Tag Archives: education

Did Media Literacy Backfire?

Anxious about the widespread consumption and spread of propaganda and fake news during this year’s election cycle, many progressives are calling for an increased commitment to media literacy programs. Others are clamoring for solutions that focus on expert fact-checking and labeling. Both of these approaches are likely to fail — not because they are bad ideas, but because they fail to take into consideration the cultural context of information consumption that we’ve created over the last thirty years. The problem on our hands is a lot bigger than most folks appreciate.

CC BY 2.0-licensed photo by CEA+ | Artist: Nam June Paik, “Electronic Superhighway. Continental US, Alaska & Hawaii” (1995).

What Are Your Sources?

I remember a casual conversation that I had with a teen girl in the midwest while I was doing research. I knew her school approached sex ed through an abstinence-only education approach, but I don’t remember how the topic of pregnancy came up. What I do remember is her telling me that she and her friends talked a lot about pregnancy and “diseases” she could get through sex. As I probed further, she matter-of-factly explained a variety of “facts” she had heard that were completely inaccurate. You couldn’t get pregnant until you were 16. AIDS spreads through kissing. Etc. I asked her if she’d talked to her doctor about any of this, and she looked me as though I had horns. She explained that she and her friends had done the research themselves, by which she meant that they’d identified websites online that “proved” their beliefs.

For years, that casual conversation has stuck with me as one of the reasons that we needed better Internet-based media literacy. As I detailed in my book It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, too many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research. As a result, the message that many had taken home was to turn to Google and use whatever came up first. They heard that Google was trustworthy and Wikipedia was not.

Understanding what sources to trust is a basic tenet of media literacy education. When educators encourage students to focus on sourcing quality information, they encourage them to critically ask who is publishing the content. Is the venue a respected outlet? What biases might the author have? The underlying assumption in all of this is that there’s universal agreement that major news outlets like the New York Times, scientific journal publications, and experts with advanced degrees are all highly trustworthy.

Think about how this might play out in communities where the “liberal media” is viewed with disdain as an untrustworthy source of information…or in those where science is seen as contradicting the knowledge of religious people…or where degrees are viewed as a weapon of the elite to justify oppression of working people. Needless to say, not everyone agrees on what makes a trusted source.

Students are also encouraged to reflect on economic and political incentives that might bias reporting. Follow the money, they are told. Now watch what happens when they are given a list of names of major power players in the East Coast news media whose names are all clearly Jewish. Welcome to an opening for anti-Semitic ideology.

Empowered Individuals…with Guns

We’ve been telling young people that they are the smartest snowflakes in the world. From the self-esteem movement in the 1980s to the normative logic of contemporary parenting, young people are told that they are lovable and capable and that they should trust their gut to make wise decisions. This sets them up for another great American ideal: personal responsibility.

In the United States, we believe that worthy people lift themselves up by their bootstraps. This is our idea of freedom. What it means in practice is that every individual is supposed to understand finance so well that they can effectively manage their own retirement funds. And every individual is expected to understand their health risks well enough to make their own decisions about insurance. To take away the power of individuals to control their own destiny is viewed as anti-American by so much of this country. You are your own master.

Children are indoctrinated into this cultural logic early, even as their parents restrict their mobility and limit their access to social situations. But when it comes to information, they are taught that they are the sole proprietors of knowledge. All they have to do is “do the research” for themselves and they will know better than anyone what is real.

Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources. If the media is reporting on something, and you don’t trust the media, then it is your responsibility to question their authority, to doubt the information you are being given. If they expend tremendous effort bringing on “experts” to argue that something is false, there must be something there to investigate.

Now think about what this means for #Pizzagate. Across this country, major news outlets went to great effort to challenge conspiracy reports that linked John Podesta and Hillary Clinton to a child trafficking ring supposedly run out of a pizza shop in Washington, DC. Most people never heard the conspiracy stories, but their ears perked up when the mainstream press went nuts trying to debunk these stories. For many people who distrust “liberal” media and were already primed not to trust Clinton, the abundant reporting suggested that there was something to investigate.

Most people who showed up to the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria to see for their own eyes went undetected. But then a guy with a gun decided he “wanted to do some good” and “rescue the children.” He was the first to admit that “the intel wasn’t 100%,” but what he was doing was something that we’ve taught people to do — question the information they’re receiving and find out the truth for themselves.

