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Critical Thinking Information literacy Social media

Review of The Filter Bubble by Eli Parizer

I just finished reading The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser. It offeres a very interesting exploration into using various search tools and how we find the information that is central to our daily lives.

His main argument has to do with how “filters bubbles” emerge from the algorithms that supply the search results or news feeds for social media websites. Since 2009, Google for example supplies search results that are geared specifically to the user making the query. Gone are the days of obtaining “absolute” Google search results based on our terms (where everyone would see the same results). Now, the results we see are “relative” to our likes and features, as seen by Google – our browser, the location of where we are, and about 50 other variables Google uses to identify us as individuals. So, if two people type in the same keywords, they would see different results based on who they are. The Facebook “News Feed” works the same way, and Pariser has reason to believe that this is applied to other websites as well.

Here are some reading notes and quotes I found really interesting:

The filter bubble introduces 3 dynamics (p.9-10): “we are already in it”, “it is invisible” and “you don’t choose to enter the bubble”. In conjunction of how much information we produce, this leads to what Steve Rubel calls the attention crash (p.11).

On “our information diet” : “By definition, a world constructed from the familiar is a world in which there’s nothing to learn.” (p.15) In Robert Putman’s Bowling Alone, we are loosing (p.17) the “bonding capital” (being alike, creating bridges) and “bridging capital” (being able to talk to people not like us).

Facebook’s EdgeRank uses three variables: affinity (how much time we send interacting with someone); the relative weight of the content (relationship status updates vs. pokes); and recency (p.38).

“If trust i news agency is falling, it is rising in the new realm of amateur and algorithmic curation” (p. 66)

The CIA book on information analysis by Heuer (p. 81): The psychology of intelligence analysis also, check out this free version from the CIA website.

“Personalization can get in the way of creativity and innovation in three ways. First, the filter bubble artificially limits the size of our “solution horizon” – the mental space in which we search for solutions to problems. Second, the information environment inside the filter bubble will tend to lack some of the key traits that spur creativity. Creativity is a context dependent trait: We’re more likely to come up with new ideas in some environments than others; the contexts that filtering creates aren’t the ones best suited to creative thinking. Finally, the filter bubble encourages a more passive approach to information, which is a odds with the kind of exploration that leads to discovery.” (p. 94) Mentions The Art of Creation by Arthur Koestler.

Creativity generally has two parts: generative thinking (reshuffling and recombining) ; convergent thinking (survey options) (p. 103)

“If a self-fulfilling prophecy is a false definition of the world that through one’s actions becomes true, we’re now on the verge of self-fulfilling identities” (p. 112). […] “On sirens and children” by Yochai Benkler (p.112) “Autonomy, Benkler points out, is a tricky concept: To be free, you have to to be able not only to do what you want, but to know what’s possible to do.”

“fundamental attribution error. We tend to attribute peoples’ behavior to their inner traits and personality rather than to the situation they’re placed in,” (p. 116)

“In the future, we want to be all well-rounded, well-informed intellectual virtuoso, but right now we want to watch Jersey Shore. Behavioral economists call this present bias – the gap between your preferences for your future self and your preferences in the current moment.” (p. 117)

“Priming effect” (p. 124) – getting people to learn a sequence of words with a theme primes them to think in a way.

“With information as with food, we are what we consume. […] Your identity shapes your media, and your media then shapes what you believe and what you care about. […] You become trapped in a you loop” (p. 125)

“If identity loops aren’t counteracted through randomness and serendipity, you could end up stuck in the foothills of your identity” (p.127) – adapted from Matt Cohler’s “Local-Maximum Problem” – when trying to maximize something – try to go up a mountain, you should always rise – byt you could be stuck on a hill next to the mountain.

Overfitting: being stuck in a class that does not fit us – “a regression to the social norm” (p. 129) “But the overfitting problem gets to one of the central, irreducible problems of the filter bubble: Stereotyping and overfitting are synonyms” (p.131) The problem of finding a pattern in the data that is there and the problem of finding a pattern that is really not there.

