Manderina and Castek (2008) write that there hasn’t been any other time in history when “human’s have had such… [immediate]… access to information in multiple forms”. To this statement, I add that at no other time in history have human’s had such access to information that can be plausibly falsified. Although it has been the prerogative of state entities to falsify information in the supposed “interests” of the state, this information upon closer perusal, could be (we believed) identified as doctored or unoriginal. Furthermore, most falsified information was in the form of written, verbal texts which could be believed or not, depending upon the reader’s inclination and beliefs. The onset of digital image manipulation has completely changed the way we can and should view perception.
Although image manipulation has been used historically, from Stalin’s Russia, when “mass alteration of photographs was undertaken to purge Stalin’s enemies from history books” to more recent occurrences such as “the composite photograph of John Kerry and Jane Fonda standing together at an antiwar demonstration” printed by the Times, the technology in current use is far more advanced and is accessible to commercial digital manipulation platforms (Rothman, 2018, p. 35). What do these changes in technology and advances in artificial intelligence mean for understanding images at large and in classrooms. Can any image be relied upon as evidence of truth? What are the markers of original images? And to what extent has this technology been reproduced in other digital platforms? This is a serious questions that we need to ask as both citizens and educators since human’s tend to rely on the ‘evidence of their eye’s’ as something irrevocably factual.
Furthermore, in exploring the notion of digital multi-literacies and disciplinary literacy (Manderina and Castek, 2016), we must also ask ourselves if we are equipped to deal with this onslaught of information that we as educators do not have the expertise to examine as forensic experts. When we present information to our students from different media, how can we determine if the images and media we use are authentic? These are very serious questions and must be reflected upon as our Defense agencies are advancing research into these questions.
DARPA or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a program in media forensics in 2016, whose goal was to investigate potential risks to national security. These risks included “synthesis of events that didn’t happen. Multiple images and videos taken from different perspectives …constructed in such a way that they look like they come from different cameras”, providing additional plausibility to falsified videos, “created by national, large, low-resource, groups or individuals”. (Rothman, 2018, p. 40) Now more than ever do we need to change the focus of curricula from standardized testing based factual information to critical literacies. Lankshear and Knobel (2008) advocate the conceptualization of digital literacies as an extension of the ways in which we think about standard literacy; the ability to read and write in different media, while being able to critically assess the viability of the information being given.
All information is laden with values and we must accept that human’s are value laden beings that build their own knowledge on the basis of previous knowledge frameworks. New information is assessed by our cognitive structures on the basis of knowledge acquired. If the knowledge acquired previously, is based on falsified information, then all knowledge built upon a system of false premises must be false. It has become increasingly urgent to make our students aware of the pitfalls of the threats of media manipulation, that are now used frequently by malicious individuals and groups in anonymity.
Lankshear and Knobel (2008) also discuss literature that divides the purposes of introducing multiliteracies as part of our classroom learning experiences. These are the acquisition of technical skills and socio-emotional learning. Gee (2004, 2013) has also written extensively about the value of using games within k-12 classrooms, citing its increasing and very effective use in the military as well as college science courses. I believe that both technical skills and socio-emotional learning are an intrinsic part of the learning that occurs through immersion. The notion of ‘flow’ referred to by Kist (2000) reflects this aspect of learning, which can only occur through deep engagement in the tasks being performed. Kist (2000) re-imagines the K-12 classroom as studios that allow students to learn through an apprenticeship model; excellent ideas that cannot be implemented within the existential crisis that exists within school districts and institutional systems. A crisis that has been created by a concerted effort to de-value the purposes of taxation and social spending. What do current teachers do at a time like this? How do they incorporate the ideas propagated by researchers arguing for the inclusion of multi-literacies in classrooms, for the purposes of engagement, learning and future implementation?