Experience Over Expertise

Many marginalized groups are justifiably angry about the ways in which their stories have been dismissed by mainstream media for decades. This is most acutely felt in communities of color. And this isn’t just about the past. It took five days for major news outlets to cover Ferguson. It took months and a lot of celebrities for journalists to start discussing the Dakota Pipeline. But feeling marginalized from news media isn’t just about people of color. For many Americans who have watched their local newspaper disappear, major urban news reporting appears disconnected from reality. The issues and topics that they feel affect their lives are often ignored.

For decades, civil rights leaders have been arguing for the importance of respecting experience over expertise, highlighting the need to hear the voices of people of color who are so often ignored by experts. This message has taken hold more broadly, particularly among lower and middle class whites who feel as though they are ignored by the establishment. Whites also want their experiences to be recognized, and they too have been pushing for the need to understand and respect the experiences of “the common man.” They see “liberal” “urban” “coastal” news outlets as antithetical to their interests because they quote from experts, use cleaned-up pundits to debate issues, and turn everyday people (e.g., “red sweater guy”) into spectacles for mass enjoyment.

Consider what’s happening in medicine. Many people used to have a family doctor whom they knew for decades and trusted as individuals even more than as experts. Today, many people see doctors as arrogant and condescending, overly expensive and inattentive to their needs. Doctors lack the time to spend more than a few minutes with patients, and many people doubt that the treatment they’re getting is in their best interest. People feel duped into paying obscene costs for procedures that they don’t understand. Many economists can’t understand why so many people would be against the Affordable Care Act because they don’t recognize that this “socialized” medicine is perceived as experts over experience by people who don’t trust politicians who tell them what’s in their best interest any more than they trust doctors. And public trust in doctors is declining sharply.

Why should we be surprised that most people are getting medical information from their personal social network and the Internet? It’s a lot cheaper than seeing a doctor, and both friends and strangers on the Internet are willing to listen, empathize, and compare notes. Why trust experts when you have at your fingertips a crowd of knowledgeable people who may have had the same experience as you and can help you out?

Consider this dynamic in light of discussions around autism and vaccinations. First, an expert-produced journal article was published linking autism to vaccinations. This resonated with many parents’ experience. Then, other experts debunked the first report, challenged the motivations of the researcher, and engaged in a mainstream media campaign to “prove” that there was no link. What unfolded felt like a war on experience, and a network of parents coordinated to counter this new batch of experts who were widely seen as ignorant, moneyed, and condescending. The more that the media focused on waving away these networks of parents through scientific language, the more the public felt sympathetic to the arguments being made by anti-vaxxers.

Keep in mind that anti-vaxxers aren’t arguing that vaccinations definitively cause autism. They are arguing that we don’t know. They are arguing that experts are forcing children to be vaccinated against their will, which sounds like oppression. What they want is choice — the choice to not vaccinate. And they want information about the risks of vaccination, which they feel are not being given to them. In essence, they are doing what we taught them to do: questioning information sources and raising doubts about the incentives of those who are pushing a single message. Doubt has become tool.

Grappling with “Fake News”

Since the election, everyone has been obsessed with fake news, as experts blame “stupid” people for not understanding what is “real.” The solutionism around this has been condescending at best. More experts are needed to label fake content. More media literacy is needed to teach people how not to be duped. And if we just push Facebook to curb the spread of fake news, all will be solved.

I can’t help but laugh at the irony of folks screaming up and down about fake news and pointing to the story about how the Pope backs Trump. The reason so many progressives know this story is because it was spread wildly among liberal circles who were citing it as appalling and fake. From what I can gather, it seems as though liberals were far more likely to spread this story than conservatives. What more could you want if you ran a fake news site whose goal was to make money by getting people to spread misinformation? Getting doubters to click on clickbait is far more profitable than getting believers because they’re far more likely to spread the content in an effort to dispel the content. Win!

CC BY 2.0-licensed photo by Denis Dervisevic.

People believe in information that confirms their priors. In fact, if you present them with data that contradicts their beliefs, they will double down on their beliefs rather than integrate the new knowledge into their understanding. This is why first impressions matter. It’s also why asking Facebook to show content that contradicts people’s views will not only increase their hatred of Facebook but increase polarization among the network. And it’s precisely why so many liberals spread “fake news” stories in ways that reinforce their belief that Trump supporters are stupid and backwards.