David Hume and Karl Popper in the induction problem (p.133) All swans I see are white, therefore all swans are white.

“Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose Notes from the Underground was a passionate critique of the utopian scientific rationalism of the day.” (p. 135) “But algorithmic induction can lead to a kind of information determinism” (p.135)

“China’s objective isn’t so much to blot out unsavory information as to alter the physics around it – to create friction for problematic information and to route public attention to progovernment forums. While it can’t block all of the people from all of the news all of the time, it doesn’t need to. «What the government cares about,» Atlantic journalist James Fellows writes, «is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother» The strategy, says Xiao Qiang of the University of California at Berkeley, is «about social control, human survailance, peer pressure, and self-censorship.»” (p.139)

“James Mulvenon, the head of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, puts it this way: ” There’s a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they’re looking at everything.” (p. 140)

On governments manipulate the truth “Rather than simply banning certain words or opinions outright, it’ll increasingly revolve around second-order censorship – the manipulation of curation, context, and the flow of information and attention.” (p.141)

Sir Francis Bacon = “Knowledge is power” “If knowledge is power, then asymmetries in knowledge are asymmetries in power” (p. 147)

David Bohm On Dialogue “To communicate, Bohm wrote, literally means to make something common” (p.162-3) Jurgen Habermas “the dean of media theory for much of the twentieth century, had similar views”

«Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral”» (p.188)

“In this book, I’ve argued that the rise of pervasive, embedded filtering is changing the way we experience the Internet and ultimately the world. […] Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away.” (p. 218-9)

“Appointing an independent ombudsman and giving the world more insight into how the powerful filtering algorithms work would be an important first step.” (p. 231)

Blended Learning Google Information literacy

Google’s Search Education

“Pssst… you may want to check out Google’s Free classes called Power Searcher…” said my colleague’s email. Although I know, use and teach many of Google’s advanced features, I could not resist to test-drive their online learning platform and initiative.

In a quick take, the site is streamlined and the tone is consensual, unscripted yet structured and slightly too slow. I also love the design of the class site, elegant and uncluttered, in true Google fashion :

Classes in a course

Lessons in a class

Lessons in a class

I also like the pace, or how all learning objects are integrated in the flow of the initiative. Each lesson, a 3 to 8 minute video, is followed by activities, usually multiple-choice of short answer questions. Learners are also called upon to open new tabs and perform steps outside of the environment.

Also, videos start with a slide, showed for 3 or 5 seconds, that cover the learning objectives/outcomes of the lesson. Daniel Russell, Senior Research Scientist at Google, provides for en engaging series of videos. Usually, the focus is on slides from a Presentation with his “talking head” in a smaller window – this is the same setup I use for my own training videos.

Now, the only criticism I can provide is the subtext of the presentation. Now, this is a corporate learning initiative, so I was expecting to get fed a lot of Google products (this actually – surprisingly – is quite pleasantly accomplished). But what slowly got on my nerves is that Daniel Russell assumes gingerly that everything you would ever wish to find is on the free web, indexed by Google.

To be fair, in one activity, he did point out that you may have to use another search system (in that case, a statistics database from a governmental agency) to locate your answer. Now, this issue is probably too much on my mind because I try to get University students to look beyond the free web for their papers…

Honestly, this criticism is very personal and I want to congratulate and thank Daniel Russell and the folks at Google for this engaging, interesting and relevant tour of their “Data garden” – Merci !

Critical Thinking Information literacy Inspiration

Reading notes: Information Diet by Clay Johnson

I just finished reading Clay Johnson’s book called The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. The author provides for a light and interesting read, somewhere between a personal account, a self-help book and a deeper analysis of information consumption. I highly recommend it to anyone working on information literacy.

My favorite quote comes at p.120: “Hummanity’s darkest moments are the ones in which masses of people had the worst information diets.”

