Literacy Now

I watched Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey as a little girl. I felt both extremely frightened and profoundly sad as Hal 9000 begged for his life by saying, “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop Dave? Stop, Dave.” I knew intellectually that Hal was a machine and not a person, so to think of his death was rather strange. But when he said, “I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it... I'm a... fraid,” I felt conflicted. After all, he said he was “afraid.” A machine having a mind? And it feels afraid? How is that possible?

 

Recently, I watched an episode of 60 Minutes on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The episode featured a number of researchers working on the development of AI that could not only mimic but also surpass humans because it can learn through experiences and it never forgets. And it has already shown amazing results. Watson, an IBM computer, won Jeopardy! in 2011 and is now learning to become a cancer expert at University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.

Although the cancer researchers at UNC lauded Watson as a potentially lifesaving tool for doctors because of its capacity to read and search nearly 8,000 cancer research papers being published on a daily basis around the world, some experts are expressing concerns on its capacity to become smarter than humans. For example, both Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have said there could be dark sides to the future of AI if machines become smarter at the expense of kindness and generosity toward humans.

Consider that scientists can now edit the human genome to cure diseases but are calling for a moratorium on such practices while ethical issues are sorted. I believe that’s a sign scientific achievement must be balanced against the advancement in humanity.

One way to do this is to read more literature pieces that ask the hard questions. Our students can learn the peril of scientific creation sans human guidance by reading Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley. Before students become computer scientists, shouldn’t they read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov to learn The Three Laws of Robotics? Unfortunately, many English teachers are now asked to read more informational or nonfiction texts or than novels in the classroom.

Having been an English teacher for over a decade in Bakersfield, California, I like to think that I understand frustration over Common Core State Standards better than many others. However, I would never give up teaching classics like the works of Shakespeare because our students need our fortitude and perseverance more than ever before. In the new world where AI could take over every aspect of our lives without a stronger moral compass, I would hope that our students will be able to recall the horrible fate of the boys in Lord of the Flies.

Kip Glazeris a native of Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1993 as a college student. She holds California Single Subject Teaching Credentials in Social Studies, English, Health, Foundational Mathematics, and School Administration. In 2014, she was named the Kern County Teacher of the Year. She earned her doctorate of education in learning technologies at Pepperdine University in October 2015. She has presented and keynoted at many state and national conferences on game-based learning and educational technologies. She has also consulted for Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning and the Kennedy Center ArtsEdge Program.

How much do you trust what you read online and in social networks? It is likely that of digital texts you obtain as you read, search, and sift through the internet has been handpicked especially for you. This is because without you knowing it, you are in a filter bubble, which could limit your—and your students’—worldview and the connections you make online. Although we live in a connected world where the Web affords unprecedented learning opportunities to make information plentiful and put experts at our fingertips, there can be pitfalls along the way.

Living in a filter bubble

Before you even start searching online, websites and search engines have already compiled information about you based on things like previous search history. Every search shows you the output of a computer-based process called an algorithm. The websites and social networks you use for research, news gathering, and watching cat videos increasingly use algorithms to filter the results to make them more personalized . Search engines, news sites, or social networks provide you with what they think you want to see, not with the broad selection of what is out there.

When you search online, search algorithms anticipate what you are looking for to provide the results more quickly. However, as these algorithms record which texts you read, you are given an  incomplete idea of what is happening in the world around you. When people gravitate to ideas that are familiar and to those that align to an existing perspectives, they develop a confirmation bias—a “tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.” This is increasingly problematic given the recent rise in fake news and disinformation sites available online.

An example from Facebook

If you ever wondered why you have thousands of Facebook friends, but you see the same few  friends in your feed, it’s because the Facebook algorithms have determined from your interaction history that these are the friends whose posts you want to see. If you don’t see anything at all from other people, the algorithms have once again determined you don’t want to see posts from those people. Facebook is just one example of the multiple ways in which algorithms try to determine what you want to see  and thus tailor the information to you.