Labeling the Pope story as fake wouldn’t have stopped people from believing that story if they were conditioned to believe it. Let’s not forget that the public may find Facebook valuable, but it doesn’t necessarily trust the company. So their “expertise” doesn’t mean squat to most people. Of course, it would be an interesting experiment to run; I do wonder how many liberals wouldn’t have forwarded it along if it had been clearly identified as fake. Would they have not felt the need to warn everyone in their network that conservatives were insane? Would they have not helped fuel a money-making fake news machine? Maybe.

But I think labeling would reinforce polarization — but it would feel like something was done. Nonbelievers would use the label to reinforce their view that the information is fake (and minimize the spread, which is probably a good thing), while believers would simply ignore the label. But does that really get us to where we want to go?

Addressing so-called fake news is going to require a lot more than labeling.It’s going to require a cultural change about how we make sense of information, whom we trust, and how we understand our own role in grappling with information. Quick and easy solutions may make the controversy go away, but they won’t address the underlying problems.

What Is Truth?

As a huge proponent for media literacy for over a decade, I’m struggling with the ways in which I missed the mark. The reality is that my assumptions and beliefs do not align with most Americans. Because of my privilege as a scholar, I get to see how expert knowledge and information is produced and have a deep respect for the strengths and limitations of scientific inquiry. Surrounded by journalists and people working to distribute information, I get to see how incentives shape information production and dissemination and the fault lines of that process. I believe that information intermediaries are important, that honed expertise matters, and that no one can ever be fully informed. As a result, I have long believed that we have to outsource certain matters and to trust others to do right by us as individuals and society as a whole. This is what it means to live in a democracy, but, more importantly, it’s what it means to live in a society.

In the United States, we’re moving towards tribalism, and we’re undoing the social fabric of our country through polarization, distrust, and self-segregation. And whether we like it or not, our culture of doubt and critique, experience over expertise, and personal responsibility is pushing us further down this path.

Media literacy asks people to raise questions and be wary of information that they’re receiving. People are. Unfortunately, that’s exactly why we’re talking past one another.

The path forward is hazy. We need to enable people to hear different perspectives and make sense of a very complicated — and in many ways, overwhelming — information landscape. We cannot fall back on standard educational approaches because the societal context has shifted. We also cannot simply assume that information intermediaries can fix the problem for us, whether they be traditional news media or social media. We need to get creative and build the social infrastructure necessary for people to meaningfully and substantively engage across existing structural lines. This won’t be easy or quick, but if we want to address issues like propaganda, hate speech, fake news, and biased content, we need to focus on the underlying issues at play. No simple band-aid will work.

Special thanks to Amanda Lenhart, Claire Fontaine, Mary Madden, and Monica Bulger for their feedback!

This post was first published as part of a series on media, accountability, and the public sphere. See also:

Are We Training Our Students to be Robots?

Excited about the possibility that he would project his creativity onto paper, I handed my 1-year-old son a crayon. He tried to eat it. I held his hand to show him how to draw, and he broke the crayon in half. I went to open the door and when I came back, he had figured out how to scribble… all over the wooden floor.

Crayons are pretty magical and versatile technologies. They can be used as educational tools — or alternatively, as projectiles. And in the process of exploring their properties, children learn to make sense of both their physical affordances and the social norms that surround them. “No, you can’t poke your brother’s eye with that crayon!” is a common refrain in my house. Learning to draw — on paper and with some sense of meaning — has a lot to do with the context, a context in which I help create, a context that is learned outside of the crayon itself.

From crayons to compasses, we’ve learned to incorporate all sorts of different tools into our lives and educational practices. Why, then, do computing and networked devices consistently stump us? Why do we imagine technology to be our educational savior, but also the demon undermining learning through distraction? Why are we so unable to see it as a tool whose value is most notably discovered situated in its context?

The arguments that Peg Tyre makes in “iPads < Teachers” are dead on. Personalized learning technologies won’t magically on their own solve our education crisis. The issues we are facing in education are social and political, reflective of our conflicting societal values. Our societal attitudes toward teachers are deeply destructive, a contemporary manifestation of historical attitudes towards women’s labor.

But rather than seeing learning as a process and valuing educators as an important part of a healthy society, we keep looking for easy ways out of our current predicament, solutions that don’t involve respecting the hard work that goes into educating our young.
In doing so, we glom onto technologies that will only exacerbate many existing issues of inequity and mistrust. What’s at stake isn’t the technology itself, but the future of learning.

