A couple of years ago I was asked to speak at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy. While at the conference, a colleague asked, "Why are you here?" Implicit in that question were certain assumptions: First, that my scholarship was in another field (I am, alas, known as the Plagiarism Person), and second, that my field does not obviously intersect with information literacy.
I didn't have a ready answer. I wanted to say "I'm here because they invited me," but of course that would have been a dodge. So I mumbled something lame and left it at that.
I don't remember who asked me that question, but I hope she's in the audience now, because today's presentation is a somewhat more articulate answer to the question. I'm not here today to talk about plagiarism; I'm here to talk about information literacy--or more accurately, information illiteracy, and all the trouble it's causing us. Among other things, I'll be making a case for why I think all of us should be paying a lot more attention to the issue. But in a sense I will be talking about plagiarism, because it is my belief that plagiarism is one of the problems that is created or at least aggravated by information illiteracy. And the "information illiteracy" is not just our students', but our own, as well. My purpose today is to raise our collective information anxiety. Not until that anxiety is pinching us, like a tight pair of shoes that have to stay on your feet all day, will we take the measures that are necessary for teaching writing today.
First, some definition of terms may be in order, given how little attention our discipline has so far paid to the issue. The American Library Association offers this definition: "Information literacy is a set of abilities requiring individuals to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." Lindsey Martin and Sylvia Williamson specify their definition to students' instructional needs: "Students need to become critical consumers of information in order to avoid overload, and to develop new intellectual skills in order to manage information effectively and transform it into usable knowledge. This collection of new intellectual skills has come to be known as 'information literacy'" (144).
These are librarians talking. What about compositionists: How are they engaging issues of information literacy? Let's start with the CompPile database with the search string "information-literacy." First we get Irene Clark's 1995 article. Second, we get--alas, there is no "second." The only article that CompPile has indexed under "information-literacy" is Clark's.
So let's turn to the online searchable program for this conference: Eight sessions are addressing information literacy in some way or another. That's better. Obviously I'm not the only person who's thinking that information literacy warrants compositionists' attention. Yet also obviously, it's not a topic that is yet collectively consuming us in the way that, say, portfolios did in the 90s. This fact lends a real poignancy to Troy Swanson's optimistic statement, "By now, most academic librarians and other educators are familiar with the Association of College and Research Library's 'Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education'" (263). Ouch.
The 1999 WPA Outcomes document does not name information literacy. Rolf Norgaard points out that it does speak of component practices (224): Under "Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing" it endorses "[u]nderstand[ing] a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources," and under "Processes" it wants students to "apply the technologies commonly used to research and communicate within their fields."
I would point out, though, that the application of these traditional categories is itself a problem: here in the new media literacy revolution, sorting information management practices into traditional print-based rhetorical categories obscures the new challenges posed by the quantity of data delivered in a variety of formats. Our discipline does not yet use the terminology and taxonomies of information literacy to describe the literate practices of new media. Instead we categorize new media as literacies. Or we categorize the formats of new media--blogs, wikis, and so forth. But descriptions and categorizations of the technologies themselves are insufficient. We need to be paying attention not just to the technologies themselves but also to the ways in which they alter literate practices--in this case, the literate practices of information management.
As Richard Saul Wurman explains in the followup to his groundbreaking Information Anxiety, the problem we face in the Information Age is not an information glut but a data glut. The data that is now glutting includes text. We see the results of data glut every day we teach: our students are writing terrible arguments that mash together, with no critical examination, a variety of sources that they have found online, and they are plagiarizing like crazy from those sources. And what we're doing in response is wrong. Just wrong. We're adopting Turnitin.com so that we can catch them plagiarizing--or scare hell out of them so they won't plagiarize--and we lecture them on the differences between scholarly journals and weblogs.
Both of these responses are wrong, because neither addresses the central problems of managing information today. As Swanson explains, one of those problems is the sequence in which we engage text. When literacy was confined to print, the procedure was to find sources, evaluate them, and then use them. This is no longer possible, given the huge number of sources available. The data glut is too huge for anyone to be able to first gather and then evaluate sources. Instead, users evaluate sources as they encounter them, deciding on the spot whether to keep them or move on.
A second problem with managing information today is that our print-based focus on the format of an information source doesn't work in the online environment. Swanson explains, "The weakness of the print-based model, when implemented in a Web-based world, is the focus on format of information source over the type of information the source contains" (262). By "format" he means publication venue--website, weblog, print magazine, brochure, scholarly journal, and so forth.
