1.3 - 21st Century Literacies - Part 2

There's a final part I want to talk about what's happened since April 22nd, 1993, and that's the need for a whole new range and array of literacies because of the social aspects of technology, as well as technical specifications of the internet and the worldwide web that we all need to know much, much more about. A book that I wrote with my HASTAC co-founder David Theo Goldberg called, The Future of Thinking, Learning Institutions in a Digital Age-- which is available as is, Now You See It, for free download for people enrolled in this class-- was written as a co-written book. We did a draft of a chapter. We then held forums around the country, both virtual forums and face to face. We gathered lots and lots and lots of feedback. And then we based on that feedback and mass contribution, we wrote a final version of the book. To my knowledge, we are the only people that actually included-- as co-authors in the book-- everybody who contributed, including some people who have funny names like Starman4, who we were not able to figure out who they were. But we just we put their pseudonyms in. This is truly a collaborative book and a collaborative process, even though the final process is a physical, printed book.

One of the things we talk about in The Future of Thinking, as well as in an appendix to Now You See It-- that you'll find if you download the book in this class-- is a list of 21st century literacies. These are things that we need to know more about because of the communications and information revolution that started on April 22nd 1993. I mean things like privacy: what does it mean that Facebook has all my private information, even though I keep changing and I have to keep changing the privacy settings? What are the privacy issues involved in a MOOC, such as this one? You know, these are real, real issues. What is security? Recently, there have been some scandals about how much the National Security Administration of the United States government knows about our private life. Are they protecting us, or are they invading the privacy? What is the line between those two? It's a different line than it used to be because of the internet; because we do so much of our communication online; because, since April 22nd, 1993, we've had the ability to think an idea and communicate it to anybody else with an
internet connection.

Ideas of privacy and security are completely merged, and so are ideas of intellectual property. If I take somebody's YouTube video and remix it with a different music, different images, make it into a meme, whose intellectual property is that? We use Creative Commons licenses as much as possible in this class. Creative Commons are often shared like-- there are many different kinds of Creative Commons licenses, and we'll talk about that later in the course. But we'll post some of the Creative Commons contracts to our website, so you can see the-- kind of partnership that happens between the person producing intellectual content and the person distributing it, as long as no money is involved. That's a new concept of property. The great internet theorist and legal theorist Yochai Benkler calls it the comments and talks about-- not the wealth of nations, which was Adam Smith's famous term that defined capitalism-- but what he calls the digital age's wealth of networks and the ways that information, intellectual property, even private data gets traded from one person to another on the internet.

Another internet issue we have to learn about is safety. Now this, like the 18th century, worry that sentimental novels would lead to pedophilia, is something that we have to think about very, very carefully. The internet commodity Cory Doctorow has reports on statistics that say that you're far safer online than you are in everyday life and that, in fact, the majority of crimes that happen against children and others on the internet are perpetuated by people who actually know-- face-to-face-- the people against whom they're using the internet to perpetuate crimes. So you're more likely to be hurt by a trusted teacher, priest, friend, family friend, older relatives, step-relative, in-law than you are from some totally anonymous person on the internet. But it's still necessary to protect your own safety, including the identity safety of being a kid who makes reckless and crazy comments on the internet at age 12, and age 20 is looking for a job and those crazy comments are still attached to your identity. How do you protect against that? That's one of the 21st century literacies we need to be teaching in education, as well.

There's another one that Internet scholar Howard Rheingold calls crap detection. And that simply means since any idea I have, I could go to the computer, I can publish it to anyone else with an internet connection, that means there's no editor; there's no publisher; there's no fact checker. How do I know if the information I'm getting is sound, scrupulous, true information. How do I know if it's, in Howard's term, "crap"? By the way, we'll be putting up a bibliography with all of these names that I'm giving you now, so you can do additional reading outside of the classroom in all of these. These are now areas, whole new intellectual areas, that cross conventional disciplines, and that pertain to all disciplines at once.

There are some other things, and I would say these are more positive things about the 21st century literacies that we have to work on together: collaboration. In the first segment of this class, I said, "no sympathy for the trolls", that trolls would be given one chance, and if they didn't take it, they were off our community. I really believe that. Collaboration online is precarious and promiscuous. By that I mean: "promiscuous" in the sense that anybody can collaborate with anybody; "precarious" in the sense that, when you're anonymous, you can be a troll, and you can be a troll without accountability. So maintaining collaboration online is both bountiful, but it's also precarious and requires the kind of sensitivity, generosity, and watchfulness.