An empty classroom at the Carpe Diem school in Indianapolis.
Education shouldn’t be just about reading, writing, and arithmetic. Students need to learn how to be a part of our society. And increasingly, that society is technologically mediated. As a result, excluding technology from the classroom makes little sense; it produces an unnecessary disconnect between school and contemporary life.

This forces us to consider two interwoven — and deeply political — societal goals of education: to create an informed citizenry and to develop the skills for a workforce.

With this in mind, there are different ways of interpreting the personalized learning agenda, which makes me feel simultaneously optimistic and outright terrified. If you take personalized learning to its logical positive extreme, technology will educate every student as efficiently as possible. This individual-centric agenda is very much rooted in American neoliberalism.

But what if there’s a darker story? What if we’re really training our students to be robots?

Let me go cynical for a moment. In the late 1800s, the goal of education in America was not particularly altruistic. Sure, there were reformers who imagined that a more educated populace would create an informed citizenry. But what made widespread education possible was that American business needed workers. Industrialization required a populace socialized into very particular frames of interaction and behavior. In other words, factories needed workers who could sit still.

Many of tomorrow’s workers aren’t going to be empowered creatives subscribed to the mantra of, “Do what you love!” Many will be slotted into systems of automation that are hybrid human and computer. Not in the sexy cyborg way, but in the ugly call center way.
Like today’s retail laborers who have to greet every potential customer with a smile, many humans in tomorrow’s economy will do the unrewarding tasks that are too expensive for robots to replace. We’re automating so many parts of our society that, to be employable, the majority of the workforce needs to be trained to be engaged with automated systems.

All of this begs one important question: who benefits, and who loses, from a technologically mediated world?

Education has long been held up as the solution to economic disparity (though some reports suggest that education doesn’t remedy inequity). While the rhetoric around personalized learning emphasizes the potential for addressing inequity, Tyre suggests that good teachers are key for personalized learning to work.

Not only are privileged students more likely to have great teachers, they are also more likely to have teachers who have been trained to use technology — and how to integrate it into the classroom’s pedagogy. If these technologies do indeed “enhance the teacher’s effect,” this does not bode well for low-status students, who are far less likely to have great teachers.

Technology also costs money. Increasingly, low-income schools are pouring large sums of money into new technologies in the hopes that those tools can fix the various problems that low-status students face. As a result, there’s less money for good teachers and other resources that schools need.

I wish I had a solution to our education woes, but I’ve been stumped time and again, mostly by the politics surrounding any possible intervention. Historically, education was the province of local schools making local decisions. Over the last 30 years, the federal government and corporations alike have worked to centralize education.

From textbooks to grading systems, large companies have standardized educational offerings, while making schools beholden to their design logic. This is how Texas values get baked into Minnesota classrooms. Simultaneously, over legitimate concern about the variation in students’ experiences, federal efforts have attempted to implement learning standards. They use funding as the stick for conformity, even as local politics and limited on-the-ground resources get in the way.

Personalized learning has the potential to introduce an entirely new factor into the education landscape: network effects. Even as ranking systems have compared schools to one another, we’ve never really had a system where one students’ learning opportunities truly depend on another’s. And yet, that’s core to how personalized learning works. These systems don’t evolve based on the individual, but based on what’s learned about students writ large.

Personalized learning is, somewhat ironically, far more socialist than it may first appear. You can’t “personalize” technology without building models that are deeply dependent on others. In other words, it is all about creating networks of people in a hyper-individualized world. It’s a strange hybrid of neoliberal and socialist ideologies.

An instructor works with a student in the learning center at the Carpe Diem school in Indianapolis.
Just as recommendation systems result in differentiated experiences online, creating dynamics where one person’s view of the internet radically differs from another’s, so too will personalized learning platforms.

More than anything, what personalized learning brings to the table for me is the stark reality that our society must start grappling with the ways we are both interconnected and differentiated. We are individuals and we are part of networks.

In the realm of education, we cannot and should not separate these two. By recognizing our interconnected nature, we might begin to fulfill the promises that technology can offer our students.

This post was originally published to Bright at Medium on April 7, 2015. Bright is made possible by funding from the New Venture Fund, and is supported by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

How Can We Help Miguel?

[Written for DML Central. More comments there.]

