Michelle Martinez's IRLS 550 Blog Spring 2009

Global E-Litism, the book by Dr. Gili Drori, was part of the readings and caused a bit of discussion in my cohort.  Primarily, I disagree somewhat with this learned scholar from Stanford -- here are my arguments, in short:

Dr. Drori:  Western culture is embedded in the Internet

    My answer -- of course!  It was created here, it lived as a part of the U.S. military for 20 years before its release to the public, and it has only lived as a part of U.S. culture for 15 years.  Fifteen years is a very short period of time, even if Americans only have a 60-day memory, and it takes some time for information to disseminate.  I find it particularly ironic that articles about the digital divide started surfacing in 1996 -- a mere two years after the Internet really took off -- because of course there were early adopters!  That is true of any technology.  And yes, Western culture is a big, big part of what is currently available.

My issue here is -- is that really harmful?  Let's just say that she's right, and Western values are being disseminated.  First off, this is happening through satellite television and corporate expansion anyway, so putting the blame on Internet technology ignores multiple variables.  Secondly, while I understand that "Western culture" is synonymous with commercialism and materialism these days, it is also the culture of Socrates, Aristotle, the Englightenment, the cultural revolution, women's rights, civil rights and a lot of other wonderful and amazing things.  I refuse to believe that embedded Western culture is an evil.

Now let's say that she's wrong, because I think she is.  If Western [i.e., materialistic] culture were truly inherent in the Web and the Internet (in that it was exclusively Western, and users could not change it), it would be a for-fee system.  It is easy to forget that, initially, the Web did cost.  It was available only through the Netscape browser, completely controlled by AOL and cost $4.95/hour plus phone charges to access.  That was in 1994.  At that time, the concept of free Internet was completely foreign to me, as I stuffed my $5 bills into my best friend's box for that purpose every hour I used her computer.  Instead, the free Internet movement and, more importantly, the free open source movement changed everything.  The Internet is inherently Marxist these days -- "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."  While the hardware and the connection has to be paid for, governments and libraries and other social organizations are filling, and should continue to fill this gap.  If her argument was that people in poor countries needed physical access and training, I would nod vehemently.  That is not her argument.  Her argument is that the Internet is inherently Western (I'm saying that there are elements of Western culture but these are superficial), and I would have to disagree just as vehemently -- it's the most socialist thing we've seen since the McCarthy era.

Looking at the net generation and management, I found this article by the UK Guardian:

How the children of the digital age will change the way we work

Recently a new and very talented employee I had hired three months earlier came into my office and shut the door. She had a question: "What's it going to take for me to be the chief exec?" I had to restrain myself from blurting out the response that was running through my mind: "I'll have to be run over by a truck." She was audacious, to be sure, but I later thought that this young woman was a classic example of her generation, children of the "baby boomers" who are now in their 20s. They're entering the workforce and challenging and infuriating their employers with new demands about how work should work, and how it should fit into their lives.

I found myself nodding enthusiastically as I read over the article; it was exactly how I felt after I started working at the library as a paraprofessional, partway into my first year as a SIRLS student.  Librarians, management and the old hierarchy just don't get it: I had co-workers who thought digital and audio books were a waste of time, and 30-year veterans of the library system who insisted that outreach was "pointless" because everyone knew what the library offered: books.  I honestly had a hard time coming back to school, and I sometimes find the idea of change, particularly issues about access and disenfranchised groups, to be unreachable.

As these long-term workers retire out of library systems, it is up to new librarians not only to close the gap between old and new thinking, but to remake libraries as a place for children and adults to get what they need.  That used to be books and a good source for reference, but I don't think that model is going to last much longer.  I personally download most of my books; I create databases to track my bills; I purchase books, toys, clothes and groceries online, and I pay most of my monthly bills online as well.  I have not balanced my checkbook off-line for over five years. 

Books, audio tapes and other analog items will always hold a place in libraries and museums.  After all, it was seeing 500-year-old illustrated manuscripts in the British Museum that made me think libraries are cool.  Plenty of people still need those older technologies, and pushing forward too quickly will leave too many out of the loop.

On the other hand, we need to focus on education, training and technological access for children and adults if we are to satisfy the needs of library populations.  As librarians, we will manage a different kind of worker as well.  For this reason, not just the public places of a library need to change, but the space held by library workers needs to change too.  The library should be a fun, vibrant place to work -- a place of ideas.  For a book is more than its paper; a book is the story, the ideas and the space within it as well, and that, for me, is what makes it incredible.  Libraries simply need to follow suit. 