Furthermore, have we as educators, articulated for ourselves, the purposes and goals of the educational opportunities that we think we are going to provide to students, in a rapidly changing globalized economic system? And most importantly, what do educators need to do to equip themselves with the skills and knowledge, that will enable them to be the masters that can provide their students with the modeling necessary for learning in apprenticeship based classrooms? Is it even plausible to entertain these expectations from teacher educator or do we need to start re-thinking the teacher education program? When Kist (2000) describes classrooms as studios, placing teachers as experts of content and media, I believe, this has serious implications for the future of teacher education. A need for deeper content learning as well as, learning ways of implementing this deeper learning into practical artifacts, that are meaningful, both in the classroom as well as the real world. After all, isn’t that the ultimate purpose of a digital multi-literacy based education; to equip students with the tools and skills necessary to be both critical consumers and producers of content. Or do you as future teachers, feel that you are equipped to negotiate these changes successfully?
References:
Rothmans, J. (Nov. 12th, 2018). Afterimage. in The New Yorker. 34-44
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/in-the-age-of-ai-is-seeing-still-believing
Lankshear, C. and Knobel. M. (2008). Introduction. In Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. Eds. Digital Literacies: Concepts, Policies and Practices (pp. 1-12). Peter Lang Publishing
Kist, W. (2000). Beginning to create the new literacy classroom: What does the new literacy look like?. Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy. 43(8). 710-718
Madelino, M. and Castek, J. (2016). Digital literacies for disciplinary learning: A call to action.
Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy. 60(1).
This was a really interesting post to engage with, it forced me to think about issues that I had not previously considered as important within a classroom setting. Unfortunately, I believe that I am ill-equipped to identify falsified images or any falsified digital content. I think that the best we can do as educators it try to get our content from the most reputable sources we can find and also collaborate with one another, so that co-workers can direct one another to sound content. Furthermore, I agree with you that teachers need to encourage the development of technical skills as well as social-emotional skills. However, I think that educators are hindered by the skills that are culturally valued as well as the privileged content that students are tested on.
ReplyDeleteHi Erin, You are quite right in saying that educators are hindered by the skills that are both culturally and institutionally valued. What I would be interested to know is your definition of content that is culturally valued. Do you think this is discipline specific and what are the ways in which we can make digital literacy part of the content that is culturally valued?
DeleteAs regards to reputable sources, the New Yorker article's reference to the printing of a falsified picture in the Times, questions the very premise of a 'reputable source'. I think that in this I would reiterate Wilfredo's point that he makes in the next post, that we should habitually and as a matter of course provide students information that can be sourced from multiple sources, while simultaneously making sure that these sources are not accessing their information from a single source. These are time consuming tasks but in this age of 'fake news', the task of detecting news that looks authentic but is fake is becoming harder but more and more important.
Thanks for your post,
ReplyDeleteYou bring multiple good points in your blog, but one that stood out to me relates to fact distortion, which can manifest as image manipulation. In this age where we face an "onslaught of information" as you put it, we would be ill-advised to send students out into the real-world to interact with the internet without teaching them the necessary skills to do so. I believe one of this skills is most definitely teaching students how to combat "fake news." While it can be difficult to identify image manipulation (as Erin said above), I think a good way to address this in general is to teach students not to take everything they see at face value. They must become critical consumers of their information, especially when learning about things through the media, which the internet harbors and provides an easy way to access it. This skills falls on the responsibility of all teachers, and should definitely be included in the curriculum. I think students will be engaged in this, too, as it is something that affects their everyday lives.
Great post Wilfredo. You are spot on when you articulate the need for educating students to be critical about what they are reading and seeing on the internet. I highlighted image manipulation as the more detrimental aspect of false information as images become indelibly printed on our minds and even if we are told that they are false, our brain remembers the image more than information regarding its credibility; this is how marketing campaigns function. If one idea is presented to a large majority of people, there is a very high chance that more people will remember the false information as being true rather than the claim that the information was false.