One of the hardest parts of doing fieldwork is hearing difficult, nuanced stories that break my heart. The more complicated the story, the harder it is to tell, but I feel a responsibility to at least try. Given how many educational reformists read this blog, I want to provide a portrait of some of the teens that I’ve met who are currently being failed by the system. My goal in doing so is to ask a hard question: how do we help these specific teens? Let me start with Miguel.

Miguel is 17 and in the 10th grade. His parents, both from Mexico, never finished high school and speak very little English. They are very religious and came to the US to try to provide a life for Miguel and his brother. When Miguel arrived first arrived in Nashville, he spoke very little English himself, but a local gang immediately adopted him and taught him English with heavy street slang. Given his initial friends, he was immediately labeled as a gangbanger by adults. He struggles with this label and it shapes his relationship to school and influences how adults treat him.

danah: Is school boring?
Miguel: Sometimes. Like, my algebra II, that class is like, I don’t get what she is saying. I tell her to slow down and she won’t slow down. She act like a computer. I sometimes am taking notes and she’ll be erasing them. That’s when I get mad and I tell her. She says she don’t care.
danah: Why doesn’t she care?
Miguel: Because she say I never pay attention.
danah: How does that make you feel?
Miguel: It makes me feel bad because I know that I pay attention and I try, but that’s her.

Miguel has long struggled to dissociate himself with gangs, looking up to people who are making their life work through the traditional tracks of school. “When I see people who are doing good in school I be like, oh, I want to be like that. It makes me be a better person and give me, what’s it called, feel better in my mind, my studies and everything.” But he faces insurmountable odds. As an undocumented / “illegal” (in his words) immigrant, he believes that he won’t be going to college. He’s particularly angry about this because his brother is doing quite well in school and there appears to be no hope for him to go to college either. (Note: I’m not sure about the legal barriers, but Miguel is convinced that there’s no way that he or his brother could go to college.)

In addition to feeling as though there’s no educational future for him, he struggles with issues about loyalty, feeling like he should be supporting his friends who supported him when he first arrived. But then a friend of his was killed; this scared him. “It makes me feel like I don’t want to be in that position anymore. I prefer to stay at home or going to the movies without knowing I’m going to get shot.” Fights are all around him and he regularly struggles to stay disengaged.

Miguel: I make decisions now by more of the– to feel myself better and safe, because one day we were fighting and this dude pulled out a knife and he started trying to kill someone. And since then, I was like, “I don’t like that.” And then, one day, it was before the knife, after the knife my friend got into a fight and everyone wasn’t there. This dude pull up a gun and he tried to shoot you. He shoot the gun, but we start running. So that’s why I prefer to stay bored in school and be safe than be doing something bad. Not doing nothing in school is more safe than to be doing something that is bad for me.

Miguel says that most of his friends stay involved with the gangs because “they don’t want leave out of the life. They want to stay in that life.” When the TV show Gangland did a special on Nashville, his friends were ecstatic that they were on TV, that they were now “famous.” This TV show, while showing the underbelly of gang culture, served as a recruiting technique for local gangs. Although Miguel wants out, there are pressures to stay in. He no longer goes to the lunchroom because he’s expected to sit with the gang. He works hard to come up with activities that will give him excuses for not showing up at fights. And while he’s got support outside of school – at church, through a counselor – even his teachers have written him off as a gangbanger.

Here’s a teen who wants to learn, who is painfully far behind and frustrated, who speaks broken English and is clearly lacking in many educational basics, who is unable to see a future for himself outside of doing menial labor and working hard to avoid being picked up by INS. He doesn’t see college as an option nor does he see any path to becoming legal. How can we help a teen like Miguel?

am I an academic?

academia (n.): The academic world or community; scholastic life.

academic (n.): 1) An ancient philosopher of the Academy.
2) A member of a college or university.
3) A member of a society for promoting art or science

At every academic conference I attend, I hear a constant refrain: “How does it feel to have left academia?” The tone changes dependent on who is doing the asking. Sometimes, it’s pure curiosity or puzzlement, fascination at my choice. At other times, there’s a hint of condescension, as though the question is actually: “Couldn’t make it in academia, eh? Stuck in industry, eh?” I try not to bristle at this but I do find myself getting defensive and trying to explain my position at Microsoft Research over and over again. So I couldn’t help but think that maybe it’s time to write it down.

