Research in the Global Village

My seventh grade students are currently hard at work on a project that will serve as a capstone for our unit on the question, How are mysteries solved? The project requires students to work in groups to investigate modern-day mysteries of their own choosing and to create a website that provides an overview of the different theories related to that mystery. To do this, they must put into practice skills that we have been developing over the last few weeks – testing reliability of sources, gathering evidence and warrants before making claims, and looking for natural explanations before supernatural ones.

Today, as students were working, I overheard one group discussing the reliability of a video they had found on YouTube. The clip showed a shaky handheld shot of a body of water, out of which sprung a large creature that was supposed to be the Loch Ness Monster. The students couldn’t agree on whether or not the video was real or fake, so they asked me for help.

I found myself in a difficult position. You see, the clip is actually taken from a movie called The Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep – a fact I knew immediately because I used to work for the company that produced the film. I could tell these students this and solve their problem right away, but that wouldn’t really teach them anything about testing the reliability of a website or video when a teacher is not present. And yet, there was no distinct skill that I could have taught them that would have helped them see through the façade of the video – the clip was created to look real in order to promote the feature film. It was posted online to attract viewers to see the movie without drawing attention to the fact that the image itself was fabricated. And thus, a company’s fun viral marketing campaign now lies at the center of a debate between seventh graders struggling to contextualize an exciting video with their research.

I share this anecdote because, upon further reflection, I think this is an example of one of the complications inherent in teaching research skills in the 21st century. For all the convenience that digital technologies provide us with, they have democratized information to the point where they have actually made the process of learning and understanding far more complicated. In an article for CNN last month, NCTE past president Carol Jago commented on the ways that some forms of technology can fail to meet our expectations in the classroom. “Many of us thought the digital revolution was going to expand students’ worlds,” she says, “because, theoretically, it could give them access to the globe.” And to some extent, it does – but we need only to look at the misinformation we are exposed to locally in the course of a day to realize that expanding our scope to a global scale would also cause the misinformation we encounter to grow exponentially. 

It is easy to think of the Internet as the latest progression of technology and therefore, an important tool for students to use in the classroom whenever possible. However, this line of thinking ignores the fact that, historically, new media are rarely tools that are simply used. In fact, they often have a way of using and shaping those who use them. Particularly when it comes to literacy.

Emerging Literacies: From the Oral Word to the Digital Word

Thousands of years ago, preliterate societies were dominated by the oral tradition. The idea of research as we understand it was essentially nonexistent; information was shared through (sometimes contradictory) stories, proverbs, songs, and familiar sentence templates. It is from out of this tradition that the alphabet is born, which brings with it the era of primary literacy – and along with it, the freedom to record thoughts and ideas for posterity.

This new technology – the read and written word – had an immense impact on the workings of the human brain. Not only does reading and writing open us up to the concept of research, it demands self-restraint in the act of learning that was never before required. In primary literacy, sentences, paragraphs, and pages unfold gradually in sequence and according to complex logical constructions before reaching an eventual conclusion. Furthermore, with the advent of literacy, the student who is researching in a print-based society is obligated to be constantly evaluating the validity of sentences (or to strategically suspend critical judgement) in a way that the oral tradition did not demand.

All of this to say: a literate person doing research in a print-based society must be both reflective and analytical, patient and assertive, open and skeptical. These are challenging behaviors to learn, which is why we traditionally scaffold the research process by teaching students summarization before paraphrasing and paraphrasing before criticism. This is also why we don’t give seventh graders complex literary criticism or scientific journals to examine when they research. We cannot expect students to be equipped to contextualize the information therein in order for it to become genuine understanding.

This brings us to the Internet. As a medium, the Internet and the digital word (when used for research, at least) borrow elements of the primary literate tradition in that they require discipline and attention on the student’s part. However, by its nature, the Internet also presents immense challenges in order for the student to be able to muster such attention.

The first reason is simple enough – the Internet is distracting. It is a medium that has shaped its users to expect information quickly and easily. It is also a medium that has gives its users the illusion that they can successfully multitask while still learning effectively – e.g. having multiple windows open, switching between them rapidly, etc. (Of course, multitasking often results in doing things poorly with great efficiency). Because students are conditioned to this way of using the Internet, they must be instructed on how to be a disciplined reader in a digital environment. This is not an easy task – many students need to unlearn bad habits that have formed over years of passive Internet use.

The second (and more insidious) reason that the Internet often inhibits student understanding in the research process is the lack of a clear hierarchy of information. In a print-based culture, the linear way of taking in information and the challenges in building the attitude and discipline of a skilled reader in order to advance to more complicated texts have served as a barrier between childhood and adulthood. This barrier is not a bad thing. An important part of childhood is gradually developing the skills needed to be a mature and thoughtful adult. In this sense, learning in the classroom ought to be a subtractive task. The teacher’s role is not to immerse the students in EVERYTHING about a subject, but rather, to provide the amount of information that students are developmentally capable of contextualizing and understanding.

The challenge of the Internet is that it is designed to do the opposite. The Internet functions to make decontextualized information accessible to everyone. It does not segregate its audience. The search results for an adult are the same as the search results for a seventh grader. As such, students are often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sites that show up in their online research – let alone the daunting task of evaluating the validity of such sites (or Loch Ness monster videos, as the case may be).

This is all a roundabout way of saying that, as an educator, I think an important part of the job is to teach students to interact with a medium thoughtfully. We must be willing to model for our students the ability to weigh the costs and benefits of using a particular technique. The fact that the Internet is so pervasive in society that students struggle to image what life was like before widely accessible high-speed Internet suggests that it is important that we engage students in inquiry about the fundamental use and usefulness of the medium. The Internet as a powerful resource for learning, but it is also as a powerful resource for tricking fools into thinking they are learning. Students need to see the Internet not as some kind of technological panacea, but as an aggregate of information distinct from the concept of knowledge. After all, unless students can contextualize the information that they encounter online, it can never lead to knowledge. Much less wisdom.

References

Logan, Robert. The Alphabet Effect. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.

Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982.

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 1982.