As an undergraduate student, I minored in Philosophy and took an entire course on Phenomenology.  In that course, we read Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in its entirety; little did I know then what a controversial book it was, or how it would pop up again in education and literacy circles for the next ten years!  Freire was quoted by one of the readings this month, and it was no surprise.  He was a controversial figure, challenging long-held ideas about the differences between educating someone in the dominant culture and someone who grows up disenfranchised.  He was one of the first to claim that intelligence was measured not by ability but by knowledge of the dominant culture, putting anyone outside of that culture at a disadvantage.  He also demonstrates how much education is "socialization" and the creation of a submissive workforce rather than arming the proletariat with the tools for critical thinking. 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed still lives on my bookshelf, and anyone seriously interested in literacy issues should read it.  It has been some years since I've read it cover to cover, but it impacted me as an undergraduate, and I am often surprised at the number of people who have never heard of Freire.  If you get a chance, pick it up; it's not a long book, and it's worth the trouble.

Paolo Freire was and is a very polarizing and influential figure, and his ideas have been adopted by left-leaning groups.  Nevertheless, the Wikipedia entry about him quotes him making this statement:

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the 'practice of freedom', the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." 

It sounds like good Democracy to me.

I noticed this great article after I finished this week's post: IU Libraries hosts student digital literacy contest

Carrie Donovan at IU Libraries said she expected the contest to once again be a success at the Bloomington campus.

"It connects the libraries to information-seeking in the minds of students, and it's a great way to insert libraries' instructional agenda into a fun and lively event in a way that it does not alienate students," she said. "I had so much fun at the event last fall."

Contestants will be given 30 questions, 30 minutes and Internet access. Correct answers earn points and incorrect answers are penalized. The highest score wins.

This seems like a great way to promote the library and digital literacy as well!

Another great literacy resource for non-English-speakers and children through the county library here in Tucson is Tumble Books (the link may not work without a library card number and PIN).  There is also a link to it on the Storytime page.  Tumble Books are digitized children's books that are read by a narrator and feature things like word pronunciation and control of the reading speed.  It's a great resource for children learning to read and for ESL learners.

Is literacy about independence, critical thinking, cognitive development or the general economic health of a country?  The argument that literacy is crucial for economic development is often cited, as in the current reading by Warschauer (2003): "At the macrolevel, mass literacy and education serve to grease the wheels of economic development and thus create conditions for greater technologization [sic] of society."

However, an article in the U.K. daily newspaper The Times, says researcher Anna Vignoles will tell a conference at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London that the economic value of the current adult education program in the U.K. (20 hours of learning time) has done nothing to boost productivity and earnings.  According to Vignoles, the nearly 1 billion pounds spent on the program has produced no economic returns, which makes it seem that mass education and literacy must be learned in childhood in order to have economic benefits.  Although she does say that people benefit from these courses, it is not enough to change economics.  She goes on to say:

Recently, someone I love graduated from high school.  He had always struggled with English grammar, and had put off going back to school.  Although he did fine with mathematics and had advanced in his career to calculating such things as turbine speeds and rotation acceleration, he just could not get over his fear of English grammar. 

I do not know who his English teacher was, but clearly, s/he terrified him.  He was the fifth of thirteen children -- someone who could get lost in the shuffle, who could drop out of high school without so much as a sigh of regret and start working and starting a family.  It took him just 34 years to go back and finish his high school diploma.

He is my father.

The University of New Mexico is trying to bring IT access to hogans in the Southwest (hence the cheesy title, "Hogan Heroes") in an effort to bridge the digital divide among Native Americans living on tribal lands.  The article about Hogan Heroes lists such services as television programming in native languages, tele-health information and anonymous counseling for suicidal teens. 

"It's not about the Internet. It's about the services you can provide on the Internet," Gerety said. UNM can supply some of those services - particularly telehealth and distance education.

Telehealth uses communication technologies to provide health care, information and training at a distance. Center for Telehealth Medical Director Dale Alverson has been consulting with Navajo Nation telecommunications officials on how to best serve their specific health needs.

One priority area is behavioral health, especially for returning veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and for suicide prevention among adolescents. Alverson said that virtual counseling through two-way video "gives that sense of presence as if you were physically face-to-face." Other priorities that can be addressed through telehealth include diabetes, substance abuse and Alzheimer's.

Through Extended University, UNM will make distance education available to Navajo communities, including online and interactive television courses. In addition, the Institute for American Indian Education is providing e-mentoring to New Mexico Native American teachers and pre-service teachers with the support of a grant from the New Mexico Public Education Department.

