Unit 3 Possible Source texts & Areas of Focus

Complicating, defending, challenging and extending the idea of “digital native”

• ·         Do "Digital Natives" Exist? Idea Channel, PBS Digital Studios. Fun video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WVKBAqjHiE
• ·         John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation Of Digital Natives. Published by Basic Books, 2008. (We have the electronic copy. Students could look at the introduction, a chapter or a section on the concept).
• ·         Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “Generational Myth.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55.4 (Sep 19, 2008): B7-B9. Extends Boyd. Accessible and easy to read.
• ·         Doug Holton, “The Digital Natives / Digital Immigrants Distinction Is Dead, Or At Least Dying.” Blog post March 19, 2010. Collection of articles, stories, conference papers on the topic. http://tinyurl.com/ngpjshh
• ·          “On Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives: How the Digital Divide Affects Families, Educational Institutions, and the Workplace.” http://www.zurinstitute.com/digital_divide.html (This accepts the category but qualifies it by creating many distinctions and sub-categories.)
• ·         Michael Thomas, (ed.) Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology, and the New Literacies. Routledge, 2011. “…an unprecedented assemblage of critical scholarly perspectives on the digital native.”
• ·         Christopher Jones and Binhui Shao. “The Net Generation and Digital Natives: Implications for Higher Education.” A literature review commissioned by the Higher Education Academy, 2011.

Research on the digital literacies of young people/undergraduates – does it confirm, extend, complicate or challenge Boyd?

• ·         Wineburg and McGrew’s, “Why Students Can’t Google Their Way to Truth”  
• ·         Online education promises learning opportunities for all, but too many community college students lack the tech skills--and the access--to take advantage of these resources.” 
• ·         Hargittai, E. “Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”. Sociological Inquiry. 80(1):92-113, 2010.
• ·         “Adaptability to Online Learning: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas.” Di Xu & Shanna Smith Jaggars, CCRC Working Paper No. 54.
• ·         Publications from the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, http://www.erialproject.org/.

Digital Literacy & Inequality

• ·         Astra Taylor, “Open Systems and Glass Ceilings.” http://www.nationofchange.org/open-systems-and-glass-ceilings-1397223100
• ·         Hargittai, E. “Digital Na(t)ives? Variation in Internet Skills and Uses among Members of the “Net Generation”. Sociological Inquiry. 80(1):92-113, 2010.
• ·         The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected.worries especially about how the psychologists who  work for these companies make the tools phenomenally addictive, as many are well-versed in the field of persuasive design (or how to influence human behavior through the screen).
• ·        
• ·          they don’t want their own children anywhere near them. 
• ·         said earlier this yearshe wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPadsNannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts. 

What search skills do young people have?

What attitudes do they have to Google and Wikipedia? Are they aware of “search engine bias” and the politics of algorithms?

Boyd claims that many young people have unsophisticated search skills, trust too easily in the results provided by Google, and are unaware of the “politics of algorithms.”  The texts below could be used to illustrate, extend, complicate, challenge and qualify Boyd’s arguments.

1. Video: Eli Pariser TED talk, “Beware Online Filter Bubbles.” http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en
2. Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Donna M. Lanclos, and Erin M. Hood, "'I always stick with the first thing that comes up on Google....' Where People Go for Information, What They Use, and Why," EDUCAUSE Review Online, December 6, 2013.
3. “At Sea in a Deluge of Data,” Alison J. Head and John Wihbey  Chronicle of Higher Education,  JULY 07, 2014. http://tinyurl.com/qx76ao8  
4.  “In Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance.” Bing Pan et al. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Volume 12, Issue 3, pages 801–823, April 2007.
5. Alison J. Head, "Learning the Ropes: How Freshmen Conduct Course Research Once They Enter College," Project Information Literacy Research Report, December 4, 2013.
6. Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age," Project Information Literacy First Year Report with Student Survey Findings, University of Washington's Information School, 2009
7. Soo Young Rieh and Brian Hilligoss, "College Students' Credibility Judgments in the Information Seeking Process," in Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility, eds. Miriam J. Metzger and Andrew J. Flanagin, MIT Press, 2008.
8. Sook Lim, "How and Why Do College Students Use Wikipedia?" Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 60, no. 11, 2009
9. Alison J Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, "How Today's College Students Use Wikipedia for Course-Related Research," First Monday, vol. 15, no. 3, 2010.
10. Helen Georgas, "Google vs. the Library: Student Preferences and Perceptions When Doing Research Using Google and a Federated Search Tool," Libraries and the Academy, vol. 13, no. 2, 2013, pp. 165–185.
11. “The ERIAL Project: Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries” by Andrew Asher, Lynda Duke, and Dave Green. Academic Commons, May 2010.
12. The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project is a series of studies of student digital literacy conducted at Illinois universities. “The majority of students -- of all levels -- exhibited significant difficulties that ranged across nearly every aspect of the search process”… They tended to overuse Google and misuse scholarly databases. They preferred simple database searches to other methods of discovery, but generally exhibited ‘a lack of understanding of search logic’ that often foiled their attempts to find good sources.”
13. Cass Sunstein, “The Daily We: Is the Internet Really a Blessing for Democracy?” Boston Review, Summer, 2001.
14. “Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. With Cynthia Dwork.” The New York Times, AUG. 10, 2015. http://tinyurl.com/po3rq26

