Tag: metaliteracy

My Passion Project, Generated in Seconds

valibrarian2 Comments

I’ve been a guest lecturer for professors in both Ireland (John O’Connor) and Turkey (Murat Gulmez) for several years and just listened to a AI Deep Dive podcast featuring my passion for digital citizenship and my work as an information professional through promoting metaliteracy (a model developed by Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson). Working collaboratively across the globe with these amazing educators has been inspiring, yet- surprisingly, I found this podcast deeply disturbing! Click the picture to listen- if interested, my work is at 8:30-26:00 minutes.

Deep Dive Podcast from GoogleLM summarizing Valibrarian as lecturer.

To hear two fake “AI” voices that are not real people discuss many years of my work at a time when I cannot get the concepts of digital citizenship in the hands of human students makes me sad!  These nonhuman agents summarized the classes I taught in the metaverse in just minutes, yet physical world teachers I talk to do not have time nor the curriculum to help prepare their students for the future as they must focus on the subject areas they teach. 

The male and female sycophantic AI voices sound knowledgeable, convincing, and act as if “in awe” of my so-called universally known work (hardly!) even though they cannot possibly think about it critically.  AI agents only simulate thinking and simulate human articulation.  It is unsettling to have my own words and passion about digital citizenship mashed-up and regurgitated as “digital content” and ironic for them to discuss the “dark side of digital culture” when the voices are uncannily disguised as human. Those two clever bots exemplify the urgent call for metaliteracy and digital citizenship as they pose as experts on the topics in a loop of artificiality. Even more ironic- to have worked in a simulated metaverse for nearly 20 years and consider it a real place. Yet it is clear to me… reality and memory take place in our minds. Yet, for machines to pose as humans is a totally different matter.

AI quickly allows us to produce content (like podcasts, poems, images and more) without the painful reflective process we humans must go through to create and communicate. AI skips process and takes us straight to the product. Perhaps this AI-generated video is not all too far from where we are or where we are headed: Post-Scarcity Blues… declaring “your passion projects, generated in seconds”.

Digital Citizenship Outpost: a 3D simulation Metamodernity Lab

valibrarian

I have become passionate about digital citizenship since the Internet and the Information Age transformed my profession as a librarian. After nearly 20 years in virtual environments, I finally decided to create a 3D space for my research journey and I named it Digital Citizenship Outpost in Second Life. The region will open soon and I will be able to archive my presentations and present lessons to promote discussion.

The first step was to design a map drawing of the region centered on the “oscillation” of opposites in our metamodern era. Every day, we oscillate between our physical/natural world and the worlds on our digital devices with online communities across distance. Information is no longer primarily accessed in print (nor in a building called a library as often as it was in days gone by) but on digital devices. Learning is a process- not a hierarchy of mastery- particularly now that the intelligence age presents revolutionary change. And- our process of lifelong learning is a journey that spirals over and over again through the seasons. Each year, we encounter those same seasons, yet they are always new and we are always learning.

So, my first thought for a region was to express this learning journey using the four seasons. At the center, the heart of metamodernism is oscillation. And, the four seasons (spring, summer, autumn, and winter) surround the landing point called Oscillation Atrium.

The four seasons take us through a journey, starting with spring (new life) which represents our new era of metamodernism with respect for our past history and excitement about future innovation. We move to summer where we learn about metaliteracy (how digital culture has changed the way we communicate, learn, and become critical thinkers). Next, we move to Autumn at the Digital Citizenship Grove and Pavilion to address the many personal responsibilities we now have as we oscillate between the physical world and life enhanced with technology online. Then, finally we come to winter…a cold dark time which presents the metaphor of AIM (artificial intelligence mountain) to explore how AI will impact our lives and learning. ChatGTP create the images below in both day and night colors which help me design the region with the help of my amazing builder friend and colleague librarian, Dawn. The collaboration of skills in the metaverse is a fabulous example of constructivism.

This post is an introduction to my new metaverse region which I hope will be a dynamic space to explore changing literacy and digital citizenship. My first thought was to name the space “The Metamodernity Lab” but the content placed in the region is designed to think deeply about the next generation and how their lives require a personal responsibility for understanding digital citizenship. This is critical because the concepts raised at the Digital Citizenship Outpost impact not only their learning, but their overall well being as humans in the intelligence age.