DeleteThe digital literacy approach to literacy instruction is truly a major change in educational pedagogy. Students become the experts of knowledge in the classroom community. Each student has something to contribute and students can learn from each other. This instruction is different because the teacher is not the source of knowledge, but the guide who points students in the right direction with strategies and structured resources. I thought author William Kist described this pedagogy best stating, “a new literacy classroom would consist of immersion in meaningful practices within a community of learners who are capable of playing multiple and different roles based on their backgrounds and experiences.” Students are bring so much more to the classroom than just themselves. These engaged students bring previous knowledge and experiences from their communities, and can help other students form new ideas about society and its functions. This is evident at my magnet school, because our diversity. Having those students from different communities around the city allows for rich discourse about important issues that matter to our students. It generates new questions and interests.
ReplyDelete“Beginning to create the new literacy classroom” highlights the characteristics of this new form of literacy instruction from the perspective of what the student will be doing. One of the central point that the reading focused on was creating “flow”. It is a level of engagement that truly puts at the center of the learning collaboration, individual metacognition, student choice, and authentic literacy. To master these characteristics as a teacher is difficult, however, it can be very rewarding to students. One of the essential is providing the structures for students to be continuous learning. This is the idea that they are learning from their mistakes. The strategies that the reading suggests are practice I use in the classroom. It is my goal to blend the cognitive skills of English and History together, and create opportunities for students to build these skills simultaneously by making these two classes one. The other strategies is students building portfolios in their writing, and analyzing their progress in writing.
-What are the possible limitations that older generations of teachers might consider in new literacy classroom?
-Which characteristic is the most important to building a new literacy classroom? Why?
Some possible limitations might be an inability to connect digital literacy with deep content learning, which I think depends on the teacher's own content knowledge, flexibility and willingness to make meaningful connections between student created content and broader conceptual frameworks etc.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Subul -- it's really interesting and I enjoyed reading it. I agree that with the access to so much information that the internet brings, a lot of that access is fraught with factual inaccuracies. I'm not sure if the NY Times piece on Facebook's full awareness of their website's fake news propagation had broken when you wrote this, but it definitely backs our points up.
ReplyDeleteI want to expand upon what you've said about digital literacies as extensions of standard literacies, particularly with regards to critically assessing the accuracy of information. I believe that many adolescents feel comfortable navigating news online and assessing its accuracy, at least in a way they do not feel equipped to do with, say, a newspaper article. Biases do, after all, exist in both. I'm wondering if it might be an effective strategy to introduce students to thinking critically through digital literacies (an extremist blog), and use that as a stepping stone to critical thinking about texts that they might be less comfortable questioning (coverage of the same world events by different countries' press outlets).
Robin you make some really good points and I had not read the article that you referenced (although the scandal with Cambridge Analytica was a good intro into the potential damage that social media had wrought). I read the article and it highlights the problematic of marrying information with capitalism. If a profit can be made from information whether it is true or false, then the validity of the information is something that gets sidelined. This is something that we need to understand first; the point of origin of each news source; the author, the organization, its ownership and the donors or financiers that support this organization. So to come back to your main point… yes it is a great idea to look at fake news in class, and you can start from a place where its obvious and have a conversation about what the students imagine the authors to be, what their beliefs are etc.
Delete(although authorship is also not simple, where some right wing news websites may not be owned by right wing pundits at all, one came on NPR, was a registered democrat but realized that it was much harder to sell stories to liberals so decided to stick to right wing fake news and made 20-40K/month in revenues)
and then segue into news stories that may be true but are biased, or based on truth but presented in such a way as to impact the reader in very specific ways. (international news media sights are a great idea, but again you want to use competing media sources ) Critical literacy is not only about questioning the obviously fake. It is about reading between the lines, always being aware that everyone writes with a bias, that language itself can be used as a tool to create bias in the reader, and that images can lie…. and to your other point, students are very aware of the ways in which images can be doctored but our minds still function in certain biological ways and its very hard to not trust the evidence of your eyes. It is something that we as individuals need to consciously do when we see or hear something even though the initial impact may affect our emotive centers. it is something we train ourselves to do, by reading multiple sources for every consequential piece of news that we come across.
You raise very interesting points in your post.