Microsoft Research is an industrial research lab in the old skool sense. In the world of computer science, the industrial research lab is well understood; it has a long history of success in producing valuable, field-changing research. Like AT&T Bell Labs or Xerox PARC, the halls of MSR are filled with scientists of the highest caliber. People who invented things that you take for granted. MSR grew out of this tradition. It’s primarily filled with computer scientists (and engineers, physicists, mathematicians). Researchers are encouraged to pursue research questions that they feel are important and they are evaluated based on their publication record, contributions to the scholarly community, and innovative research that produces “tech transfer.”

Being a social scientist in one of these labs is peculiar, but not new. I have long admired the anthropological contributions Lucy Suchman made to research while at PARC. Being a social scientist at an industrial research lab can be a tricky balance. There are plenty of anthropologists and other social scientists who do applied work at Microsoft, focused on specific product needs. This is extremely important work, but it’s different than scholarly research. It’s also tricky to say what constitutes “tech transfer” as a social scientist. I don’t really produce IP in the traditional sense, but my work contributes to the company in other ways.

Yet, tech transfer is only a fraction of what I do. The vast majority of my time is spent doing the same type of research that I’ve been doing for years. I follow topics that interest me and dive head first in, regardless of whether or not it involves Microsoft’s current or future products. I publish articles without seeking approval from anyone. I blog about my research without vetting it through Microsoft. I attend academic conferences, review papers, and contribute to scholarly discourse. It looks a whole lot like academia to me. Yet, I hear all sorts of remarks that indicate that folks don’t believe that what I do is akin to academia. I feel the need to account for these and offer a different perspective.

But you’re working for a corporation! Since when are universities not corporations? Best that I can tell, most universities are fundamentally real estate barons who gain public credibility by offering higher education. The difference is that Microsoft’s products are very visible and related to the types of research that they seek to support. Both Microsoft and the university invest in research in the hopes that it will benefit the corporation as a whole, directly through the production (and protection) of IP or indirectly by creating an atmosphere where productive work can take place. The outcomes may look different, but both Microsoft and the university are large corporations with a fiscal mindset.

But a company makes you focus on the company’s bottom line! There is no doubt that Microsoft would love to have research that benefits it financially, but the dynamic is far more symbiotic than parasitic. We’re welcome to do the research we’re most passionate about, but we get financial bonuses for creating patents or for producing quality research that benefits the company. It’s an incentives system. On the contrary, I would argue that the university model is predominantly parasitic. Researchers at universities must run around begging external agencies for money so that they can do the research they love to do. When they finally succeed in getting a grant, how does the university respond? It takes 30-60% for “overhead.” And when they don’t get funding, they’re punished with lack of research resources and students. Furthermore, most university researchers don’t get to do as they please – they do what they (think they) can get funding for. I suspect I have far more freedom in terms of my research agenda than most university scholars.

Still, you have to spend time helping the company directly! Yes, I spend time working with product groups. But I like to think of it as my teaching duty. Rather than teaching Soc 101 to hung-over 18-year-olds who didn’t bother doing the reading, I teach an interactive form of Soc 101 to engineers who are filled with questions that start with “but why?” and “but how?” I have a hard time imagining that my engagement with product groups takes up more of my time than teaching, office hours, and prep. And it’s often quite fun and thought-provoking.

Well, there’s no tenure! What exactly is tenure? The promise that the university will promise you a salary in return for perpetual grant begging? Tenure guarantees a job, but it doesn’t guarantee an enjoyable one. There’s no promise of a pay raise or good classes to teach. Microsoft Research does have the right to fire me but, from what I can see, it’s more common for people to leave when they don’t gel well (just like in universities). The bigger threat is whether or not Microsoft will be around in N years (arguably, also true with many universities). I suspect that my job is just as solid as it would be in most university environments. The difference really comes down to bonuses. At the university, there are no performance-based bonuses. At Microsoft Research, a large chunk of my salary is linked to performance. Thus, I have an incentive to do well. There are also promotions that parallel university levels; Researcher = Assistant Professor, Senior Researcher = Associate Professor, Principle Researcher = Full Professor. This may not offer the on-paper guarantee of tenure, but it is pretty darn equivalent.

