An Ocean of Information: Who’s the Captain?

By Paul Braymen

WRI 111: Writing Seminar

To read Professor Anne Boyle’s comments on the writing moves found in this essay, click on or hover over the footnotes within the text.

Imagine, if you will, that a fully functional iPhone suddenly dropped from the sky and into the hands of the smartest caveman in the world, circa two hundred thousand years ago. ¹ Let’s also say that wifi isn’t an issue, and the words on the screen are written in ‘cavemanese’. At first glance, this man seems to have access to more information than anyone before him. He has the knowledge of all humankind at his fingertips, only a quick search away, right? Wrong. He wouldn’t even know where to start. With limitless information at his disposal, no one from back then could be expected to parse such a vast amount of data.

While access to such a device and the information that comes with it might seem absurd to anyone living more than about 50 years ago, it’s the reality of life today. As a society, we are being inundated with information. However, without proper context, all that information becomes overwhelming, and the facts blend in with the fiction. Just because we can google the answers to any of our questions doesn’t mean that the correct one will always present itself. Even worse, careless spreading of unverified information can not only drown out real information, but can also be used to intentionally deceive as well. Thus, it’s of vital importance that members of modern society are equipped with the skills to sift through a deluge of data, and to be able to tell apart facts from fake news. ² But how do we develop these skills? Is it fair for us to expect citizens to spontaneously acquire a critical viewpoint? Or is it the job of those committed to education to ensure the next generation is prepared to navigate an ocean of information? Keep reading, and we will explore the reasons why schools should put a greater emphasis on teaching children how to find their bearings in this information era.

Let’s start with the obvious: schools (in the context of primary and secondary education) are about more than just memorizing facts. We love to bemoan the lessons we learned, saying to our teachers “But when are we ever going to use this?” Here’s the secret: maybe you won’t. If you don’t plan on continuing your education, or perhaps staying in STEM, calculus may be as useful to you as hieroglyphics. Your nine-to-five job doesn’t make you answer document-based questions, and most realtors agree that chi-square tests are rarely part of the closing process. If all this information is extraneous, why bother learning it at all? We learn so many things so that we can learn how to learn. ³ As Gail Caruth, adjunct faculty of the Educational Leadership Department at Texas A&M University, puts it, “The main purpose of education … is to attain the capacity to become life-long learners” (3). People often complain that schools should teach so-called ‘useful information’, like how to file taxes, or how to change a car’s oil, etc. If schools were to teach every useful process life had to offer, we would be in the classroom all the way through adulthood. ⁴ Instead, the goal of most schools today is to provide the necessary skills for matriculants to learn these things on their own.

This has worked well for the last century or so, but society today looks very different than it did many years ago. As someone like my middle-aged father could tell you, even a mere 40 years ago, information was relatively hard to come by. To find sources for a school project, he would spend hours in the library, shuffling through the dusty stacks for any shred of information on his topic. He may come back with two or three books, and his research would be finished. Today, we have what could be considered the opposite problem. ⁵ With a single database query, I can find thousands of studies investigating any phenomenon of interest. The challenge today, then, is identifying which ones are credible. The words of the nation’s leading scientist on antibody research and the words of my crystal-healing neighbor don’t necessarily merit the same consideration when it comes to an outbreak, but my technology doesn’t know that. Both stories can appear side by side on my Facebook feed, each competing for my attention. As Miftachul Huda writes in The International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, “today’s generation is bombarded by media technology …, all information can be easily accessed” (695). Information today is so easy to interact with that anybody can say whatever he or she wants, and valid, valuable information can easily be drowned out by pop-sci headlines and sensationalist media.

But still, this begs the question: who is responsible for instilling these skills in our citizens? If someone attends the best school in the world, and comes out not knowing anything, was it the school’s fault? Is our education system obligated to raise model members of society? After all, it isn’t a criminal offense to be dumb or ignorant. Even if we required schools to amend their curriculum to teach information literacy, there’s no guarantee that we see a marked difference in the ability of citizens to use it, not to mention the billions of adults who are beyond their years in a classroom. Additionally, it takes time and money for any major change in a curriculum to be rolled out and established. It could be a very long, expensive process to develop new information literacy-centered pedagogies that can address these new concerns, not to mention the uncertainty of success.

