Uzbek TV

A news crew from Uzbekistan interviewed the CIRCLE staff earlier today. They were nothing like Balat from the “Ali G. Show.” For one thing, they only spoke Russian and had to use an interpreter. For another, they asked extremely serious and sober questions, like “What precentage of eligible voters are under 30?”

All interviews are one-sided affairs; and when everything has to be translated, you can’t make small talk or ask irrelevant questions. As I watched, I wondered: What is it like being in a car with four Uzbeks and a State Department handler, driving around suburban DC for an interview with people at some “Center for Information …”? Why do Uzbeks care about youth turnout in the US election? When we say that kids study “civic education” in American high schools, what scenes pop into their heads? What do they imagine goes on in a place like the University of Maryland? What are they going to say in Russian voiceover as they show my colleagues talking? Are they even paying attention?

In short, I found the news crew more interesting–but probably more mysterious–than they found us and our issue of American youth civic engagement.

medical information online

LIBRES (Library and Information Science Electronic Journal) has just published an article of mine entitled “What Should be the Role of Government-Supported Medical Websites?” I begin by noting that low-budget medical websites with crackpot advice can sometimes score higher than MedlinePlus on Google. MedlinePlus is a major product of the National Library of Medicine, which has an annual budget of $250 million and is supported directly by the National Institutes of Health. NIH, in turn, has a budget of $20 billion and employs 18,000 people, including 5-10 Nobel Laureates at any given time. The openness of the Internet means that official, white-coated medicine (as embodied by NIH) is losing its monopoly–and that is not necessarily a good thing.

I ask whether we should take various modest steps to push Web-searchers toward official portals like MedlinePlus. I conclude that we should, although this is not an easy question, since government sites have been known to manipulate medical information for political reasons, and drug companies have excessive power over the medical profession.

Peter Suber immediately noticed my article. Peter is probably the world’s leading advocate of open-access publishing. Material is open-access if it is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” LIBRES is an open-access publication: peer-reviewed, but available free on the Internet. Therefore, Peter monitors it. I asked him how he could track so many sites so efficiently, and he told me that he uses WebSite Watcher to “crawl” through 100 sites each day and notify him of all changes.

Peter says he agrees that government websites like MedlinePlus are great, but they would be better if NIH required all of the work it funded to be open-access. There is a serious proposal to make that happen: see Peter’s FAQ page.

three paths to civic renewal

Right now, my email inbox contains announcements of three important civic initiatives:

  • AmericaSpeaks has put together a document that explains how one could organize a deliberation involving one million Americans. Using large face-to-face meetings, small informal gatherings, and online forums, citizens would simultaneously discuss a single topic, reach conclusions that would be transmitted to policymakers, and then turn into an active constituency to support their recommendations. In 2002, Senators Hatch and Wyden introduced a bill that would authorize a national discussion of health care reform. That idea prompted AmericaSpeaks to convene a group of experts to work out a fairly detailed blueprint for coordinated deliberations on any topic of national importance. (The AmericaSpeaks document is not yet online, but I will forward a copy of the .pdf on request.)
  • Nancy Kranich, a former president of the American Library Association and a friend of mine, has written a comprehensive report about the “Information Commons.” It is now on the Brennan Center website in an attractive format. Nancy notes that the Internet could allow a vast expansion of the fundamental ideal traditionally championed by public libraries: free, shared information. But digital media also create the risk that intellectual property will be over-protected and restricted. She documents ways that libraries are protecting open access and building “information commons” for the digital era. These commons are not only storehouses of knowledge; they also support communities and social networks and thus enhance civil society. She concludes with policy recommendations to enhance the commons.
  • My colleagues at J-Lab, the Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland, have announced $1 million in grants for “community news ventures.” Nonprofits and educational institutions may apply for funding to “help create new types of self-sustaining community media projects.” The source of J-Lab’s funds is the Knight Foundation, also a major benefactor of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, in which I’m heavily involved.

    • Community news services housed in local nonprofits, “information commons” based in libraries, large-scale deliberations on important issues … this could be the beginning of a true civic revival.

    a powerful argument for civics

    Excellent education in history and civics is necessary to achieve the reading goals of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That was a theme in today’s discussions of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, which I chaired. The argument goes like this:

    1. You can prepare kids to achieve “basic” levels on the fourth grade reading assessment by teaching them skills such as phonics and decoding. But you cannot get them past “basic” at fourth grade, or to any level of competence at the eighth and twelfth grade, without giving them lots of good texts to read and comprehend. They need experience in comprehension. And they need a store of knowledge derived from reading–in other words, some form of “cultural literacy.”

    2. Therefore, achieving the reading goals of NCLB requires high-quality instruction in such fields as literature, natural science, history, social science, and current events. Indeed, it requires high-quality instruction in all of those areas, because a narrow curriculum will generate readers with narrow competence.

    People who like NCLB should agree with this argument, but so should people who think that NCLB is too much of an unfunded mandate or that it puts too much emphasis on high-stakes tests. These critics also want students to read.

    Philosophically, one might argue that teaching civics in order to enhance reading skills is putting the cart before the horse. Public schools were founded with a civic mission, and teaching history and social studies requires no justification other than a civic one. I suppose I agree with this, but I’m a practical person who just happens to hold a philosophy Ph.D. I see an enormous practical opportunity here for people who are concerned about the future of our democracy.

    Policymakers want kids to read. They measure reading with the NAEP reading assessment (which I believe to be a good instrument). Students will score at “proficient” levels on the NAEP only if they learn to comprehend historical and social texts. So we’d better invest time and effort in teaching history and social studies. As a crucial side-effect, we will produce more capable political and civic agents for the future.

    the Internet and youth civic engagement

    The Summit Collaborative’s Marc Osten and Katrin Verclas have written an important new paper entitled “The Power of the Internet to Engage a Generation.”

    The paper provides a bold vision for how to use digital networks to encourage civic participation–although the authors note that “technology alone will most often not motivate young people to become deeply engaged. Any initiative that relies upon technology as a tool for engagement requires complementary offline components as well.”

    Many young people have grown up online and “staked out the Internet as an alternative space for socializing, communicating, and information sharing–away from the eyes of parents and other adults.” The voluntary network of the Net fits many young people’s “anti-institutional” ideals. In some ways, their values are new (radically libertarian), but in other ways, their “ideas are a return to earlier concepts of grassroots politics. … David Weinberger suggests, ‘That is why the web, for all its technological newsness and oddness, feels so familiar to us. And that is why it feels like a return even though it is the newest of the new. The web is a return to the values that have been with us from the beginning.”

    However, the potential of the Web for reinvigorating citizens’ networks is partly unfulfilled. Various advocacy groups use data mining and tailored messages to mobilize people, but these techniques (even when entirely well-intentioned) can be manipulative and can segment people into narrow, unreflective groups. There are tools for “augmented social networks” that give users more flexibility and discretion to find others with similar–or different–views and to develop reputations for tustworthiness. However, these tools tend to be proprietary, which means that they don’t work together and they cannot be adapted for new social uses.

    Thus Osten and Verclas call for a new suite of open-source tools for strengthening diverse networks among young people. These tools would help youth to create discussion spaces and self-publish; to identify other people by interest; to contribute to large stores of data (such as maps); and to meet one another offline. Osten and Verclas also discuss the need to identify and support youth who are serving as leaders or “network nodes.”

    A longer paper could go into much more concrete detail, but this is a great outline for further discussion.