We Were Knowledge Couriers, My Father and I

valibrarian

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” (Chiseled on stone at Farley Post Office in NYC). Information delivery is important and has been essential to humans for thousands of years.

My father was a mailman, and he estimated that he walked around the world twice over the many years of carrying his mailbag.  My career as a librarian spanned 30 years and I came to realize we were both in the information delivery service!

Information delivery requires discerning priorities.  All data is not equal, and we are now drowning in it!  AI is rapidly becoming our number one information delivery service provider, which raises the question about how human beings prioritize the value of information and the evolving process of information seeking behavior.

Humans should be able to discern and prioritize information from accurate sources and experts.  Humans should not be robbed of the quest for knowledge and the journey through the “snow, rain, hear or gloom of night” to bring it forth!

Just think, for years it has been a federal crime to open mail that is not addressed to you!  Yet privacy is now on shaky ground. 

While we waited for days for news to arrive in the mail, we now expect answers to come to us instantly and rarely care where those answers came from nor the long history of humans working hard who created those answers. While a letter from one we love touched us deeply in the past, we now simply scroll and delete messages too quickly to bother with any reflection or savoring of the tactility.  

I often think of my father’s wisdom even though he is now gone.  I’ve never known anyone wiser, yet I had to watch his brain fail the last decade of his life with dementia.  The human brain is the most incredible and mysterious thing on our planet.  AI can never replicate it.

AI image generated by CoPilot

What Does Your Personal Dashboard Look Like?

valibrarian

It’s personal! Each of us gets to set up our personal dashboard on digital devices (computer screens, smartphones, tablets and more) with our own color schemes, favorite apps, and background pics. Students may have the icon for their classroom learning management program, shoppers have their favorite apps to stores, and we all have favorite creative apps, health apps or travel and weather apps.

Personal screen dashboard

So what’s the big dashboard deal?

In the past, prior to the digital age, sources of information were limited. We had few channels of incoming information, such as radio, television and the books. Research meant heading to the library! Now, the library is in our pockets and so are a million apps that we can personally choose.

My personal dashboard is great, right?

Maybe not so great! This personalization of our incoming and outgoing information (as prosumers: both producers and consumers of content) means that our sources of information are unique and there is no more “shared culture of information”. Each of us lives in our own digital bubble of so-called friends and each of us follows a unique personally chosen never ending stream of information.

And what’s wrong with that? Well, big data companies impact what we see by tracking our preferences, for one thing. If I am seeing completely different information than you are…do we really live in the same world?

Is Confirmation Bias a real concern?

From https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-confirmation-bias-2795024

Our personal dashboards are impacting the way we think. Back when we had limited sources of information there were gatekeepers (librarians, researchers, reporters, historians, etc.) who helped weed out inaccuracies and helped us trust information. That responsibility for evaluation has been handed to each of us- or should I say thrown on us like a ton of bricks since the Internet has millions of pieces of information bombarding us every minute of the day. Unless we are alert and aware, we easily fall into confirmation bias and our dashboards are turned into narrow-focused channels that do not provide opposing views. Our “friends” become our information sources and we choose them because they think like we do. Without critical thinking and the debate between opposing viewpoints, real learning cannot take place.

There’s Still Hope

Being alert and aware of our thinking, of our dashboards, and of our personal responsibility for metaliteracy is essential. If we can embrace that personal responsibility, we have hope for our well-being, for empathy toward others, for valuing the need to listen to other perspectives and for the (dare I say) need for compromise. Social media has the tendency to promote emotionally charged shares, tweets and posts. When we are emotionally involved with viewpoints (often viewpoints we know little about), our chosen ideologies become more important than listening to others. Hope for our future and for the generations to follow us may rest on metaliteracy and the willingness to listen, to agree to disagree and to give our dashboards some real thought. Perhaps hope for the future may even rest on deliberately choosing to pause and reflect, to resist the share button, and even learn how to keep silent.

