Teaching in a Brave New World

Earlier this year, a student sent me this thought-provoking cartoon comparison of the the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, based on the writings of culture-critic Neil Postman. We discussed it in my senior English class after reading M.T. Anderson’s Feed. In our discussion, students themselves questioned the impact on society of our increased engagement with electronic media and some wondered if they themselves weren’t as “smart” as a result (several gave the example of having trouble with simple math as a result of their reliance on calculators). While they (and I) weren’t saying that we should toss out all our computers and iPods and cell phones and GPS systems, it does make me wonder how to use all of this to our benefit and not to our eventual destruction (not to be too dramatic about it).

So how do we avoid Huxley’s Brave New World? One way, I think, is to realize what the new media can and can’t do. As the Jenkins article suggests, the new media has created a more participatory culture. This has the potential to combat the lack of engagement and “voice” young people often feel in society and as citizens; if they feel like they are empowered, this could encourage them to keep up with current events, for example, more so than the young people of previous generations. As Jenkins also points out, however, the obstacles to this include not only the digital divide, which enables some young people greater access to this participatory culture than others, but also the “transparency problem”: students can access information more readily, but need help analyzing it independently. Young people, according to Jenkins, judge credibility of information, for example, predominately on format and design as opposed to analysis of the content itself. In general, Jenkins points out that these new literacies add to, don’t replace, traditional literacies. He writes, “Before students can engage with the new participatory culture, they must learn to read and write.” He notes that students need reading and writing skills as well as research skills and technical skills in order to fully utilize the potential benefits of the new literacies.

Other writers seem to gloss over these pre-conditions to successful engagement with new media. In Dr. Ross J. Todd’s article, “Youth and Their Virtual Networked Worlds: Research Findings and Implications for School Libraries” in the July 2008 issue of School Libraries Worldwide, Todd initially acknowledges that young people have been given too much credit for mastery of the new media. Todd writes, “According to Jenkins, as reported by Baer, on the Digital natives blog at Harvard University (2007), labels such as ‘digital immigrants’ and ‘digital natives’ increasingly oversimplify and overexaggerate generational differences, and indeed, convey the assumption that young people have innate digital skills.” Todd also cites research that concluded, “that despite increased access to information technology and information sources electronically, behaviours that predate the Web continue to persist.” In other words, students continue to underutilize advanced search options and fail to consider “relevance, accuracy and authority of information," both of which are to their detriment in accessing information. In general, Todd points out that the “Google generation” is no better at research than those who came before them. In doing so, Todd seems to be acknowledging the same needs that Jenkins does for traditional literacies.

However, Todd goes on in his articles to champion the learning potential of social networking, encouraging librarians to rethink the library as a “knowledge commons” as opposed to an “information place.” He argues that young people’s new facility with social networking should shift our focus from students as information consumers to students as knowledge creators. While on the surface, I agree with his enthusiasm for the creative potential of social networking, Todd seems to suggest that students are either information consumers OR knowledge creators, something with which I strongly disagree. I would argue instead, as I think Jenkins does, that in order to create knowledge, in order to have something to share in this participatory culture, students still need to be informed. And, in order to be informed, students need traditional literacies.

The Rice University online media guides we looked at this week for class are great tools, but without traditional literacies, I don’t know how I could get my students to locate them and read them. If we REPLACE our focus on traditional literacies with these new media literacies, our students will not be better prepared for their 21st century lives, as Todd argues, but unable to fully utilize all that their 21st century lives have to offer. The goal, as Jenkins argues, needs to be adding the new to the old and finding how the two can enhance each other. Recently, I was in the library with my honors level American Studies class. One asked if she could ask the librarian if the school library had any books on her research topic. While I was happy to let her do so, I asked first if she had checked the online catalog yet. She had not and, as it turned out, did not know how to do so. She had been at the high school since freshman year. The librarians do a wonderful job, put together excellent electronic resource lists for topics, subscribe to excellent databases, and yet students often miss the best resources because of their poor research skills. In addition to research skills, students’ ability to create with technology is also impaired by poor reading and critical thinking skills. Using iMovie, for example, requires patience, logic, and reading directions to become familiar with it, something which students in our information-rich era don’t seem to be lacking. No one entity at school is in charge of teaching these skills; students receive them piecemeal in their classes, in library visits, but without a clearly articulated vision of where/when/what learning targets/goals are to be achieved and why. With so many choices and so much information, we don’t seem any smarter.

While Todd invokes Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as a counterpoint to what he envisions as the wonderful opportunity for school librarians to connect to students, he glosses over how we will avoid this fate. Huxley’s fears that giving us so much information will, in Neil Postman’s words, “drown the truth in a sea of irrelevance,” don’t have to become reality. We must not rush to the new media, however, as the answer to all our educational woes, but rather as another tool, one which can only be utilized successfully in conjunction with traditional literacies like reading, writing, and critical thinking.