However, despite these obstacles, I believe it is still up to schools to help prepare our young minds for the challenges they will face. No other institution is as poised as our education system to impart new skills to a large audience. As was previously established, the primary role of schools is to prepare citizens to handle novel and evolving problems in the real world (Caruth 3). The problems of today look vastly different than the problems of yesteryear, but teaching methods remain largely the same. Asmaa Ganayem, founder and director of the Technology Education and Cultural Diversity center at Al Qasimi College in Israel, found that, “educators and mentors are still modeling traditional technology in education […] despite the fact that the Israeli Ministry of Education (2011) has adapted the 21st century skills to its educational system” (4). ⁶ To effectively tackle our new, modern dilemma, schools must modify what and how they spend time in their classroom. Unfortunately, many teachers simply don’t have the necessary information literacy skills themselves. According to Sarah Crary, assistant professor in the School of Education at North Dakota State university, “Studies of teachers’ and school librarian’s understanding of information literacy skills revealed that teachers had a poor understanding of effective information literacy skills” (4). A solution may not be easy or perfect, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a shot. By changing the curriculum of primary and secondary schools to further integrate technology and information literacy into their lesson plans, as well as educating the teachers themselves about information literacy, we can allow students to use their devices for more than just entertainment.

For many, including myself, technology was a quick and dirty way to kill post-soccer-practice evenings. In fifth grade, after receiving a laptop for my schoolwork, I had access to a new world of information. Even so, I never thought about learning something new. Viewed through my prepubescent perspective, it was a device designed entirely to play video games. However, that changed once I started having to use it in the classroom. When I needed to do research for my science projects, I didn’t go to the library, I went to jStor. I had to learn good sources from bad sources, all as direct parts of the lesson plan. What has stuck with me through the years wasn’t the information on those websites I visited, but rather how to go about browsing and processing new material. Thanks to my technology and information-based upbringing, digital literacy has come as naturally to me as traditional literacy. ⁷

Tragically, recent developments have proved just how important a solid foundation of information literacy is. In the past, while conspiracy theories certainly existed, they were generally kept out of the collective consciousness. Like a fire without a forest, it was harder for radical ideas and gobbledygook to spread uncontrolled. Unfortunately, the Internet is undiscerning. Giovanni Ciampaglia, a data science professor at the University of Southern Florida, claims that “the deluge of online misinformation is overloading the exchange of ideas upon which democracies depend” (65). Again, everyone gets a voice, no matter how substantiated his or her point may be. Sensational headlines become the norm, and misinformation sets the world ablaze.

Not all is lost, though. Despite the best efforts of the ignorant, science continues to develop. As a result, many deadly diseases that plagued humanity have been nearly eradicated. Progress was going smoothly, until one fraudulent and discredited study set humanity back by a few years. A so-called ‘scientist’ by the name of Andrew Wakefield published a study and concluded that developmental disorders like autism were linked to children who received life-saving vaccinations (639). Even though this study and all its implications have been debunked countless times, the damage has been done. There exists a group of people, commonly referred to as ‘antivaxxers’, who have run with this conclusion choosing to prevent their children from receiving immunity to illness, and convincing others to do the same. As Azhar Hussain writes in the medical journal Cureus, “[The work of Wakefield] has caused multiple measles outbreaks in Western countries where the measles virus was previously considered eliminated” (1). These antivaxxers claim they do their own research and tout ‘science’ around as if it supports them. Acting like a plague of its own, misinformation spreads and grows, infecting the minds of our citizens with frightening yet unfounded stories and news. ⁸ Despite being ostensibly false, this propaganda can have real consequences. A scientifically literate person could assess the validity of these claims, but instead, people die because of the ignorance of others.

