capabilities have facilitated unprecedented access to the world’s sum of knowledge, but they’ve also stretched our conception of scarcity and put unbelievable stress on increasingly antiquated conceptions of copyright and intellectual property. They’re also in direct conflict with most schools’ thinking regarding collaboration, cheating, citation, and plagiarism.

Even as copyright faces challenges, we have new and vital abilities to be content creators. We can all have a voice, and we can all express that voice at a previously unimaginable scale. As The Cluetrain Manifesto notes way back in 2000, “There’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening [before]…. There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being” (Levine, Locke, Searls, & Weinberger, 2000, p. 36). In the early 21st century, a twelve-year-old may be able to reach the same potential audience as a major media company. The implications of that for schools are enormous and almost completely unrealized.

Opportunities for Collaboration

We can not only communicate but also collaborate with others to create new value for our mutual benefit. We are witnessing the rapid rise not just of the cloud but also of the crowd. Crowdsourcing allows individuals who are geographically distributed but connected by their interests and passions to come together and, bit by bit, create enormous aggregated value. These include projects like Wikipedia and The Huffington Post, reviews on sites such as Amazon and TripAdvisor, marketplaces like Craigslist and Etsy, videos at BrickFilms and in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scratch programming community, tutorials at WikiHow and on YouTube, fan resources and stories at Wikia and FanFiction, business solutions generated at InnoCentive and 99designs, and citizen science projects at Galaxy Zoo and Project Noah—none of which would be possible in the analog world.

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing’s cousin, allows individuals to raise money directly from other people rather than through financial institutions. For example, the Kiva microlending service aggregates small financial contributions to help people in the developing world better themselves and their communities. Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe allow inventors, artists, and students to raise money for their projects without having to go to venture capital firms. DonorsChoose and Experiment.com allow teachers and scientists to crowdfund their needs. There are many more examples, and if you aren’t familiar with the websites noted in these last two paragraphs, consider visiting some of them to understand our new crowd-related possibilities.

Is this shift in the way we share and relate to information unprecedented in history? According to Tom Standage (2013), today’s new tools in many respects represent a return to humanity before the 20th century shift to mass media, back when ideas and information were primarily shared through individual word of mouth. In effect, many areas of today’s information landscape now eliminate the authority of traditional media outlets, replacing them with individual producers who create and disseminate content via mobile phones, social media, and online platforms. Whereas our analog information landscape used to be centralized, limited by distance, and dominated by a few publishers and broadcasting networks, our new digital information landscape is decentralized, borderless, and highly distributed. Each of us is an information node and an information hub. Free content becomes a business model (Anderson, 2009; Jarvis, 2009). Privacy becomes a challenge.

This decentralization has already required corporations and politicians to be more transparent and accountable. It also has helped upend governments, as with the Arab Spring in 2010 and 2011, during which activists in the Middle East coordinated their actions and shared information through Twitter and other social media platforms in an attempt to overthrow the repressive leadership of several nations, including Egypt, Syria, and Libya.

In short, the power of information in our digital landscape is greater than ever before, yet our means for assessing the validity and authority of that information have changed. As a result, although the digital landscape empowers individuals as producers, it also requires them, as consumers, to master the skills of information filtering and critical thinking to a historically unprecedented degree.

There is no foreseeable future in which printed words—expensive and isolated—reassert their dominance over digital information—ubiquitous, cheap, and connected to the wider world. But in most classrooms, we still pretend otherwise. Schools serve many societal functions, but one of their primary roles is to help students master the dominant information landscape of their time. Giving students the skills to take advantage of and thrive in this new information landscape is one of the challenges that our schools must address.

Schools are supposed to prepare graduates with the knowledge to navigate the larger society outside school walls. Right now, we’re largely failing on this front. To succeed, we must make schools different.

Practical Steps and Strategies

• Treat information literacy and technology fluency as essential student learning outcomes. For example, technological proficiency is one of the essential Schoolwide Learning Outcomes at deeper learning school New Tech High (see chapter 7, page 44). Educators there regularly assess for it as part of their students’ project-based learning.