Another 21st century positive literacy: global consciousness. I love it. I love it, that no longer do we just automatically assume that Gutenberg invented movable type; that we have Wikipedia as a global encyclopedia that puts in the histories of many different cultures at once.

About five years ago, several universities were banning Wikipedia, and my organization, HASTAC, came out very much in favor of Wikipedia and said if you don't like the quality of Wikipedia, instead of having conventional term papers, have your students improve the entries on Wikipedia. Have them turn their specialized knowledge they're getting into your class into a public good. And since I was one of the spokespeople for this more expansive contributive idea of knowledge rather than an authoritative editor-based version of knowledge, I did an experiment. I went on to Wikipedia and looked up some basic entries that I thought I knew pretty well to see what kind of contribution and global contribution, had been made. My favorite example is calculus. I was a math geek growing up. Calculus was my favorite subject of all subjects. I still get a little tingle thinking about calculus, and everybody who knows me knows I can get very elegiac about the scholarships I won as a kid to math camp where we got to experiment with calculus at a very, very early age. I was shocked when I read the entry on calculus on Wikipedia. It was no longer the great intellectual battle between Newton and Leibniz over who invented calculus. Suddenly it was, Egyptians invented calculus, and they were aided by the Iranians, and they were aided by the Chinese, and aided by the Turks. And, you know, Newton and Leibniz were quite latecomers into that whole history. So, since I was interested in the authenticity and the accuracy of Wikipedia, I called a reference librarian here at Duke and I told her to look at the calculus entry, and said I've never heard about this before. Is this crazy? And she said, let me find out. And she called me back, and said, "You know, there's not a single book in the Duke library that can authenticate this history, but give me a week."

And she did something amazing-- and I've written about this in a blog, which I will post to the internet, and post to our Coursera site on the HASTAC site now. She found her equivalent-- fine, fine authoritative reference libraries at the best research universities in all of those countries: Egypt, China, Iran, Turkey-- and Korea was another one-- and asked them what they knew about the history of calculus. Three interesting things came out of this experiment: 1) not a single librarian that she talked to in any of those other countries knew the whole complex multicultural, international history of calculus that was there on Wikipedia; they were all surprised to read it. 2) some of them didn't even know about their own history's contribution. But 3) when they all did research according to their same elite standards of reference librarians-- impeccable standards-- they discovered it was true. But there was no book that anybody found out in this investigation that included this whole history. This is an amazing, amazing ability that we have now: to contribute to new knowledge by tapping new knowledge producers, people who have not been part of the conversation before or who have been part of a very insular conversation before, but haven't been able to collaborate with one another. At HASTAC, we call that methodology "collaboration by difference", meaning-- it's a new kind of collaboration-- when people who are not known as experts outside of their very narrow domain work with and translate their domain knowledge outside of that domain. Something very special, something exponentially amazing happens, such as creating the world's largest encyclopedia ever; all without paying anybody, without paying anyone to write, to edit or to read or to subscribe to the encyclopedia. Rational choice economic theory, the wealth of nations, back there with Adam Smith, would have said, "There's no way that Wikipedia could exist." It exists. That's one of the literacies we have to learn about.

And yet... only about 9 percent of the contributors to Wikipedia, worldwide, are women. What is that? It's an open world of contribution and 9% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women, when worldwide, so many of the knowledge makers, the archivists, and the knowledge keepers; librarians; teachers; editors; publishers; are women? Only 9 percent of the contributors to Wikipedia are women? So that raises yet another crucially important question for 21st century literacy: what do we mean by access? When I say I can have an idea, I can go to my computer and publish that idea to anyone else with an internet connection, what does that mean in terms of who actually I'm connecting to? What are the hidden codes that deny access, as well as the material; economic; racial; religious; regional; cultural codes that impede access? All of those things are what, I think you should think about as the new ethics of the internet age. These are complex ethics that we should be teaching in our schools and should be part of the future of education.

Thank you for staying with me for another segment: the history and future of higher-- mostly higher-- education. Next time, who is your favorite teacher and why? Tell us, let us know. Thank you.