While on the subject of Facebook, let’s dig in a bit deeper. You’ll have to login to Facebook to see your ad preferences. Ad preferences are compiled from your posts, likes, and collection of friends on the network. They also track you as you move and search elsewhere online. Those little buttons you see on other websites asking you to “like” their page on Facebook are tracking you as you move across the Web. You don’t even have to be logged in for the social network to keep track of your history, and Facebook is not the only company doing this.

While you’re on your Facebook ad preferences page, click through the different tabs to see what information the social network has about you. They sell all of this information to advertisers. Facebook has its own determination of your political views based on your activity. Under the Interests tab, click on the Lifestyle and Culture tab. In this section, you might find a box titled US Politics or the appropriate political association for wherever you live; this information is used by advertisers and political campaigns to send you news, ads, and posts containing their message.

What can you do?

For the most part, there isn’t much that you can do to break free from this filter bubble other than removing yourself from social media entirely. Many sites are increasingly using personalized search tools to manipulate your feed of information. Within Facebook, Twitter, or other social networks, you can address some of this by showing (or teaching) the algorithm you want a diverse set of opinions and information by following individuals or groups that have different perspectives than your own. You can also use a unbiased search engine like DuckDuckGo or routinely use Incognito mode on Google Chrome or on other browsers. Finally, there are Chrome extensions that are great for protecting your privacy and stopping others from tracking you online.

I think the best defense against filter bubbles is simply awareness. Recognize that filter bubbles exist and that they create a very real echo chamber that influences your potential for literacy and learning. You should also discuss this with your students and investigate methods for them to actively interact with individuals or groups with perspectives different from their own. You can start this dialogue by watching Eli Pariser describe the dangers of filter bubbles. From there it needs to be an active fight on the part of every individual to not simply trust that what they are shown online is the full story. Everyone needs to understand the danger of confirmation bias and the filter bubble as they become thoughtful, critically aware, literate individuals.

W. Ian O’Byrne, an ILA member since 2007, is an assistant professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. His research examines the literacy practices of individuals as they read, write, and communicate in online spaces. He blogs at wiobyrne.com. You can subscribe to his newsletter or podcast to stay up to date on literacy, education, and technology.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Do you know Glenn? Maybe you’ve had Glenn—or an adolescent reader like him—as a student. His reading scores on standardized tests are middle-of-the-pack. But if you shadow Glenn through a typical day, you’ll discover that he’s a reader of eclectic interests with a repertoire of distinct, somewhat idiosyncratic ways of reading he habitually resorts to when reading in particular contexts, for particular purposes.

(Note: “Glenn” is a composite. The following vignettes of Glenn reading draw on interview and think-aloud data collected from two sixth-graders who each described and demonstrated more than 10 different ways of reading they use on a regular basis.)

• Lying on the couch, reading a graphic novel, Hereville, for pleasure, Glenn’s gaze flits across the page, bouncing back and forth between words and pictorial details, adjusting its path from page to page as the layout of panels changes. He enjoys the speed with which the story unfolds. He also enjoys noticing details in the drawings that clash with what a character has said or what a character is thinking.
• In the car, on his smartphone, text-messaging with his friends, Glenn alternates between reading and typing. He has made a game of trying to anticipate what his friends will type next in response to what he has just typed, and with some friends, on some topics, he bats 1000. He also has strong views about how emojis can be more persuasive than words in some conversations because their meaning is often fuzzy and open to interpretation.
• Sitting in his sixth-grade social studies classroom, reading his social studies textbook, Glenn’s go-to method is to turn the information on the page into a movie in his head. This works well on some pages (e.g., with descriptions of wars and battles) and less well on others (e.g., with information about changing agricultural methods). With his textbook, he also sometimes voices the words in his head in the style of a play-by-play sports announcer—which he says helps him stay focused when the information is boring.
• In the cafeteria at lunch with his “gamer” friends, Glenn co-reads a how-to book about a favorite video game (e.g., Minecraft: Redstone Handbook). When he is not  reading, he is envisioning game situations in which a particular how-to tip could be applied. As Glenn and his friends exchange ideas, they interrupt each other with objections and alternate ideas, which sends everyone back to the book to check for details that support or disqualify their ideas.
• At the dining room table, at his mother’s laptop, Glenn searches a video-game wiki (e.g., Minecraft Wiki) for usable information and now also with an eye for authorship and sourcing. A few months ago, a friend who tried to add a new page to the wiki had that page deleted by a more senior wiki author/administrator, and this event sparked Glenn’s curiosity. Now he uses a reading process that looks at the “layers” under the wiki’s top layer. He looks at the history of the page he’s on and enjoys scanning the “talk” page to see the disagreements among editors about what the page should include or exclude.
• Still on his mother’s laptop, having logged into his account at a popular learn-how-to-code website (e.g., CodeCombat.com), Glenn composes lines of code, clicks Run to see how the code he has written changes the movements of a digital character, and then meticulously rereads what he has written to fix mistakes. He’s keenly aware that even a single letter or punctuation mark in the wrong place can cause a problem.

