Spring Landscaping
I bet I’m not the only one who has, at some point, told students how much easier they have it than we adults did at their age – especially when it comes to doing research. But I’ve recently been rethinking that stance.
Not too long ago, I started a podcast. In each episode, I chat with a school librarian about a lesson, program, or activity they’ve done so others can learn from it and add it to their school librarian tool kit. I was recently re-listening to an episode featuring New Jersey school librarian Meredith Butts, in which we talked about organizing information. It got me thinking about the information landscape: how I have interacted with it, how I think about it, and how students are experiencing it today.
“Back in the day…”
When I was just a lad, and even into the early 2000s, doing research outside the areas specifically covered in the school curricula meant going to the public library.
For me, this meant a trip across town from my house (but fortunately, only across the parking lot from my middle and high schools). Once there, I’d have to figure out what my search terms were, so I could try looking them up in the card catalog. After a lot of trial and error, I’d scribble down some call numbers and go search the stacks to see which items were actually available. Having collected what I could find, I’d have to skim through the books to see whether the information they contained was relevant to the research I was doing.
I shudder to think about how much time I wasted just on getting to and from the library – nevermind how much I spent actually retrieving information.
The Information Revolution
The modern student has all the information in the universe at their fingertips. They can literally ask a question of a machine and receive an answer in moments. It’s really pretty amazing, almost magical. A majority of students at the middle grade level and up – and a remarkable number even below those ages – have access to these devices.
I sometimes get frustrated by my students’ blasé attitude toward this incredible resource. I am a bit jealous of how easy research has become for them.
And yet, I often forget that while I had to “work” to get information throughout most of my primary, secondary, and early higher education years, I knew that when I went to the library, the information I would find would be considered reliable. I implicitly trusted the information I found.
Conversely, our students have a wealth of information at their fingertips, but determining the veracity of the information requires work. Verifying the authenticity and authority of sources, as well as the accuracy of what those sources are sharing, is a much more mentally taxing task than hitching a ride to the library. (And potentially nearly as time-consuming.)
Pick Two
I need to remind myself of this the next time I’m annoyed at students for not working harder to verify their sources — especially since I can’t recall EVER having to verify the information I found at the library. It was just presumed to be reliable.
As with most things in life, it’s all trade-offs. In the business world, there’s a maxim:
Good. Fast. Cheap. You can choose any two.
This applies just as much to information as to products. We’ve swapped our certainty that information supplied for “free” from the library comes from good sources for fast access via relatively cheap – or at least ubiquitous – devices.
Considering Gatekeepers
Educators and librarians are often critical of gatekeepers, particularly when it comes to information. We want everyone to have access to information. But when every gatekeeper is removed from every stage of the information system, so everyone is free to share information with everyone else, there is a degradation of the quality of information available.
It is somewhat ironic that as we have democratized the ability to share information, we’ve made access to information feel less valuable, while simultaneously making the available information less trustworthy. As human information behavior theory tells us, humans are lazy and prone to taking what is easily available. So while it is certainly possible to access good information relatively quickly, it comes with caveats. You need the right access to databases, and the knowledge of how to use them.
Because what’s actually easier to get these days is bad information.
Resource Fatigue
I remember sitting in the library feeling overwhelmed when I’d learn there were 10 books on a topic I was researching. There were just too many options, and having to parse through them to identify what was actually useful was daunting.
Now I talk to Ss about narrowing thousands or millions of hits down to hundreds or dozens.
Now I’m wondering if there’s something to be said for curating collections down to low-single-digit sets of resources, especially for younger students.
Discussing this via Bluesky, Meredith pointed out, “NO ONE is parsing through thousands of results, not even adults. The process of getting a functional set of results to even do preliminary stages of research is a big lift for anyone.”
With this in mind, it’s easy to see why our students might grasp – somewhat desperately – for tools that can help them deal with the vast oceans of information.
The Shortcut Machine
And this is another point that Meredith made me rethink. For years, I have pushed the idea that our students are trying to drink from a firehose of information. They are deluged with information from every channel they access. But Meredith pointed out that this metaphor no longer applies. So-called “artificial intelligence” (a marketing term, rather than a factual description of the tool) is playing into our tendency to accept the easiest answer available – regardless of whether that answer is correct.
Meredith also offered up a new analogy that holds promise for getting our students to reconsider using AI. (An aside: I dislike even typing “AI”, as it’s a misleading term, but will use it here for the sake of simplicity). She pointed out that AI tools “spoon-feed” answers to users. These tools essentially grind up information into a slurry and talk to us in a soothing voice to get us to mindlessly open our mouths and accept the pap they are providing.
I have yet to meet a student of any age that wishes to be infantilized. Perhaps this is an emotional goad that pushes back on the desire for the easiest answer.
New Tricks
They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Well, this old dog certainly tries to expand his skills and knowledge. That’s what I love about chatting with Meredith, and all the wonderful school librarians kind enough to share their time and ideas – they help me re-examine ideas I may have thought firmly settled, and help me see the world from a fresh perspective.
This particular conversation gave me a lot to re-think. But as an information professional, it’s incredibly important that I reflect on my own beliefs, experiences, and biases, and compare them to the lived experiences of my students. And while as an educator I need to be critical not only of how they interact with the world, I also need to remind myself to be critical of my own feelings and assumptions. Because feelings are not facts, no matter how much we might want them to be.
As a fellow old dog, I appreciate this perspective! Just like the students, I am overwhelmed at the information overload and the mental calisthenics required to verify its credibility. These students are facing a whole different set of challenges than we faced. While it is a newer type of struggle, it is still a struggle.
This part right here:
“She pointed out that AI tools “spoon-feed” answers to users. These tools essentially grind up information into a slurry and talk to us in a soothing voice to get us to mindlessly open our mouths and accept the pap they are providing.
I have yet to meet a student of any age that wishes to be infantilized. Perhaps this is an emotional goad that pushes back on the desire for the easiest answer.”
I am also thinking this could be a leverage point for us – if we appeal to our students’ desire to be viewed as grown, mature, sophisticated, etc., we might be able to arm them with some tools to help them slow down and make meaning of the sources, processes, and tools that are used to produce this slurry (or any form of information), versus simply passing it off as good enough. The word mindlessly jumps out at me – how about we encourage all of the humans in our sphere (not just students) to be more mindFUL and less mindLESS?
Since Google has deliberately made its search worse, and the AI-slop snake has eaten most of the internet and has begun to eat its own tail, we might soon start wishing for the “good old days” of research before the internet. Could our students be living through the end of the Information Age?
Kathryn – A close friend and I chat pretty regularly, and he and I find ourselves saying in pretty much every conversation something like, “I don’t want to be the old man here, but back when we were young, things were better.” When it comes to information, I feel like our students are actually at a disadvantage compared to when I was young. There’s such a thing as “too much,” and I feel for our students as they try to navigate the rapids. But hopefully we can model for them that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer volume of information, and then model how we can use thoughtful coping mechanisms to locate the useful and necessary wheat out of all the chaff.
Len – YES! I know education has really been whacking kids over the head with “being mindful” the past several years, but hopefully, we can re-claim the phrase as we help students be more mindful of their information diets!
Andrew – We’re certainly living through SOMETHING. My hope is that the current tsunami of slop will trigger a backlash and encourage folks to shun the info-garbage generators and latch on to actual, factual, reliable sources. Here’s hoping!