Johnson uses a driving analogy between the food we eat (i.e. our diet) and the information we consume. He quickly dismisses the phrase “information overload” as misleading – as with obesity, we are responsible for the information we consume :

It’s not information overload, it’s information overconsumption that’s the problem. Information overload means somehow managing the intake of vast quantities of information in new and more efficient ways. Information overconsumption means we need to find new ways to be selective about our intake. It is very difficult, for example, to overconsume vegetables. (p.26)

The author then points out, in chapter 3 (“Big Info”) that the major corporations in charge of producing news have slowly but surely affirmed their strategy to “give people what they want: entertainment and affirmation” (p.31) rather than balanced facts. Entertainment is self-explanatory but affirmation means providing reinforcement for pre-existing beliefs – neither ofwhich qualify as balanced fact-based news.

Still in chapter 3, Johnson covers “content farms” who aim to (1) drive traffic to a site, (2) maximize ad-revenue, (3) on low turn-around time with (4) a modicum of editorial quality (p.35). This leads new model is possible because of a software system called BlogSmith which looks at search queries in real time and identifies breaking, seasonal or evergreen topics. “It’s journalism, commoditized.” (p.36) He also decries in 2008 there were 69300 news analysts versus 275000 public relations specialists, creating a system where the professionals responsible for our news suffer from their own kind of obesity that leads to churnalism (p.40) – the tendency to plagiarize press releases and calling it news.

Based on this prognosis, Johnson dives in the social psychology behind our unhealthy information consumption habits in his forth chapter. “[D]elusion comes from psychological phenomena like heuristics, conformation bias, and cognitive dissonance.” (p.45) A heuristic is a rule of thumb, confirmation bias is the tendency to overvalue information that confirms our point of view (all the while disregarding what attacks it) and we hate cognitive dissonance – according to Wikipedia – “discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously.” Johnson even links searching to a dopamine inducing process: “We’re information consumption machines that evolved in a world where information about survival was scarce.” (p.51)

Johnson’ 5th chapter covers the central theme of his book: information obesity. “Through trial and error, our media companies have figured out what we want, and are giving it to us. It turns out, the more they give it to us, the more we want it. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. […] The result is a public that’s being torn apart, only comfortable hearing the reality that’s unique to their particular tribe. […] It’s a new kind of ignorance epidemic: information obesity.” (p.54)

“The new ignorance has three flavors – all of which lead us to information obesity: agnotology, epistemic closure and filter failure” (p.58) efering to Robert Proctor, a historian at Stanford University, Johnson defines agnotology “as the study of culturally induced doubt, particularly through the production of seemingly factual data. It’s a modern form of manufactured ignorance.” (p.58) Similarly, epistemic closure is, quoting Julian Sanchez of the CATO Institute,

“Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of had because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.”(p.59)

Johnson states “Epistemic closure is a tool that empowers agnotological ignorance. As certain information is produced, all other sources of information are dismissed as unreliable or worse, conspiratorial” (p.60). Finally, filter bubbles refers to Eli Pariser’s eponymous book (The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You) and emerge from “the network of personalization technology that figures out what you want and keeps feeding you that at the expense of what you don’t want.” (p.61)

The first part of Johnson’s book closes with the symptoms of information obesity (chapter 6): apnea (how notifications of new email of text messages on your cell phone change your vital signs); a poor sense of time; attention fatigue; loss of social breadth; distorted sense of reality and brand loyalty.

The second part of Johnson’s book covers his “information diet” – and has the definite (and slightly annoying) tone of a self-help book.

Johnson’s 7th chapter covers data literacy – which has “four main components – you need to know how to search, you need to know how to filter and process, you need to know how to produce, and you need to know how to synthesize” (p. 80) For searching, he points out the value of government information. For filtering, he quoted from a Knight commission report called Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age.

Attention Fitness is the crux of Johnson’s 8th chapter. Willpower can be improved but only by measuring our current state and providing for an information consumption plan or budget. One must eliminate interruption technologies and focus on giving us some productive time while planning to spend time of social media a few minutes on the hour. This training can take time, increasing the amount of productive work in relation to distractive tasks – all the while keeping moments to pause or exercise.