From Glenn’s point of view, these ways of reading are all different. They look and feel as different as playing different sports. To be sure, they are all forms of reading (just as different ball sports are all ways of using your body to get a ball into some kind of net), but they are also at the same time significantly different, both in terms of how much he enjoys them and cares about them, and in terms of the cognitive processes and strategies he’s using when he enacts one or another.

Which is why Glenn sometimes tunes out when his ELA teacher tells him and his classmates about “what good readers do.”

Narrow characterizations fail to recognize and leverage the diverse types of reading experiences and expertise that diverse students bring to the classroom, to the page, and to the screen. And that’s a big missed opportunity. As students’ ways of reading diversify, and as students bring more and more specialized reading expertise and varied reading MOs to the classroom, it behooves us as teachers to enlarge our awareness—and to find ways to build on what our students know and do as readers, even when what they know and do is not the academic reading we privilege.

Paul Morsink is an assistant professor in Reading and Language Arts at Oakland University in Michigan.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

“It’s like...magic!” the second grader celebrated, as he scanned a QR code on a frog food container and was directed to a website about what frogs eat. “Magic” was also what we felt when a team of us—a second-grade classroom teacher, a technology staff developer, and an administrator—examined how digital tools helped to support student-directed inquiry in the content areas over the course of a school year. We discovered three practices vital to making digital inquiry–based learning successful.

Encouraging questions and wonderings

Knowing that their ideas mattered helped our students to feel comfortable trying out different inquiry questions/topic ideas during our science and social studies units. Before we introduced digital tools, we created a “Think and Wonder” wall on a classroom bulletin board where students could place sticky notes with any questions or ideas they were pondering. Idea sharing and questioning were established as vital components of our learning community. When we later introduced Padlet, an online collaborative “bulletin board,” kids were not only comfortable sharing their thoughts in the digital format but many also eagerly contributed responses from home. We were thrilled to see how seamless the transition to digital sharing was and impressed with the inquiry that had extended beyond the units of study and the classroom.

Extending the learning network

While creating a Google slideshow to share her understanding of communities, one of our students searched for a picture of a fire truck but could not find one she liked. Instead, she discovered and played with the Google drawing tool and created her own fire truck clip art. Her partner noticed what she’d done and excitedly told the classmates sitting nearby to come and see. Suddenly, this student was teaching a group of classmates a neat trick that many of them then went on to try. The teacher noticed this and invited the student to conduct a minilesson on using the drawing tool the next day. Other students were then invited to share their tips and strategies throughout the year. We noted how they helped each other in many ways such as providing technical support, helping to narrow down topics for research, and giving feedback to improve each other's presentations. The teacher was no longer the “expert” in the room and students viewed their peers as resources.

Finding entry points for all learners

At the culmination of our science unit study of frogs, we asked students to share what they’d learned about the life cycle through observations and research. We introduced Wixie, an online publishing and creativity platform that enables students ages 4–8 to create multimedia presentations. We were impressed by students’ abilities to customize projects with little support to demonstrate their understanding of the frog life cycle. Throughout the study, students asked questions related to the information they were learning. For their culminating project, many chose to extend their presentations by seeking answers to these questions. Some students transferred learning from other subject areas and incorporated Venn diagrams, maps and charts, and QR codes directing their audience to noteworthy frog websites. Other students created a single slide presentation that read more like an informational poster, with voice recordings to narrate over their photographs, digital and analog drawings, and flowcharts. Students with diverse learning needs were able to use their strengths to communicate their understanding using the various tools available.