Critical Digital Literacy

•  Mike Caulfield, “Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers” https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/
  “Four Strategies” https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/chapter/four-strategies/
  How “News Literacy” Gets the Web Wrong https://hapgood.us/2017/03/04/how-news-literacy-gets-the-web-wrong/
  “Using Google Reverse Image Search” https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/chapter/using-google-reverse-image-search/
  “Tracking The Source Of Viral Photos” https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/chapter/tracking-the-source-of-viral-photo/
• New York Times: “Skills and Strategies: Determining the Reliability of Sources”
• "Crap Detection 101.” City Brights, Howard Rheingold, SFGate.com. SFGate Blogs.
• Rheingold, Howard – video on crap detection. http://rheingold.com/2013/crap-detection-mini-course/
• Prezi on the subject: https://prezi.com/cutjhwskuqbk/chapter-2-rheingold-prezi/
• Scott Rosenberg, “In the Context of Web Context: How to Check Out Any Web Page,” Wordyard Blog, September 14, 2010, http://www.wordyard.com/2010/09/14/in-the-context-of-web-context-how-to-check-out-any-web-page.
• Bing and the Microsoft Education Team, “From Search to Research: Developing Critical Thinking through Web Research Skills” PDF, pp 3-14, 31-37.

The Politics of Algorithms 

• Algorithmic Accountability: A Primer. By Robyn Caplan, Joan Donovan, Lauren Hanson, and Jeanna Matthews. A Data and Society report.
• Eli Pariser TED talk, “Beware Online Filter Bubbles.” http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en
• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
• A three minute introduction to Noble's research, and her book Algorithms of Oppression. From USC TV.  Long video talk by Noble at a Data and Society event, 
  and one at USC
• Research Safiya Umoja Noble has looked at algorithms and racism. Here is an accessible summary of some of Noble's work 
• Video: What Algorithms Taught Me About Forgiveness. Julia Angwin at MozFest 
• "Make Algorithms Accountable." A New York Times op-ed by Julia Angwin 
• "Machine Bias." A Pro Publica article about algorithms used in criminal sentencing. 
• "Watch out, algorithms: Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson unveil The Markup, their plan for investigating tech’s societal impacts" A Nieman Lab article about Anwin and Larson's work.

Sites/Data for Analysis

• A twitter account named TIMENOUT that the bomb suspect followed. It is a fairly popular account, with around 250,000 listed followers. What are the main themes? What do you notice about the rhetoric? How can we analyze, fact-check, and evaluate the material? What kinds of critical digital literacy might help inoculate students against it?
• An archive of tweets by the Florida Bomb Suspect Cesar Sayoc. 
• Archive of messages on Gab by Robert Bowers who is accused of attacking a synagogue in Pittsburgh.  
• This NYT story examines sites spreading fake news and fake images related to the migrant Caravan 
• House Intelligence Collection of Facebook Ads During 2016 Election by Russian Propaganda Teams
• Sample Facebook Ads from the 2016 Election Organized by Group (fake liberal, fake conservative, fake Muslim, fake BLM, etc.)  
• Story on a new Russian site for fake news set up for the election. It has evaded YouTube's detection system with "Buzzfeed-stye knock-offs"
• A collection of one year's worth of chat room logs from the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker's Party. 
• The BlackmattersUS site, one of the few remaining web sites created by Russian operatives during the 2016 election. 
  New materials stopped appearing there in mid-2017, but you can find a lot to analyze. You could also use archive.org to loook at how it changed over time. 
• 50 Fake Facebook Ads from the Election (Newsweek) 

California Passes New Media Literacy Law

• http://www2.ncte.org/report/california-passes-law-strengthen-media-literacy-classrooms/
  Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that mandates the California Department of Education provide media literacy resources on its website, to help teachers and students navigate information on the internet. Proposer Bill Dodd based his efforts on the Stanford University study in 2016, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. This study showed that 80 percent of middle school students didn’t recognize an ad that was masquerading as a news story despite it being labeled “sponsored content.” The study also found that high school students had trouble telling the difference between the real Fox News Facebook site and a fake account mimicking the conservative news outlet.