WWW: Beyond the Basics

6. Education

6.5 Critical literacy: the WWW's great potential

What we seek to achieve with educational technology requires us to step back and determine what it is we wish to achieve within our educational system. A common goal is to create self-directed life-long learners who are well-equipped to take up a productive role in society. Our society is rapidly becoming an information-driven one, and so it is incumbent upon us to equip students of the future to be effective information managers.

Knowledge continues to double at an increasingly fast rate. Requiring students to learn facts, as is common under the didactic system, is no longer a viable proposition. We need to equip our students with all the necessary skills to be able to locate and evaluate any information they need. They must become information managers, not information regurgitators (Mann, 1994).

As part of this process, two key questions face students searching out information:

  1. Is this information relevant to my needs?
  2. How do I determine the credibility of the source?

In essence, the problem is to develop critical literacy (Jongsma, 1991). In a society where we are bombarded with often contradictory information, we must cultivate the abilitity to evaluate it critically. We must become critically literate (Macedo, 1993).

Students have had neither the need nor the opportunity to develop critical literacy in the class thus far. The authoritative nature of the didactic approach, combined with the use of textbooks as the primary delivery mechanism for information favours the largely uncritical acceptance of information.

Textbooks are static and usually out of date by the time they are printed. Worse still, because of budgetary concerns, textbooks usually must be adopted a minimum of several years, and so students must face a built-in obsolescence in the information they receive. In addition, textbooks need to please a broad diversity and wide audience, leading to a dilution and compromising of their contents. (For example, one is unlikely to find a frank treatment of the Viet Nam war in a US K-12 classroom text.) Political concerns aside, textbooks also come to the student pre-filtered. Somebody else, either the author or the librarian that chose the book, decided whether the material was relevant or appropriate to the student's needs. For these reasons, students have little opportunity to gain access to raw, unfiltered, even contradictory information with which to challenge their critical literacy. Yet in the real world this is precisely the kind of information they must deal with. (Wilson, 1988)

The WWW offers immediate access to up-to-date raw information on every conceivable topic from a huge variety of sources. While teachers use the WWW as an important source of information in their classes, they can also use it to cultivate critical literacy in their students.

As an example, part of the Montgomery County social studies curriculum includes a unit entitled "Facing History" which centres around human rights, including a focus on the Holocaust. Teachers incorporating material from the WWW might discover Holocaust memorial sites along with Holocaust revisionist (Holocaust denial) sites such as that run by the "Institute for Holocaust Research." Immediately, the student is confronted by two diametrically opposing views of the same subject. They must determine which is the more credible. In doing so, they must call upon skills that cut across the entire curriculum to sniff out misinformation, disinformation, and bias. A knowledge of statistics, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and so on might be needed to uncover the flaws in a specious argument. It may be necessary to examine what is not said in order to reveal something telling. For example, the fact that Holocaust memorial sites contain links to Holocaust denial sites but not vice versa could indicate to the reader that the former are not afraid of presenting all the information and letting the reader decide, whereas the latter wish to confine the reader's available information to the skewed presentation they offer.

Critical literacy is a prerequisite skill that must be fostered when using information from the Internet. This invaluable skill will carry over into a real world that contains ever more sources and quantities of information. On the Internet, where anyone may publish anything relatively easy, the huge quantity of extant information makes the use of search engines commonplace. However, search engines cannot rank the returned documents for credibility. This is left to the student, with a potential mountain of chaff mixed in with tasty morsels of wheat. In such a diluted ocean of information, the source is not always easy to evaluate, especially according to reputation, because of the vast number of (often anonymous) authors involved. In the end, it is usually left to the document to speak for itself in terms of its content validity, and ultimate credibility lies in the critical literacy of the reader. (Farah, 1995)

Although this may seem like a burden, it is also a great liberation. Critical literacy is needed for a true democracy to function. Also, the critically literate reader will be armed with the skills necessary to avoid the pitfalls of specious advertising, pseudo-science, narrowed reality (e.g. Holocaust revisionism, Scientific Creationism, cults), get-rich-quick schemes (time-share scams, pyramid schemes, innumerable mail frauds), political rhetoric, indoctrination, media bias, double-speak, twisted statistics, and other ills that prey on the gullible in this information society we live in.

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Copyright © 1996 Paul Mather, All Rights Reserved

Paul Mather <paul@cs.vt.edu>
Last modified: Sun Nov 24 23:21:02 1996