Words Matter

‘What we find changes who we become’[1]
How do we find information on stuff? As Dr. Ian Rowlands, chief author on the CIBER report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (11 January 2008) has stressed, findability used to be partly about physical attributes: ‘As a kid, I grew up spending hours in the central reference library in Plymouth. This helped me to form a clear understanding of the information landscape because of the physical layout of the library, and the appearance of the materials’.[2] As information is embodied online, we have shifted from a three dimensional realm to zero dimensions. Findability used to require physical waymarkers:

'Definition, distinction, difference. In the physical environments, size, shape, color, and location set objects apart. In the digital realm, we rely heavily on words. Words as labels. Words as links. Keywords. The humble keyword has become surprisingly important in recent years. As a vital ingredient in the online search process, keywords have become part of our everyday experience. We feed keywords into Google, Yahoo!, MSN, eBay, and Amazon. We search for news, products, people, used furniture, and music. And words are the key to our success'.[3]

If that is the case, what happens if you can’t spell? Or for that matter, if text message orthography is employed? Or you don’t know the difference between US and UK spelling? Sure, Google will prompt you ‘did you mean…?’ but is that any substitute for a well stocked vocabulary, with plenty of synonyms at your disposal? Or knowing how to use a dictionary? And what happens if you don’t know how words are conceptually related to each other and form ontologies and taxonomies? Or if you don’t know that there is a meta-language toolkit for words called ‘grammar’ that establishes the rules of the road, the dos and don’ts that enable us to communicate, help establish meaning, formulate questions? The CIBER report highlights many such problems of poor lexical and logical skills leading to bad relevance judgements being made in search behaviour. Words are fundamental to findability.

A recent anonymous piece in the THES entitled 'The kids aren’t all write: functionally illiterate and frankly not bothered' highlighted spelling and grammar problems in new cohorts. The author argued that

'It seems to be an endemic problem, with many lecturers now lowering their standards, or even not recognising spelling or grammar errors. One of my third-year dissertation students looked at the corrections I’d made to her draft thesis with absolute disgust and said to me: “I don’t understand why you’re so picky about my spelling and punctuation. Nobody’s ever told me there’s a problem before”'[4]

Ideally, lexical richness and linguistic sophistication should develop with subject expertise as students move from shallow to deep learning, entering the Garden of Paradox where the same words have different meanings, different words have the same meaning, where meanings are contested and contextual and students are comfortable with uncertainty and contingency. But how carefully do we guide students by choosing our words carefully, being consistent, explaining the terms we use?

'Words are messy little critters. Imprecise and undependable, their meaning shifts with context. One man’s paradise is another man’s oblivion. Synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, contranyms: the challenges of communication are part of the human condition, unsusceptible to the eager advances of technology'.[5]

Arriving at university many students are lost for words. Being able to say what you mean requires words. Lynsey Hanley, the author of Estates: An Intimate History makes the case that inarticulacy leads to social exclusion:

'When you don’t have the words to express how you feel or what you think, there are two ways you can go. You can fall back heavily on clichés, or invent new words to fill the gaps. Speaking in clichés or argot, in turn, invites those with a wider conventional vocabulary to treat you as though you are stupid. Like illiteracy, inarticulacy has great power to disempower'.[6]

[1] Morville, Peter, Ambient Findability, (O'Reilly, 2005) cover quote.
[2] ‘Intellectual literacy hour’, The Guardian, Tuesday 15 January 2008
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2240563,00.html Accessed 17 April 2008
[3] Morville, Ambient Findability, (O'Reilly, 2005), 4.
[4] Anon., ‘The kids aren’t all write: functionally illiterate and frankly not bothered, THES, 21 February 2008
[5] Morville, Peter, Ambient Findability, (O'Reilly, 2005), 15
[6] Hanley, L., ‘Succumbing to inarticulacy is a blight on all our lives’, The Guardian, Tuesday 4 March 2008, 28

Information Literacy

Lost in Ciberia….
Is the Google generation more information literate than previous generations? Not according to a recent report from the CIBER research unit at UCL, produced for the British Library and the JISC, Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (11 January 2008). It is perhaps ironic that the explosion of freely accessible information has gone hand in hand with clear evidence of an inability to find information, that we have become ‘information-rich but question-poor.’ This would seem counterintuitive, given the enormous success of search engines like Google, the utility of natural-language searching and the hype around the semantic web. But the CIBER report indicates a number of startling findings

The ‘net native’ generation they studied increasingly lack the linguistic, logical and critical-evaluation skills to find stuff. They have no conceptual framework of the digital-information landscape. In effect, the digital literacies of the Google Generation have not developed in parallel with information literacy. If anything, the digital environment has made it harder to evaluate stuff in terms of: authority, quality, accuracy; relevance, bias, currency. There are a number of reasons for this. Partly it’s about the rapid rate of change to a fully digital environment, partly because of the speed at which things are emerging, converging and hybridizing on the web. But the big problem is information overload. According to Peter Morville in his seminal book Ambient Findability, (2005) ‘There is so much to find, but we must first know how to search and who to trust. In the information age, transmedia information literacy is a core life skill’. The UNESCO Prague Declaration of 2003, Towards an Information Literate Society goes one further and frames the problem as one of rights: information literacy ‘is a prerequisite for participating effectively in the information society, and is part of the basic human right of lifelong learning.’ Fail to find stuff and you are marginalised and disenfranchised. Findability just got a whole lot more serious.

'Digital Literacies' at the UCLan University Conference 2008

The challenges facing language in the new media age…
The 'digital revolution' opens up new ways of publishing, new ways of writing, new ways of collaborating, even new ways of reading. This session explores the issue of what it means to be literate in the digital age. Recent research on the ‘Google Generation’ and the information-seeking behaviour of the future researcher suggests that the ‘internet native’ generation increasingly lacks the logical, linguistic and critical evaluation skills to find what they need in a digital environment. Information overload is leading to a cohort who are ‘information rich but question poor’. What are the implications for teaching and learning? Can we use new technologies like blogs and wikis to develop writing skills, inculcate collaborative and communication skills, teach critical thinking skills?

Come and join in this lively, open debate on the issue surrounding the changing face of literacy in the digital age and its effects on students, research, teaching and the wider world.

Monday 23rd June, 2008, 11;45-13:15, location to be confirmed.

Panellists will include Jonathan Westaway (Senior Information Officer, LIS), Professor Jane Singer (Johnston Press Chair in Digital Journalism), Joanne Bryce (Senior Lecturer in Psychology), Daniel Lamont (Principal Lecturer in English).