If inquiry-based learning is to be successful in the elementary classroom, teachers need to facilitate a classroom environment where independent thinking is celebrated, risk-taking is encouraged, and strengths are highlighted. These practices can transfer in meaningful ways when using digital tools. By laying the groundwork for a culture of asking questions and seeking answers, sharing ideas, and learning from peers using digital tools, teachers can find their own “magic” in the classroom.

Jenny Gieras teaches third grade at Roaring Brook Elementary School in Chappaqua, NY. She can be reached via Twitter. Ellen Moskowitz is an instructional technology coach in Chappaqua, NY. She can be reached via Twitter. William Yang is an assistant principal at the Edgewood Elementary School in Scarsdale, NY. He can be contacted via Twitter. This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

Earlier this fall, I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across an anchor chart created by Pana Asavavatana. Hashtagged with #MentorTech and #LivBit, I curiously clicked on the handle of @TheLivBits. Short for Olivia, Liv is an elementary student in the United States who shares selfie videos that range from book reviews to her thinking about reading. Liv also shares meetings with authors and inspirational bits.

In an age of global connectedness, Liv’s videos, shared through her “mom-monitored” Twitter, Instagram, and Vimeo accounts have taken the world by storm since she began posting in February 2016. Curious about the possibilities of using Liv’s videos in the global literacy classroom, I reached out to Pana and asked her to share her strategies for doing so.

Pana is the preK–2 technology and design coach at Taipei American School, an independent, coeducational day school with a U.S.-based curriculum. Founded in 1949 for preK–12 learners, its students represent more than 30 nationalities. In her role, Pana collaborates with 23 teachers as well as specialist teams, including Mandarin and art, with a focus on technology integration, robotics, and engineering.

An active Twitter user, Pana first encountered Liv through teacher and author Kristin Ziemke, who had posted about #LivBits. Pana discovered Liv’s Instagram (note: the account is private and you must request permission to follow), where Liv began her journey of sharing ideas about books. During summer 2016, Pana, Kristin, and Liv met at the Building Learning Communities (BLC) education conference in Boston, where each person presented.

As many of us know, “literacy” is more than just reading text on a page. Communicating in today’s world includes multisensory, multimodal, and interactive experiences to engage audiences. What does this mean for teachers and students?

Together, we must learn to think critically about new media and how to use it effectively to share ideas globally. Liv is one example of a student connecting with wider audiences using digital platforms, which reflects the evolving nature of communication today.

Mentor texts in literacy teaching are not new. We, as educators, often use them to teach craft or techniques in writing and hope our students will use these tools to enrich their own writing. Similarly, Liv’s videos act as “mentor tech” and provide models that Pana’s students use to create their own videos. Pana’s students begin drafting a script before filming their first video and then revising their work. Throughout this process, students watch several versions of Liv’s videos, noting craft techniques they might borrow—from what they might say to how ideas are presented on camera.

The collaboration between Pana and Liv is but one example of how new technologies are continually opening new doors for fostering a global literacies network, inclusive of both teachers and children. As Liv’s mom shared with me, Liv’s goal is “to be a positive voice for kids, to celebrate others’ work, and to grow advocacy for causes she cares about—like being a voice for shark education.” The selfie videos created by Liv and Pana’s students provide teachers another medium for generating meaningful assessment, feedback, and communication that tells much more about a child’s literacy learning than a test score.

Liv is one model of how children can use social media not only to learn but also to develop, reflect on, and share their passion and knowledge with others as they cultivate metacognition about their literacy experiences.

Special thanks to Pana Asavavatana, an Apple Distinguished Educator, for connecting with a stranger from across the globe via Twitter. I am deeply grateful for her willingness to share her teaching expertise and the work of her students at Taipei American School with me. 

Cassie J. Brownell is a doctoral candidate and Marianne Amarel Teaching and Teacher Education Fellow in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. A corecipient of a 2015 NCTE-CEE Research Initiative Grant, Cassie’s most recent collaborative project—#hearmyhome—explores how writing with and through sound might help students and teachers attune toward literacies and communities of difference.

This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association’s Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).