Our job was easy in a print world. We could tell students to stick with the formats of books and scholarly journals; we could tell them to obtain these works at the bricks-and-mortar library; the process of locating them was fairly straightforward; and the format itself accomplished all the evaluation that was needed.
Today, however, the same information (e.g., an article in Nature) may appear in multiple formats (e.g., online and in print) (262-263). The open internet is a swamp of information; students may therefore see no need to explore the "hidden internet," the wealth of information available in subscription-only sites accessible through library databases. Once they do get into those sites, they often meet with frustration: Google is easy because it searches 100% of the data inside millions of texts and delivers the texts to the user. ProQuest, Project Muse, and EBSCO Host, in contrast, search for keywords. And whether they deliver the text itself depends on the vendor and on what subscription your library holds to the service. Little wonder, then, that our students are disinterested in the difficulties of the hidden internet. Why bother with all that when so much is available in a single simple keyword search?
Today, moreover, the most up-to-date information is available online, and not always in a format that would be sanctioned in the print world. If you want to learn what I think about plagiarism, you can go to my published articles and books. These not only express my opinions and analyses, but they have benefited from peer review and subsequent revision. Fine. But if you want to know what I think about what's happening with plagiarism today, you'll go to my weblog. No peer review there? Well, no. But you can read the Comments section see what others think about what I've said. And you can do a Technorati search to find out whether others are blogging about what I've said. On my blog you get the added bonus of reading my thoughts about basketball, coal mining, feral cats, Appalachia, cycling, and the upstate New York weather. . . .
Not just the most current information but sometimes the most authoritative information may come in a non-peer-reviewed format. For examples of this phenomenon, we can go to Wikipedia, which some instructors forbid their students to use. (There was a time, too, when it wasn't uncommon for instructors to forbid use of the internet. Yeah, good luck with both of those prohibitions. Might as well stand in the middle of the Mississippi and forbid its southward flow, too.) Wikipedia has up-to-the minute information contributed and validated by users. This allows misuse, as in the famous instance wherein Wikipedia had to temporarily ban contributions from U.S. Senate offices, because Senators' staffers were editing, sanitizing, and sometimes falsifying entries about their employers. Meanwhile, though, the respected journal Nature compares Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica, finding errors in both but concluding that Wikipedia runs a close second to the Britannica for accuracy.
Let me quickly show you a specific case of the complexity of format in new media. In last week's political news, Senator Russ Feingold proposed a censure of the President. If we were to apply print standards, where would we tell our students to search for information on Feingold's proposal? Because it's breaking news, we might recommend mainstream print media. Good mainstream print media. "Look at the New York Times or the Washington Post," we'd say. Online? Fine; okay; it's the Times and the Post, after all. But if you want to read what Feingold himself has to say about the proposal, you wouldn't look for the quoted snippets in the mainstream media; you'd go to the weblog Daily Kos, where Feingold himself posted a succinct overview--and where, as of midday on March 15, 550 readers had responded.
So does this mean we should tell students to begin with weblogs? No, not that, either. What it means is that we can no longer tell students to conduct their searches according to format. Rather, we have to teach them to conduct multi-format searches and to conduct both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations of what they find there.
And does that mean that weblogs are now of the same value as scholarly journals? No. But the answer is "no" because the question itself is invalid. It is not that the format hierarchy has changed; it is that the format hierarchy is no longer the Prime Directive of information literacy. The format hierarchy is now only one of several essential mechanisms for evaluating data. In a magisterial encyclopedia entry on web credibility, David Danielson explains that users make these on-the-spot evaluations in one of several ways:
1. Experienced readers and researchers such as the group of people gathered in this room rely heavily on what Danielson calls "presumed credibility": Prior to evaluating or even reading a text, experienced readers make predictive judgments about it, based on their preexisting knowledge. I know, for example, to expect conservative analysis from the National Review and left-leaning analysis from The Nation.
2. "Experienced credibility" comes from already knowing the source or the site, and returning to it again. As a blogger, for example, I know that many of the people using the LiveJournal platform are in their teens and early twenties, and that LiveJournal discourse tends to be informal, elliptical, and heavily coded in the community discourse. I know to expect this as I go to a LiveJournal URL; I don't expect to find a scholarly blog there.
3. "Reputed credibility" relies on the recommendations of others. Most of us exercise reputed credibility through book reviews and colleagues' recommendations. For students, reputed credibility works through assigned readings.
4. "Surface credibility" works for all of us but is the mainstay of inexperienced researchers. The appearance of a site--the appeal of its design--exerts a significant influence on users' judgments concerning its credibility.