While the landscape of information has changed drastically over the years, so too have humans. No longer are we cavemen with sharp sticks, but rather thinkers with sharp minds. We are a resilient species, and have adapted to face countless challenges. So too must we adapt to handle our greatest weapon yet: knowledge. Misinformation and ignorance have real, tangible consequences for our population, but we are not powerless in the fight against them. We must be proactive, and make sure that our teachers are both technologically literate and able to teach students to use technology both deftly and responsibly. Just as Prometheus passed to humankind the secrets of fire, we must arm our descendants with the skills to guide them through this digital ocean that we live in today.

Works Cited

Caruth, Gail. Learning How to Learn: A Six Point Model for Increasing Student Engagement. no. 2, 2014. ERIC, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED552869.

Ciampaglia, Giovanni Luca, et al. “Research Challenges of Digital Misinformation: Toward a Trustworthy Web.” AI Magazine, vol. 39, no. 1, 1, Mar. 2018, pp. 65–74. www.aaai.org, doi:10.1609/aimag.v39i1.2783.

Crary, Sarah. “Secondary Teacher Perceptions and Openness to Change Regarding Instruction in Information Literacy Skills.” School Library Research, vol. 22, Jan. 2019. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eric&AN=EJ1221655&site=ehost-live.

Huda, Miftachul, et al. “Empowering Children with Adaptive Technology Skills: Careful Engagement in the Digital Information Age.” International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, vol. 9, no. 3, International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, Mar. 2017, pp. 693–708.

Hussain, Azhar, et al. “The Anti-Vaccination Movement: A Regression in Modern Medicine.” Cureus, vol. 10, no. 7. PubMed Central, doi:10.7759/cureus.2919. Accessed 5 Apr. 2020.

A Word from Paul

Never would I have thought that, of all the essays I’ve written, this would have received any attention. I can still remember when I finished writing the first draft (in a single stressful night), shortly after Wake cancelled classes in Spring 2020. I gave it one final read through before thinking to myself, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever written.” It was sloppy, incoherent, and pretentious. As much as I hated turning it in, I was just glad to see it leave my outbox. However, that draft was an experiment. I wanted to try out a technique I studied in Dr. Boyle’s class, one that Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.” In her essay, Lamott presents the merits of dumping your mind onto a page and seeing what sticks, whittling down and refining later in the process.

This was a departure from my classic drafting style, which was to do absolutely everything I could except writing. I would spend hours making long, meticulous, and overbearing outlines to guide me. It was a safe and consistent strategy, but after a while it seemed to box me in. This particular paper, though, called for a new approach.This essay was the one I had the most anxiety about writing (ironic, right?). Since middle school, argumentative essays have intimidated me. Something about picking a position and sticking with it seemed like a dangerous commitment. How could I assert something so adamantly? What if I wanted to change my mind? I’ve done it before; in freshman year of high school I started writing one side of a persuasive essay, but halfway through, I found myself advocating for the opposite! The last thing I wanted was to end up having to completely change and rewrite something I’d already committed myself to.

Funnily enough, this process of writing and rewriting (what I now call revision) is absolutely essential to every good piece of writing. No one writes a bestseller on their first try. It’s an iterative process, constantly growing. What began as my shitty first draft, through many rewrites and rounds of peer review, eventually blossomed into the essay above. Paragraphs were shuffled, loose threads were severed, and research was done. After all, if I couldn’t put sources behind what I was saying, why should anyone believe it? What you read was perhaps the sixth or seventh version; I hope you never get a chance to read the earliest ones. Long story short, I learned that revising isn’t just looking for spelling errors, or sprinkling around semicolons; it’s the process by which an essay goes from awful, to bad, to alright, to pretty good, and finally, to something you can be proud to turn in. Thanks for reading my (hopefully) not-so-shitty paper, and I challenge you to try the technique for yourself. Write a horrendous, awful, absolutely embarrassing first draft; just like me, you might be surprised by how it turns out!