It’s not like you have students! Most professors love having students because of the collaboration potential. (Some enjoy the empire building but that’s not my bent.) Of course, this varies by field. Some scholars feel as though they need students to complete their work; in other fields, students are more an opportunity to mentor. My approach to students is more of collaboration and mentorship rather than slave labor. It’s true that I don’t have students, but I have the fortune of being able to take a handful of interns each year for 12 weeks each. These interns are primarily post-quals PhD students who have the skills and passion for collaboratively working on a constrained research project. No, it is not the same as 7-year students that you get to watch grow, but it’s not like I’m not engaged with younger scholars. My time with them is just more constrained and focused. There are also postdocs who come for 1-2 years. And when I’m craving collaboration, I can bring in visiting researchers to work with me. So it’s a bit more hodge-podge, but there’s still tremendous opportunities for engagement with scholars at all levels.

Whatever… it’s not real research. This is what it always comes down to… “Real” research comes from the university, suggesting that what comes out of industrial research labs is “fake.” I’m never quite sure how to best respond to this except to commit to proving folks wrong.

I feel very fortunate to have a position at Microsoft Research, even if lots of folks don’t seem to get why it’s a good deal. In many ways, this environment is far more academic than what I witnessed at MIT’s Media Lab or Berkeley’s iSchool. The biggest downside is that it’s not helping with my disciplinary identity crisis. If I had joined a specific disciplinary department, I might have had a clearer sense of the “top” journals, relevant conferences, and whether or not publishing a book is a must to succeed. Perhaps not, but I like to think so. Instead, I’m as confused as ever about where to publish and how to best disseminate my research in a manner that is generally useful. Thus, instead of becoming a proper -ist, I’m continuing to pave a strange path that may or may not bite me in the ass in the future. Of course, this identity crisis is pure academia. And one of the clearest reminders that I’m still an academic through-and-through.

I may not be a professor, but I’m still a scholar and, arguably, an academic. The title of “Researcher” may not seem very impressive or academic in social science realms, but practically speaking, it’s akin to “Assistant Professor” (and that’s even how people discuss it internally). What I do looks a lot like what any university researcher does, but with fewer restrictions. I don’t have to beg for grants. I don’t have to battle onerous IRBs (note: dealing directly with lawyers is MUCH easier than dealing with academics who are worrying about the legal repercussions of research). I can travel when I need to for research. I can do research that I think is important. I can collaborate with whomever I please. In return, I make certain that my research (and that of others) is translated into language that product people can understand. Personally, I think it’s a pretty amazing trade-off.

some thoughts on technophilia

The New Media Consortium is hosting a Symposium for the Future October 27-29. I was asked to write a few thoughts that might provoke conversation in preparation for the event. This is a re-posting of my Ideas for Thought. If you are an educator or involved in the world of learning, consider attending the symposium. Regardless, if these topics interest you, consider reading the other idea pieces by Gardner Campbell and Holly Willis.

It is easy to fall in love with technology. It is equally easy to fear it. In a setting like this Symposium, many of us fall in the passionate lovers camp, dreamily accounting for all of the wonderful things we’ve experienced through and because of technology. All too often, our conversations center on the need to get technology into the hands of learners, as though the gaps that we’re seeing can be explained away by issues of access. Push comes to shove, most of us know that there are problems with this model, but in a world filled with dichotomous rhetoric, it’s easy to get into the habit of being the proselytizer in the face of fear-mongering.

I want to push back against our utopian habits because I think that they’re doing us a disservice. Technology does not determine practice. How people embrace technology has less to do with the technology itself than with the social setting in which they are embedded. Those who are immersed in a techno-savvy, technophilic community are far more likely to embrace technology than those whose social world is shaped by other patterns of consumption and communication. People’s practices are also shaped by those around them. There are cluster effects to socio-technical engagement. In other words, people do what their friends do.

Rejecting technological determinism should be a mantra in our professional conversations. It’s really easy to get in the habit of seeing a new shiny piece of technology and just assume that we can dump it into an educational setting and !voila! miracles will happen. Yet, we also know that the field of dreams is merely that, a dream. Dumping laptops into a classroom does no good if a teacher doesn’t know how to leverage the technology for educational purposes. Building virtual worlds serves no educational purpose without curricula that connects a lesson plan with the affordances of the technology. Without educators, technology in the classroom is useless.