It is with these four criteria, Danielson says, that researchers make their on-the-spot evaluations as they encounter sources. These are not recommendations from him; they are descriptions of actual practice.
We can readily see a problem: inexperienced researchers such as our students rely on reputed credibility and, most of all, surface credibility. Our efforts to instruct them in recognizing text formats online--how to use the college library database, for example--are one useful response. Yet it is an entirely insufficient response. Users today--and I include us as well as our students--need to know how to make on-the-spot evaluations of open-source online texts.
That connects to yet another problem with managing information today: the process is not linear. Michael Eisenberg tries to make it so with his proprietary information literacy system designed for school instruction. He acknowledges that the actual process is not linear; instead, he acknowledges the recursivity of information management. But the model itself suggests an underlying linearity.
Although we in composition studies are accustomed to talking about "linear" and "recursive" processes, I don't consider this binary sufficient. In this case I'd prefer to talk "rhizomatic" processes of information-seeking. The difference is crucial; when we use the linear/recursive dyad, we are working from an underlying linear model. In the front half of the dyad, linearity, everything moves inexorably along a more or less straight line. In the back half of the dyad, recursivity, inquiry also moves along a more or less straight line but occasionally loops back on itself.
Instead, I am contrasting rhizomatic and linear models, and I am asserting that the research process today is fundamentally rhizomatic. Information-seeking in new media goes in multiple unplanned directions simultaneously, and it is from these disparate, sometimes unconnected threads that researchers make meaning. Everything we teach about research in our classes--graduate as well as undergraduate--is rendered useless unless we can address these and other challenges of contemporary information literacy.
My abstract for this presentation promised pedagogical recommendations. That's a pretty audacious promise, given how tentative my own information literacy in new media is. What I'll do instead is list for you the resolutions I've made for my own literacy and for my teaching. These are marvelously tentative, yet I offer them as a report of where I am in this quest, and the place from which I am presently working:
1. First, I need to work actively to develop my own information literacy. I don't think I really need to expand on that statement. We cannot hide from the fact that the ground has shifted beneath us, and anyone who is going to continue teaching writing has the responsibility of keeping up with contemporary literacies.
2. Second, in my undergraduate teaching, I need to resist the urge to pull the rhizomes into a straight, unified line. Instead, I have to teach my students how to search for and evaluate information in the new environment, the data glut. When I teach research writing next year, for example, my students will set up Google news alerts, Technorati watchlists, and del.icio.us accounts.
3. Third, I need to work on our descriptive terminology for and taxonomies of information management in new media, and I need to cease trying to shoehorn contemporary information management into the terminology and taxonomies that are our legacy from the print-based world.
4. Fourth, rather than making the now-obsolete assertion that research begins with format selection, I have to teach my students how to recognize and work within multiple formats, and I have to mentor them as they develop practices that will allow them to exercise reputed credibility and experienced credibility checks on the sources they find.
5. And then, of course, I have to continue teaching them how to write from the sources they find, acknowledging their cutting and pasting as quotation, and constructing valid, ethical arguments from the sources they select. One of my primary teaching strategies in this regard is to assign summaries and insist that they include neither plagiarism, patchwriting, nor quotation. The summaries must summarize, in fresh language. I give these summary assignments to all my students, from first-years to advanced PhDs. Summary-writing is an advanced literacy skill that warrants ongoing practice.
6. Sixth, I need to be teaching my students how to manage information in current technologies--not how I managed it before these technologies became available. The task includes opening students to the exploration and value of the hidden internet as well as open-source searching.
7. That means I need to be teaching writing in computer-equipped classrooms. At my own institution, that means I need to be making the arguments for those computer-equipped classrooms, which are expensive. But pointing out the expense of, for example, a subscription to Turnitin.com--my university is contemplating a $20,000 annual investment in the service--might be a way of arguing for the investment in computer classrooms. If we can actually be teaching our students how to work with sources rather than trying to determine whether they have used a string of eight words or more from a source--which is the profoundly limited, inadequate datum that Turnitin delivers, along with a copy of the source--can't we justify our institutions' investment in better classroom technology? Our institutions are plenty worried about the specter of student plagiarism; let's give them solutions that really will help.
As you can see, I've shifted here from personal resolutions to exhorting my audience. Argument suits me much better than exposition, I suppose. Whether they are resolutions or proposals, what I've just listed is tentative resolutions from a scholar who is in the thick of refitting her literacy skills and her teaching practices. If you're interested in pursuing this line of inquiry yourself, I've put a bibliography of sources on my website. Enjoy.