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts” in Writing about Writing, Ed., Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs. Bedford Books St. Martins, 2020.

From Professor Anne Boyle

Commentary

What I most appreciated about Paul Braymen’s argumentative essay was his voice and his tenacity. In his own reflection, Paul admits that his first try at this paper was disappointing. I commented that while I appreciated his intimate, informal, and sincere voice and his metaphoric language, the topic was too broad and claims needed to be substantiated. When he received my comments, instead of being frustrated, Paul was energized and began what would be at least eight revisions. With each revision, he would ask me about something specific, like the structure of a group of sentences, where his voice seemed too informal, where he needed more research. He also sharpened his structure, leading his audience through the essay with guideposts meant direct his audience; he would do this through rhetorical questions, humorous insights, or humane appeals. When Paul addresses his readers, I believe he relies on his oral appeal. He works so hard and so well to establish a voice that pops off the page, into a reader’s ear. Yes, he knows that his argument is still a bit broad, but he is passionate about it and I think he may return to it and write the 30 page paper that the topic deserves.

Assignment

Your third assignment allows you to build on the work you have already accomplished in this course. You have already shown that you can rhetorically analyze complicated texts. You understand that writers have a certain exigence as they write; you know how they use evidence, how they construct their own ethos through words, how they work to persuade you through logic and emotional appeal.

Using at least 3 sources, you will demonstrate that you can write a balanced, clear, and cogent argumentative essay. The length should be 4 ½-6 pages. You may choose your topic, but you should recognize the need to hone in on a manageable topic. I encourage you to shy away from topics that are too general and embrace an issue where you can clearly see that intelligent people may disagree. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate your ability to research a topic of interest, put sources in conversation (“forward and counter”), construct an annotated bibliography, and “take an approach” of your own.

Steps to consider:

If you are using 3 sources, you will need to read many more to make certain that you have the best sources given your time constraint, so get researching!
Your first step, which we will workshop in class, is to narrow your topic or field of exploration. As archeologist’s know, the narrower the field, the deeper you can dig.
In this paper, you are not trying to win a debate. Think of your thesis as a critical question that you will investigate in your paper. Once you narrow down your topic to a thesis and pose your critical question, you need to show your reader that there is no easy answer to this question, that the most you can do is interrogate a variety of claims and come up with the claim you think has validity.
We all have biases, but you need to investigate or interrogate your own biases or you will not find the distance that will allow you to read your sources critically and analyze them rhetorically. Your objective is to persuade readers that you have a valid point of view.
“Come to terms” with your source materials as you read them with a rhetorically-aware eye.

As you read your sources, create an annotated bibliography that contains the correct bibliographical citation followed by 1 to 3 concise sentences that describe the author’s claim and the approach used by the author. Here is an example of the annotation added after the bibliographical citation for Margaret Kantz’s article: Writing to an audience interested in helping students develop their argumentative skills, Kantz compares the processes used by two students as they write argumentative papers. The less successful, writerly-based Shirley reports on her sources, while the more successful, rhetorically-wise Alice is able to evaluate and analyze conflicting claims.

Editor Comments

1
Paul works to establish a relationship with readers by inviting them to imagine a scenario. ↩︎
2
After a brief overview of the ways that information can be taken out of context and manipulated, Paul stakes his claim and follows it with rhetorical questions meant to draw in his readers. ↩︎
3
Returning to his claim that information, alone, can be misconstrued and manipulated, Paul argues that public schools are sites where students should learn how to process and analyze information. ↩︎
4
Paul anticipates and addresses counter claims. ↩︎
5
Paul uses a personal anecdote to bolster his claim that 21st century educators need to address not how to locate information, but how to assess the accuracy of that information and the credibility of the source. ↩︎
6
Credible sources are used to bolster his argument. ↩︎
7
Paul uses personal experience to emphasize how important digital literacy training was for him as a younger student. ↩︎
8
Returning to his earlier claim that false and inaccurate information can be harmful, Paul uses sources that provide specific examples of such enduring harm. ↩︎