Of course, having a strong sense of humor keeps us sane and allows us to consider all options – particularly the least probable or anticipated, as Johnson explains in his 9th chapter, quoting from Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, MIT Press.

Johnson’s 10th chapter provides details on how to consume and proposes an audacious (but tongue-in-cheek) scheme to provide “nutritional” labels in information products – very much as we have for food. In reality, one should consume consciously, that is by controlling our information intake and its source. Keeping a clean habit includes such important advice as to cut one’s subscription to cable television in order to purchase items à la carte. Keeping a journal is also a good idea – as it provides measurable feedback. Other bits of advice include consuming local (p.108), low-ad (p.111), diverse – mainly Khan Academy, TED Talks and Kickstarter (p.113-5) and balanced (p.115) sources.

Johnson’s conclusion (Part III – Social Obesity) attempts to depict the how his scheme might impact the political and social climate in the USA. Of interest in Chapter 11 (the participation Gap) is his take on transparency’s dark side:

“You can simply claim to be transparent, and create a halo of honesty about you, without actually being honest.
Two factors empower this dark side of transparency. […] The first is the deluge of information and facts disguised as entertainment. Even the most open and transparent systems must compete with buckets of information that are more interesting. The second is our poor information diets – that we choose information we want to hear over information that reveals the truth makes the competition all the more difficult.(p.132)

Johnson continues:

“[T]he thruth is that citizen-focused transparency initiatives have a miserable track record of fighting corruption. And citizens have a miserable track record of using those initiatives to make rational decisions about the people they elect.
Transparency isn’t a replacement for integrity and honesty; it’s an infrastructural tool that allows for those attributes to occur – but only if the public is willing [to] act upon the information that they recieve as a result of transparency in a conscious, deliberate way.” (p. 134)

and :

“The greatest political ideas have come from the constant search for synthesis and pragmatism, and the foundation of democracy is constant public participation. (p. 137)

Our information consumption habits thus shape the economics of information production – that is how we can shape the future of available information at the societal level.

Johnson closes with a letter to programmers and software developers – the “new” scribes that rule our information world, with a call to get involved in local and social issues with their skills – to fix real problems.

Blended Learning Concordia University Information literacy

Thoughts on a university library’s role in blended learning

We had a very interesting meeting today with Concordia’s Center for Teaching & Learning. The goal of the presentation was to explore partnership ideas, but we also discussed how the Library could contribute to a blended learning initiative at our institution.

Here are some thoughts about the blended learning environment (I purposefully use the environment paradigm, which I borrow from systems theory as posited by Luhmann)

Firstly, the main point brought was the idea of a “learning object” – a concept that we did not quite hammer out. I would offer this personal definition : a learning object is a type of document that presents information or knowledge to enable a learner to achieve a specific outcome. A learning object may (recursively) contain one or many other learning objects. Templates are useful tools to present this information or knowledge in a structured way. A learning object repository is a collection of curated learning objects, with associated metadata.

Secound, I would like to point out that there are many agents in this environment : the learners (obviously), the instructor or their assistant, the content owners and the system administrators. Each one of them has a role to play in the conception, organisation and provision of learning objects to learners.

Of course, the goal would be to identify all the learning objects and all the agents that are relevant in this environment. It may be easier to start with all the distinct templates of learning objects (as there may be too many learning objects).

Which now brings me to this conceptual model:
Collaborative Document Management Framework

I devised this model during the course of my graduate degree in law (I’ve explained it on this blog post) and I’ve presented it at an IFLA Pre-Conference.

Now, this model tries to map out the Web 2.0 environment – I will make the claim that “blended learning” is functionally equivalent to Web 2.0 on a conceptual level (sorry for not prouving this point thoroughly – more on that later perhaps).