What I liked best about this article was the emphasis on content and the explanation about why the service would be useful. I found some of the readings to be a bit vague on why, exactly, digital services would be so great for people on reservations.  I lived on an island in the Pacific, shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, for two years with no English television or Internet, and I could personally see the slow degradation of the culture as satellite television and always-on broadband slowly infiltrated the community.  I feel there is a very valid argument for the dissolution of cultural heritage with the introduction of technology, and I wish I could find a better study on the effects.  I will be searching for just such a study for future postings.

Since I just declared, in the discussion forum, that a non-accessible e-government website is primarily the fault of a lazy webmaster, let me discuss briefly how anyone (librarians included) can make a site accessible to print-disabled persons.

If you would like to look at a few full tutorials, this one is pretty good, and this one is ok, too, although more focused on webmasters from the UK.  

Another great site and a good example of a Javascript- and CSS-free site is Computers for Handicapped Independence Program.  The site, which looks like websites used to before fancy formatting, isn't plain because the authors were not artistic -- this is what a stripped-down site is like; these sites, made without extra formatting, are much easier for computer software to 'read' for the print-impaired.  So long as this is what a site looks like when the fancy stuff is disabled (Javascript and CSS), it's fine for the main site to look pretty.  It is only when site creators forget to make a good foundational site in favor of images and graphics that disabled users cannot access crucial content.

There are many perks to creating an accessible site, including the fact that it is the law for governments and businesses. A disabled-friendly site facilitates clear, concise coding that downloads and moves quickly.  Sites that are accessible tend to use current software, such as Adobe Acrobat 9, which creates a PDF that is reader-accessible.  The latest versions of Flash also provide better accessibility.

Software such as BOBBY (now owned by IBM) and Lynx can be used to test sites for accessibility and are approved for use.  WAVE is another site useful for accessibility checks; put in a web address and it will return your site with accessibility errors marked (I tried http://library.pima.gov and found 20 errors in the homepage, for example). In fact, there are even volunteers who will check your site for disabled access for you (although I suspect WAVE use here).

The WC3, an international group that decides standards for computer- and Internet-related hardware and software, gives the following guidelines for designing an accessible website:

Using the Internet takes a leap of faith.  Sometimes, however, that leap of faith turns into a swift fall into a canyon of misinformation.  For new students, deciphering accurate, factual information from the slightly inaccurate, wildly inaccurate and just plain weird is a (not so funny) comedy of errors. How do you know it's factual?  What do you look for -- misspelled words, bad grammar, weird statistics?  And more importantly, when you're searching in a second or third language from your own, how can you spot the inconsistencies so blatant to a native reader?

The New York Times recently published an article about school librarians, with a description of how school librarian Stephanie Rosalia teaches students to search for information online.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. "Don't answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find," she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

"It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!" Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. "That's wrong."

Helping students, whether they be children or adult learners, evaluate a source is an important skill that was previously only in the realm of the educated -- librarians, professors, teachers and editors.  Students, for the most part, walked into a library and received a book or encyclopedia that contained "accurate" information.  The source was used, generally without much question, and that was that.

Some may look back on the days of authoritative sources as the good ol' days gone by, but that really isn't the case.  For example, look at the book entitled Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, Winner of the 1996 American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.  This book chronicles the many historical misconceptions that have been furthered by "authoritative" sources over the years...(click below to continue)

In the previous post, I discussed the issue of e-books and audio books in libraries.  One of the main problems with these formats is with digital rights management, commonly called DRM and resulting from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 (see a simplified explanation here). While there is always a conflict between the users of information and the providers of it, the DMCA swings the pendulum in providers' favor.  The act criminalizes unauthorized distribution of digital content, which seems innocuous, but the law has been used to criminalize legitimate professions, such as crytography/cryptology or cryptanalysis.  It has also forced content producers to use proprietary software (to their cost) and causes a significant amount of trouble for legitimate users of digital content and for information technology professionals. 

So what does DRM have to do with the library, or with digital access?

Analog formats, such as books, have little to do with DRM.  Compact Discs, or CDs, are not subject to the same digital rights because they are not controlled by a cartel; that is to say, a CD will play here, in Europe, on any player, without problems.  DVDs, so long as they stay within region, have no problems, but libraries could not, for example, buy an independent film or documentary produced outside of the United States because of the "region codes" required by the sole owners of the digital keys, the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD-CCA).  While this is somewhat limiting, it is not a crucial access issue.

Digital Rights Management software, however, does affect online content, particularly online databases that provide libraries with e-books and audio books.  In this article, titled Digital Rights Management: A Failure in the Developed World, a Danger to the Developing World, authors argue that DRM further limits the ability of disabled people to benefit from digital content.  Digital Rights Management is in direct violation of copyright law encouraging technologies for the disabled.  Since the disabled are reported as having some of the lowest access rates to information and digital content, the possibility that DRM is further disenfranchising the disabled is a serious accusation.