Category Archives: Internet and public issues

the history of civics and news literacy education

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I’m in Chicago for Poynter’s News Literacy Summit, entitled “Because News Matters.” Participants promote (to varying degrees) such outcomes as: following and understanding the news, taking informed action as citizens, understanding how the media work, critically interpreting news, understanding society and politics, valuing high-quality news, understanding media effects on individual behaviors and attitudes, being well informed about current events, civilly discussing controversial issues, valuing First Amendment freedoms, making news media, and making other forms of media.

Each of these objectives has been pursued for a long time. John Dewey, for example, was a great proponent of news media literacy. To get a rough sense of what has been taught over time, consider this graph of the percentage of American students who’ve had various courses on their transcripts:

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This is a complex picture, without simple trends. I would, however, emphasize a few observations:

1) A course that truly focused on using the news media was “problems of democracy,” which typically involved having to read the daily newspaper in order to prepare for pop quizzes on current events and classroom discussions. That course had its heyday in the 1940s and is now largely gone.

2) Courses that look like college-level social science are much more common today than they were in the past.

3) American Government is a hardy perennial course. But it has to cover a wide range of material, including the history and structure of the US government. Following current events is often an afterthought, not aligned with standardized tests.

Sources: Up to 1994, Richard G. Niemi and Julia Smith, “Enrollments in High School Government Classes: Are We Short-Changing Both Citizenship and Political Science Training?” PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 281-287. After that, the National High School Transcript Study; CIRCLE’s 2012 survey.

how to teach the constitution of cyberspace

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Tomorrow at the American Political Science Association, I’ll be joining Hahrie C. Han (Wellesley College), Cathy J. Cohen (University of Chicago), and Joseph Kahne (Mills College) on a panel on Civic Education after the Digital Revolution Date (10:15 AM-12:00 PM, Omni Palladian Ballroom, DC).

This is one topic I’d like to discuss: Students should understand and be able to critically assess the basic rules and structure of the Internet, much as they should understand and be able to criticize the US Constitution. But the Internet is harder to grasp, for both teachers and students. How should the “constitution of cyberspace” be taught (if at all)?

The US government as an institution that students should understand in order to critically assess it. To be sure, the government is large and complex, it has changed over time, and it has both proponents and sharp critics. Yet it has one fundamental document (the US Constitution) and one impressive justification (in the Federalist Papers) that provide focal points of debate. Students can learn a lot by reading the Constitution, some of the Federalist Papers, and some critics of the Constitution and then applying their knowledge through discussions of historical and current controversies.

In contrast, Web 2.0 has no constitution and no Federalist Papers. I admire perceptive theorists of the new media landscape: Benkler (2006), boyd (2008), Castells (2000), Lessig (2000), Shirky (2008), Sunstein (2007), and others. None of these authors would claim to be the James Madison of cyberspace. They did not have the authority to write its fundamental rules, and they do not offer highly general justifications of it. Their writing is too difficult to be assigned directly in most k-12 classrooms. Their scholarship has not been digested for youth audiences, nor has it prominent expression in political discourse. If there is a Gettysburg Address for the new media environment, I have not seen it.

I do not presume that the US Constitution is preferable to the rules of cyberspace or that the framers of the Constitution are more admirable than the architects of the digital world. The Constitution requires critical evaluation; the Internet has attractive features. I would simply assert that it is harder to understand cyberspace than the US government because only the latter has an authoritative code (the Constitution) and official justifications that we can read and critically evaluate.

MOOCs are old and shopworn

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This is from a Connected Planet article in 1997:

Ah, spring – the time of year when students decide to skip classes en masse and sit outside enjoying the sun and fresh air. For the students of the University of Phoenix Online Campus, however, that ritual loses something in the translation: To duck their professors, all they have to do is turn off their PCs and unhook their modems.

But it’s a tradeoff that they’re willing to make in order to earn their undergraduate and graduate degrees on a part-time basis from the comfort of their own homes. The University of Phoenix opened its doors to its first 12 on-line students in 1989, and it now boasts 2500 students, 250 faculty members and eight degree program. …

However, one education industry analyst wonders how much credibility an on-line degree really has in the marketplace. “I would imagine there would be a bias against on-line degrees of any kind,” said Rick Hesel, principal at Art & Science Group. “Face-to-face contact with the faculty is considered to be a mark of quality, and because this program doesn’t have that, I think both employers and prospective students would be wary.”

But that could change soon, as the big names in education get into the on-line arena, Hesel said.

“Once you see Harvard or other prestigious MBA programs getting into it, all bets are off,” he said.

And Hesel believes that will be sooner rather than later.

Contrast that with the talk of a “MOOC Revolution” in (for instance) this 2103 Tom Friedman article. Friedman, like many others, presumes that MOOCs (massive open online courses) are very new, rapidly spreading, highly promising, originating in institutions like Stanford and Harvard with distinguished educators like Michael Sandel, and motivated by the goals of better and more accessible education. But, as Aaron Bady argues in Liberal Education, even the word “MOOC” is now almost six years old, and the basic practice dates to 1989. Even then, students were assigned to online discussion groups and showed videos of lectures. MOOCs did not originate at luminous, global intellectual powerhouses but at the University of Phoenix, which is now rapidly shrinking and faces widespread criticism for achieving a loan default rate higher than its graduation rate. Dispersion of the MOOC model has been slow and halting due to poor reputation and questionable impact. The prediction that “Harvard and other prestigious MBA programs” would soon adopt MOOCs turned out to be 16 years premature.