It is defined as 2 elements, documents and agents, interacting through 4 generic relationships: linking (document-document); conversations or intermediations (agent-agent); using (document-agent); and contributing (agent-document). This is meaningful in a discussion of a library’s role in a blended learning environment as is helps define exactly where it may be useful.

Specifically, I find that the priority is to identify areas where librarians may be contributing content – creating learning objects, followed closely to linking these learning objects to form paths through the knowledge base. Finally, librarians may play a role in the conversations that may happen in the environment between the various agents (focussing, as a priority, with the conversations that happen with the gatekeepers of knowledge: instructors and their assistants).

Of course, this is an off the cuff exploration of a complex topic, where I pin some broad concepts on a simplification of the real world. But it makes sense ! Please feel free to share comments or questions below…

Special thanks to Pamela Carson and Vince Graziano, two colleagues from Concordia University Libraries, for our very interesting conversation that was instrumental in organizing this post.

Information literacy Read Me Reference

New CAIJ issue: innovation, uncertainty and perceptions

The Canadian Association of Information Science has delivered its latest issue of its Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science (via Project Muse on behalf of UT Press, the publisher), vol. 35 issue 4.

A few articles seem particularly interesting, such as:

Enhancing Skills, Effecting Change: Evaluating an Intervention for Students with Below-Proficient Information Literacy Skills / Renforcer les compétences pour induire des changements : évaluation d’une intervention auprès d’étudiants possédant des compétences informationnelles inférieures à la maîtrise
Don Latham
Melissa Gross
pp. 157-173

and

Subject Guides in Academic Libraries: A User-Centred Study of Uses and Perceptions/Les guides par sujets dans les bibliothèques académiques : une étude des utilisations et des perceptions centrée sur l’utilisateur
Dana Ouellette
pp. 226-241

Of course, all articles seem interesting, but there is so little time to read everything!

Information literacy Inspiration

Some MERLOT with PRIMO for inspiration

This post presents the PRIMO (Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online) and the MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Teaching and Learning) projects.

PRIMO
Under the ALA/ACRL umbrella, one can find the PRIMO Committee of the Instruction section. Of the many things they do, they offer a database of Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online – aka the PRIMO database.

Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online Database

I remember in the past that a team at Concordia University Libraries (of which I was a member) was awarded the “site of the month” award for June 2006 from the PRIMO Committee for our InfoResearch 101 project.

MERLOT
I remember stumbling on the MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Teaching and Learning) repository about a year ago. It contained a few interesting sites relating to business, such as Stanford’s Educators Corner or the Beginner’s Guide to Business Research.

According to their site, MERLOT is a

MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy. MERLOT is a leading edge, user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

Information literacy

InfoLit under any other name…

Information literacy as a standard has been articulated in various ways, mostly drawing from the seminal work of Bloom and his taxonomy (classification) of learning objectives.

Beyond the ACRL standards, which are the omnipresent tool for academic libraries in North-America, one can find the SCONUL (british research libraries) has the 7 pilars model or the UNESCO Information Literacy indicators.

Schools can draw on the ALA has the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and closer to home, a team at Concordia University’s Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP) has developed the ISIS-21 model, which looks like this:
ISIS-21 Inquiry Process

In addition, the inspired researcher on the issue could look beyond the education world for a sense of information literacy. The Conference Board of Canada (a think tank) has developed the “Employability Skills 2000+” framework, which lists the desired skills one should have to evolve in the workforce. For example, it lists under “Fundamental Skills” :

Manage Information
• locate, gather and organize information using appropriate technology and information systems
• access, analyze and apply knowledge and skills from various disciplines (e.g., the arts, languages, science, technology, mathematics, social sciences, and the humanities)
Use Number

Or, the Government of Canada published in 2002 Knowledge Matters: Skills and Learning for Canadians, which highlights the imperatives for developing skills in the new economy. One can also find a trace on the importance of skills in the 2009 Business Plan for Indutry Canada, where strategy 2 involves “fostering the knowledge-based economy through enhanced research and innovation, training and skills” – all nice things one could broadly place in the catch all concept of information literacy.