There are also no such things as “digital natives.” Just because many of today’s youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don’t. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There’s an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it’s also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like “digital natives” obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

Along the same lines, keep in mind that the technology that you adore may hold no interest for your students. They don’t use del.icio.us or Second Life or Ning or Twitter as a part of their everyday practices. And the ways that they use Facebook and MySpace and YouTube are quite different than the ways in which you do. We each approach technology based on our own needs and desires and we leverage it to do our bidding. In this way, we actively repurpose technology as a part of engagement such that rarely does one technology fit all. Yet, when we introduce technology in an educational setting, we often mistakenly assume that students will embrace the technology in the same way that we do. This never works out and can cause unexpected strife. Take social network sites as an example. You use this for professional networking; teens use it to socialize with their peers. Putting Facebook or MySpace into the classroom can create a severe cognitive collision as teens try to work out the shift in contexts. Most problematically, when teens are forced to navigate Friending in an educational setting, painful dramas occur because who you’re polite to in school may be very different than who you socialize with at home. Using technology that ruptures social norms in the classroom can be socially and educationally harmful.

As we talk about the wonderfulness of technology, please keep in mind the complexities involved. Technology is a wonderful tool but it is not a panacea. It cannot solve all societal ills just by its mere existence. To have relevance and power, it must be leveraged by people to meet needs. This requires all of us to push past what we hope might happen and focus on introducing technology in a context that makes sense.

help me find innovative practitioners who address online safety issues

I need your help. One of our central conclusions in the Internet Safety Technical Task Force Report was that many of the online safety issues require the collective engagement of a whole variety of different groups, including educators, social workers, psychologists, mental health experts, law enforcement, etc. Through my work on online safety, I’ve met a lot of consultants, activists, and online safety experts. Through my work as a researcher, I’ve met a lot of practitioners who are trying to engage youth about these issues through outright fear that isn’t grounded in anything other than myth.

Unfortunately, I haven’t met a lot of people who are on the ground with youth dealing with the messiness of addressing online safety issues from a realistic point of view. I don’t know a lot of practitioners who are developing innovative ways of educating and supporting at-risk youth because they have to in their practices. I need your help to identify these people.

  • I want to know teachers. Who are the teachers who are trying to integrate online safety issues into their classroom by using a realistic model of youth risk?
  • I want to know school administrators. Who are the school administrators who are trying to build school policy that addresses online safety issues from a non-fear-driven approach?
  • I want to know law enforcement officers. Who are the law enforcement officers who are directly dealing with the crimes that occur?
  • I want to know people from social services. Who are the people in social services (like social workers) who are directly working with at-risk youth who engage in risky behavior online?
  • I want to know mental health practitioners. Who are the psychologists and mental health practitioners who are trying to help youth who engage in risky practices online? Or who help youth involved in self-harm deal with their engagement with self-harm websites?
  • I want to know youth ministers. Who are the youth pastors and ministers who are trying to help at-risk youth navigate risky situations?
  • I want to know other youth-focused practitioners. Who else is out there working with youth who is incorporating online safety issues into their practice?

I know that there are a lot of people out there who are speaking about what these partitioners should do, who are advising these practitioners, or who are trying to build curricula/tools to support these practitioners, but I want to learn more about the innovative practitioners themselves.

Please… who’s incorporating sensible online safety approaches into their daily practice with youth in the classrooms, in therapy, in social work, in religious advising, etc.? Who’s out there trying to wade through the myths, get a realistic portrait, and approach youth from a grounded point of view in order to directly help them, not as a safety expert but as someone who works with youth because of their professional role? Who do I need to know?

(Feel free to leave a comment or email me at zephoria [at] zephoria [dot] org.)

education and Skywalker Ranch

Yesterday, i flew up to Skywalker Ranch to meet with a bunch of people who think about/work on issues around education. It was held there because it included folks from the George Lucas Educational Foundation (and was put on by the Institute for the Future and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation). OMG… drool. That place is just ridiculously gorgeous! There were gardens and a lake and vineyards and all things pretty northern California. PLUS there were original life sabers and other movie memorabilia. Mega drool.

On top of being in an idyllic setting, the meeting was quite engaging. It was very school-focused and a small group of us came to the realization that schools need to start serving the tension between ego-centered, personalized, individualistic society and globalized society. There used to be scales – people would be part of local communities, broader communities, nation-states, etc. Networked society is altering the relationships between people and communities are suffering because of the lack of cohesion, social norms, etc. When we think about education (especially when we talk about its role in relation to civic life), we need to stop damning technology and start engaging with the shifts that have occurred in the architecture of sociality. We started toying with what that would mean as a design criteria for educational infrastructure. (I was trying really hard to think of optimistic ideas for formal education but i also realized how much i still detest the bureaucratic nature of public schools.)