Metaphorically Speaking...You're OK

A fascinating Ted Talk featuring James Geary's thoughts on how ubiquitous and embedded is the metaphor in our ways of thinking:



And the Prezi presentation featured in Geary's talk:

Mixing Mind and Metaphor on Prezi

A Symphony of "Wows" and "Yuks"

“However, people’s dependence on multimedia, rather than on traditional text-based sources of information, could make them particularly susceptible to what scientist, writer, broadcaster and member of the House of Lords Professor Susan Greenfield calls “the ‘yuk’ and ‘wow’ factors”. The more exciting the presentation, the more likely they are to be impressed by it. So, for an obvious example, young people using the net to get the truth may decide between creationism or evolution not on the quality of the arguments but on the cleverness of the web designers’ pyrotechnics. But healthy amounts of adolescent skepticism (“whatever”) kick in at about the same time as acne. So, if we are able to equip young people with the skills to evaluate different sources in the context of a media-rich world, pupils will know how important it is to take everything they find online - however wicked the graphics - with a huge pinch of salt.”

--from futurelab.org.uk’s article, "The Future’s bright, the future is…"

Sometimes I include the random PowerPoint slide of a rabbit in a football costume or of Darth Vader teaching grammar to young students. It’s fun stuff: I see how long I can carry on the ruse as if the slide is actually part of the real lesson, and make wild connections and long, drawn out, and detailed anecdotes that give credence to the notion that, “Oh yeah, after the Star Wars series Darth often appeared in elementary schools to teach the past participle to ten-year-olds,” or, “Yes, definitely the first mammal besides homo sapiens to get drafted into the NFL was a rabbit—of course, they are both fast and can change direction on a dime with those sturdy hind legs—and rumor has it that this rabbit was a distant, if not direct, descendant of the hare that was the inspiration for Warner Brother’s Bugs Bunny.”

I am not really very funny, and the kids know it. I am only funny because I am not funny, and I generally apologize on the first day of class in September for all of the unfunny hyjinks I will drag my students through over the course of the school year. I don’t even use flashing lights or music (very often) to get a reaction out of my students—I just insist that my story/PowerPoint slide/random video is in fact true and entirely related to the task at hand—and yet they still remember such jokes at the end of the year (or the end of their high school careers) much more readily than they remember the symbolic significance of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn (much to my chagrin). Action research for my master’s degree thesis involved investigating the correlation between the use of humor in the classroom and levels of student engagement. It turns out there is one, and the trick is to try and infuse that humor with images and ideas that are also relevant to the lesson/idea/task at hand so as to ensure better and longer-term understanding for students.

But I’m just one person and, again, not very funny—nor am I bestowed with expensive tools and expertise in the areas of persuasion. Nonetheless, students believe my most ridiculous claims when coupled with a mere (ridiculous, at that) picture. And this concerns me.

If a noticeable number of my students are gullible enough to (time and again) fall for Mr. Fuller’s in-class song and dance, just imagine what they might be susceptible to believe online—when actual marketers with actual agendas and actual tools and actual expertise place a well-aimed and actual advertisement in front of them on the internet. “No problem,” you say, “young people can tell what is a commercial and what is ‘real.’” Yes, perhaps. Most of the time. But how about when those same “marketers”—or “designers of content,” as seems a more apt description of today’s online authors—deliver information within a context that is seamlessly integrated with other, seemingly important and legitimate content? What then?

At its most basic levels, the ability to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent, sincerely wise and merely flashy—whether in an online environment or a very real physical environment, say, at the grocery market (are online environments “real” or not?)—is the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, between truth and hoax. I sometime wonder in what ways P.T. Barnum might have leveraged the internet. Certainly, he would have been master orchestrator of wows and yuks.

What kind of symphony do we want our future-adult students to play in? What kind of symphony will they play in? Who will be the conductor, and who will be willing to call out the conductor when his directions are, well, just wrong?



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School Libraries and TLs in the News on CBC

"School libraries: How important are they to learning and critical thinking?" asked a CBC news story headline yesterday.

Also see this recent CBC story regarding decreases in Ontario library staffing.

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Eli Pariser on TED: Beware online "filter bubbles"

A great, short talk by Eli Pariser on TED that addresses some of the important information literacy ideas hinted at in today's earlier post.

Author-ity

“Authority” is, in general, a perhaps dubious term in a secondary school library context because there are at least a couple of things happening with regards to “authority” and “teens”: first, teens, by nature, tend to enjoy challenging authority, and secondly, the Internet creates a scenario where teens—or any human being, for that matter—can now access information themselves (rather than digesting information that is furnished solely by a textbook or a teacher) and/or create and publish information themselves. This access to virtually limitless content changes classroom dynamics: the teacher is less of a direct instructor and much more of a facilitator. This scenario very quickly changes traditional classroom authority dynamics, which in turn leads to a need for greater emphasis on information literacy—begging such questions as “What is authority and why does it matter?” and “Who has authority?” and “How can I wisely determine authority?”

Now, certainly we know that “authority” is not meant to suggest stronger/weaker, leader/follower power dynamics per se. Authority, of course, refers to the credibility of an author or source—“author-ity.” However, it is interesting, as an English teacher and library user, to see ways in which authority is being interpreted by students today.

Authority is very often confused with popularity. This is an easy mistake for human beings—particularly teens?—to make: the more we hear about and/or discuss something, the more credibility or authority it tends to embody. As legends grow stronger and more intriguing with each retelling, so does content gain more authority each time it is referenced. As my advanced biology students recently told me in one of our English class discussions regarding persuasion, “Proximity creates fondness”; this seems convincingly true in both the animal world as well as the world of content and media.

The “authority is popularity” rule is seen in the ubiquity of Google and the way in which the search engine organizes its search results: the most often visited—or most popular—websites appear near the top of a search result. While it is true that there are many factors that contribute to search results, Page Ranking is one important factor. As noted by Google itself: “Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site's PageRank." Further, we all know that very often it is only the first page of results from a Google search that is looked at by a user. The details of how PageRank works are not so important; it is enough simply to note that the very way in which our most popular search engine today operates serves to blur a high school student’s everyday perception of what is important, what is popular, what has authority.

Happily, I find that, with some coaching, students can become very information literate—quite adept at skillfully determining what is authoritative and why. However, it can be a challenge to encounter a, say, sixteen year old digital native student who has had no exposure to information literacy. These students sometimes don’t understand how to wisely judge authority or don’t want to have to wisely understand authority—because doing so means changing the way he or she thinks, changing the ways of his or her online life that have become very comfortable relying on content from Youtube or Google as “answers.”

A great way to show students that there is a very real need to become information literate—and to possess skills that allow them to wisely judge authority—is to introduce them to “spoof” websites. Find a way to integrate a site (or sites) into your curriculum and see what the results are: how long does it take students to recognize something “fishy” is happening? Who notices first? Who doesn’t notice? How long does it take students to start extrapolating and realizing how important ideas like authority, reliability, and credibility are when roaming the World Wide Web—a place that is still in many ways in its free-wheeling Wild West phase. Some of my favorite spoof sites include “Feline Reactions to Bearded Men” and the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide. See my blog post for a fuller list with links.

At the end of the day, it is simply interesting to watch the ways in which all people—but particularly young people (high school students)—have an evolving sense of what “authority” means, and how that sense is tied to advancements in the areas of technology and media and in the processes of how content is created and delivered.

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