ReplyDeleteIt reminder me immensely of this whole "fake news" movement going on in this country, since everyone has a smart phone and access to all the information they could possibly need. I recently observed at a high school social studies classroom where they were studying civics and how the government works, which just so happened to be at the same time of the election. From this, the instructor found it necessary to teach these freshmen about bias, and to basically not believe everything you read. However, I will also say that majority of the youth is more than capable of spotting out inconsistencies in the media, since this is constantly being talked about in the media. Regardless, this is an important skill to learn to not only be successful in school, but also to become a lifelong learner and question everything.
Thank you Daniel for your response and you are right that students are more media savvy then we may think, but advertising works on them, so messaging and specific kinds of messaging has a significant impact on individual behavior. We dont want students to only recognize fake news, but manipulation, not only political (which they are not all that engaged in) but also commercial. Commercial brands have a huge impact on the ways in which individuals make decisions and critical literacy in science education should educate students on how different pharmaceutical companies finance research projects and then publish the results in a language that is beneficial to them even though the results of the research may not be conclusive etc. Science journals are replete with examples of biases that later impact decision making even at the federal level (take the sugar industries lobbying against publishing the results of research regarding the impact of sugar on our health in the 80's) ...
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ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing! This post was definitely the most interesting to read. I completely agree that we need to take into account what information we are having students engage with. There are so many positive and negatives that come with technology being a part of the classroom. One major negative . though, is what you brought up in your post. I think it is important for us as teachers to make sure we are providing students with the necessary skills to know if the information they are engaging with is true.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your post. When I read the Kist article, I too questioned whether such a "new literacy" classroom could exist without a school structure to support and encourage it as he described. I (pessimistically?) do not believe that such a school will ever exist. One thing I think we can incorporate from his many ideas is that classrooms are places where teachers and students all engage in using disciplinary ways of thinking to question what we see and experience and in creating something meaningful to communicate our ideas to various audiences. While our preparation programs can always be improved (more content area classes, more focus on useful application, etc), I do not think teachers need to have perfect expertise in all content and media. We should, however, be walking the path that we expect our students to step onto. As Manderino and Castek (2008) say, "Shifting traditional notions of expert novice toward more bi-directional knowledge exchanges between adults and youths opens up new avenues for collaborative learning." So I suppose we have to be flexible, creative, and humble in choosing what and how we explore content with our students.
ReplyDeleteHi Subul,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great post! It really forced me to reflect on how ill prepared I am to authenticate visual imagery precisely because it has not been part of my disciplinary literacy practices, though I certainly see how increasingly important it is becoming. Begrudgingly, I will have to become an expert in that as well because as you point out there are no external resources available ... As teachers we will have to "vet" or own curriculum which will in fact be onerous, but it may prove to be a valuable opportunity to model what critical thinking looks like within our specific disciplines
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ReplyDelete. Hi, Subul. I think it we need to make sure that the images and media we use must be authentic which requires our critical thinking. As for equipping ourselves, we need to not only learn the knowledge of our own discipline, but also those of other discipline which will give us in more perspectives in teaching. I like you mentions that “to equip students with tools and skills necessary to be both critical consumers and producers of content.” As a educators, we have help our students develop the ability of critical thinking, but also let them know how to use what they’ve learned.
ReplyDeleteHi, Subul. I think it we need to make sure that the images and media we use must be authentic which requires our critical thinking. As for equipping ourselves, we need to not only learn the knowledge of our own discipline, but also those of other discipline which will give us in more perspectives in teaching. I like you mentions that “to equip students with tools and skills necessary to be both critical consumers and producers of content.” As a educators, we have help our students develop the ability of critical thinking, but also let them know how to use what they’ve learned.
ReplyDeleteWhen the authors talked about how we have never had such immediate access to information was really interesting to me, I know I personally take this for granted. I can't imagine having to complete a research paper or practically any assignment without the internet! It is crazy how much we depend on it. I think as teachers we need to walk a fine line between teaching students how to use technology responsible, but not be completely dependent on it to survive.
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