As Bady argues, there is no reason to rush to adopt MOOCs. We are not going through a “MOOC revolution.” Rather, we have extensive experience and it is not encouraging. To be sure, online courses have educational potential; a CIRCLE paper outlines some advantages. But we must avoid the hype. If college administrators were asked whether they wanted to implement the University of Phoenix’s 1989 model instead of Stanford’s latest MOOC, I doubt they would feel as excited.

(I take this overall argument from Bady, but I found the 1997 article quoted above.)

the new information technologies empower whom?

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(Frederick, MD) Within the past week, I have read two good manuscript chapters about the Dreamers and how they have used social media to change the public debate about naturalization and citizenship rights–even though they are young, not rich, and not even legally citizens. That kind of example suggests that the Internet strengthens the disadvantaged.

On the other hand, we have all read about the NSA’s monitoring of electronic communications, domestic and foreign. One of the most telling episodes in that story was Google’s outraged discovery that the NSA taps its data. Google has–and the NSA wants–a detailed profile of almost every Internet user in the world, valuable for marketers and spooks. This kind of example suggests that the Internet strengthens the strong.

It could do both, depending on context; and the balance may shift over time. To what extent various parties are empowered is an ongoing empirical question. But I would suggest a conceptual distinction to help guide the inquiry.

Part of politics is authoritative decision-making about rules or goods. That makes it substantially zero-sum. For instance, a win for the pro-choice side is a loss for the pro-life side. (However, everyone may gain from having a peaceful and efficient process for deciding contentious issues.) Insofar as politics is zero-sum, all parties will use the new technologies to try to win. It is an open question who will gain, relative to the others. Those who increase their share of power could be the traditionally weak, the traditionally strong, or both at the expense of the middle.

Some authoritative decision-making is not zero-sum. For example, the passage of same-sex marriage legislation is a loss for its opponents, but not if they decide that they like same-sex marriage (as millions have done). A shift in actual beliefs can enable a win-win outcome. The new electronic media are certainly changing the ways that public opinions shift. Again, it is an open empirical question whether this is a good thing. We have recently seen a rapid change in opinion favorable to gay rights but also a substantial erosion of belief in climate change.

Some politics is win-win or constructive interaction. For instance, when people collectively create Wikipedia, they are producing a public asset, and that is a political outcome. Yet, leaving aside some very hot struggles about particular Wikipedia pages, this effort is not adversarial.

When politics is collaborative, some may gain more than others. For instance, Wikipedia doesn’t do you much good if you can’t read. But it needn’t actually hurt anyone, and it may confer its benefits broadly. It enriches the commonwealth.

The Internet clearly has constructive outcomes like this. On the other hand, even Wikipedia uses carbon to run. That is a negative externality, and it is only an example of such. If Craigslist killed the daily newspaper, that was another casualty.

I have deliberately reached no conclusions here but have simply suggested that if we want to think about who is empowered by the new electronic media, it is worth dividing the topic into three parts: rivalrous politics, persuasive politics, and collaborative politics.

the latest on online political engagement

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Aaron Smith of the Pew Internet & Public Life Project has released a new report based on Pew’s polling that provides the best current information on how we use the Internet and social media to engage in politics. These are some points that struck me as especially interesting:

  • “39% of American adults took part in some sort of political activity in the context of a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter.” That would include, for example “liking” political material (which 23% of adults have done) and encouraging other people to vote (21%).
  • For most political activities–online and offline–levels of engagement are strongly correlated with income and education. The gap is also seen in the use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to communicate about politics, but the disparity is smaller in that domain. “In other words, even as the impact of income on political participation is more modest in the context of social networking sites, socio-economic distinctions related to education still play a prominent role in these spaces.”
  • Age matters for social networking but not for the other forms of online political engagement: “There are only modest age-related differences when it comes to getting involved in political groups or in-person activities, speaking out publicly in online spaces, or speaking out publicly in offline spaces.” But two-thirds of young adults had used social media for political communication, as compared to just 13% of seniors.
  • Not only has the use of social networking sites and tools expanded, but the proportion of users who do something political with social media tripled between 2008 and 2012. That surprises me because I might have expected that as social media reached mass scale, it would draw more apolitical users.
  • A key question about social networking is whether it leads to anything, because some social networking behaviors (such as clicking to “like” a post) are so quick and easy that they hardly seem to count. According to Smith, “18% of social networking site users say they have decided to take action involving a political or social issue because of something they read on those sites.” He also finds that those who use social media for political purposes are more engaged in other ways. Overall, it looks as if social media do not detract from other forms of engagement but probably contribute modestly.

I am always worried about over-reporting in surveys of civic behavior–our own as well as other organizations’. One way to test the level of over-report is to ask respondents whether they voted, because we know how many ballots were actually cast. This survey was conducted last summer, before the election, so turnout could not be measured. But respondents were asked whether they were registered to vote, and 75% said they were. The official voter registration rate in November was around 70%, but that may be an overestimate because Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Michigan and Mississippi actually count more people as registered than they have eligible resident citizens. (Citizens who have moved or died are still on their rolls.) Also, many people register after the summer of an election year. So the 75% registration rate reported in this Pew survey is high. It suggests either a bias in their sample toward active citizens or a social desirability bias that causes people to claim they engaged when they did not. These problems are absolutely typical in our business, and I am always more interested in differences within a poll than what we would call the “point estimates” (e.g., “39% of American used Facebook or Twitter for political purposes”). But if you want to estimate the rates of online civic participation, I would cut the reported numbers down by a quarter or so. They remain pretty impressive.