1.5: Why this Matters now

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PIL’s findings from the past 10 years come full circle when trying to understand how prepared today’s students will be to navigate an information landscape that has dramatically changed. These findings suggest that the shortcuts students adopt to manage academic research — and even the training they receive in carefully unpacking complex academic arguments — do not adequately prepare them for a world of abundant news and information that is deeply influenced by algorithms. These findings raise questions about whether the gap between what students learn in school and what they need to know is deepening at a time of an epistemological crisis.

Our research tells us that many of today’s traditional-aged students are different from those who came before.⁵⁷ Their ethnic and racial diversity, their professional destinies, and their experience growing up just as mobile devices and social media became ubiquitous, all set them apart.⁵⁸ To hear their stories, as we did in our 2019 focus groups for this study, many students think their experiences with technology distinguish them from other age cohorts. For instance, many were assiduously warned by concerned parents and teachers that the internet could be a “bad and dangerous place” where cyber bullying, human trafficking, and predators congregated to spread their destructive messages on an epic scale.

Searching on school-issued laptops became a supplement to (or in some cases, a replacement for) using school libraries.⁵⁹ And, while teachers were giving these high schoolers ineffective lessons, such as “domains ending in .org are more trustworthy than those ending in .com,” and relying on standard checklists to evaluate websites,⁶⁰ students were teaching each other how to circumvent the filters schools used to keep them from landing on the “wrong” websites. In the process, they were learning how to insulate themselves from the surveillance and control of parents and teachers.

Today, this cohort is coming of age at a time when electoral politics are playing out through social media memes, and Twitter feuds become tomorrow’s headlines. Social media platforms are used to stage massive student walkouts against gun violence and a cross-generational “March for Our Lives” around the world. Turning Point USA, a conservative group, calls out faculty advancing “leftist propaganda in the classroom” with “The Professor Watchlist” website.⁶¹ A 17-year-old Swedish climate activist⁶² rallies people across the globe through social media and exchanges online barbs with the U.S. president. It is clear that today’s young people will help determine what is possible as a collective society.

Many college students already see themselves as active participants in news and information flows, not passive recipients of uncontested knowledge. Our work as educators and librarians is to help students navigate information, not just for college courses but beyond — in the workplace, in their personal lives, as lifelong learners, and as news consumers, creators, and voters. The ways information is shaped and shared today has changed a great deal since we began our national research studies at PIL only a decade ago. Taken together, this means we need to change how and what we teach. But first, we must understand what students may already know about algorithms.

References

Rachel Premack (12 July 2018), “Millennials love their brands, Gen Zs are terrified of college debt, and 6 other ways Gen Zs and millennials are totally different,” Business Insider, https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-...ennials-2018-6
danah boyd (9 March 2019), “You think you want media literacy...do you?” Points, Data & Society, points.datasociety.net/you-t...u-7cad6af18ec2
Hallie Golden (4 September 2019), “The decline and evolution of the school librarian,” CityLab, www.citylab.com/life/2019/09...cation/597316/
Students in this study mentioned lessons learned in high school, generally in dismissive terms. For a study that faults the chronic problem of ineffective web training in schools, see Joel Breakstone, Mark Smith, Sam Wineburg, Amie Rapaport, Jill Carle, Marshall Garland, and Anna Saavedra (14 November 2019), “Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait,” Stanford History Education Group. stacks.stanford. edu/file/gf151tb4868/Civic%20Online%20Reasoning%20National%20Portrait.pdf
Christopher Mele (28 November 2016), “Professor Watchlist is seen as a threat to academic freedom,” The New York Times, www. nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/professor-watchlist-is-seen-as-threat-to-academic-freedom.html
Somini Sengupta (18 February 2019), “Becoming Greta: ‘Invisible girl’ to global climate activist, with bumps along the way,” The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/c...-thunburg.html

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