Is Meaningless Media Mandatory?

valibrarian

How Mandated Use of Social Media Began

I was a school librarian when the information hierarchy toppled and print was no longer at the top! Suddenly, my school principal and colleagues looked to me to answer the question “What is happening to information?” And, I became the voice of the school on social media. It was simply dropped in my lap. What kind of information professional would I be if I was not aware of the information channels being used as digital culture emerged?

Often, I have told people how it felt at the turn of the 21st century, when it seemed the floor beneath my feet in the library was shaking! I knew there was no going back and that digital culture would change everything. But, I embraced it and said “Bring it on!” even though I had a distaste for social media and the narcissism of everyone yelling “Look at me!” Much of the content we scroll through is self-serving, unimportant, and rather meaningless. User-generated content sometimes makes me long for the gatekeepers who made authors jump through hoops to get published. Entering a library with stacks of high quality materials gave me a sense of trust in authority and quality that one never finds online. (Sure, there may never have been a “perfect 100% truth” of information, but at least we didn’t have to dig through a pile of nonsense to find a truthful nugget.)

Once Facebook took off, every field seemed to adopt social media as a way to connect us all: business people, educators, long-lost family and special interest groups, for example. And take off it did! Within a decade, Facebook and Twitter impacted the fabric of society and others began to join me in the feeling that it is inherently wrong. Yet, everyone seemed to justify using it because… well, everybody was doing it. Yes, it feels mandated.

A colleague recently told me she deleted all her social media except for LinkedIn and that it feels great. I felt a pang of envy at her bravery to cut it off. But the libraries and groups I work with insist on using social media as the best way to reach out to patrons and provide information easily. Again, it feels mandated.

We’re in a Dilemma

The ME! ME! ME! oversharing of personal information is not the only problem with social media. Data mining uses our information to manipulate our behavior, as pointed out in the Nexflix documentary THE SOCIAL DILEMMA. Our incoming dashboards, unique to each of us, compel us toward personalized ads and a tendency for confirmation bias (following those whose ideas align to our own).

Rather than live in fear, for the past 20 years I have been researching information literacy (and the term metaliteracy which I feel describes it perfectly) with the goal of helping the next generation remain human. I joke that we are all cyborgs and it may be pretty close to the truth. Many young people are aware of the problems encountered on social media and organizations like the Center for Humane Technology are striving to find ways to tackle them. For me, my faith keeps fear away and, without faith, my view of the future would appear dark and dismal. Awareness of the social dilemma which has swept across our planet awakens us to our personal responsibility for metaliteracy.

Meta-Death: Not Facebook Metaverse (Please)

valibrarian

Literacy in digital culture has been my passion for decades now. And the prefix META has played a big role in my research as I adopted the terms metaliteracy in our metamodern era. In addition, my colleagues have spent years learning best practices for teaching in the metaverse, yet Facebook is just now spotlighting that word and changing the company’s name to META!


Meta! Meta! Meta!

Suddenly the world is criticizing this prefix, probably because many people dislike Facebook but feel compelled to use it. Apparently, META means “dead” in Hebrew! Yet, Meta has Greek roots that often translate as “after, beyond, about or among”. For instance, metacognition concerns thinking about thinking. But let’s consider this idea of meta = death.

Metaliteracy and the Death of Print

I witnessed the close of the Gutenberg Parenthesis (the period when the book was king format of the information hierarchy for 500 years from about the 1500-2000 AD) during my career as a librarian. What a fascinating journey it was! It felt like the library floor was shifting beneath my feet and I jumped into digital culture to figure out how information could be navigated after the death of fixed media. Yes…the word death may fit with metaliteracy! Death of print as king (yet long live print) as well as “beyond print” or thinking “about literacy” after the impact of the Internet.

Of course, a book in print is still a viable format and many people still prefer print books to digital formats or ebooks. Perhaps print will survive long into our future (of course a librarian would hope). But most content today is born digital, creating the need to investigate archival of changing formats as they evolve and the hardware used to access them becomes obsolete.

Metamodernism and the Death of Dystopia

Postmodernism ushered in a period of irony and cynicism as grand narratives were broken down and truth became illusive. A new period is arising beyond postmodernism which may allow room for sincerity, hope, and a balance of tradition and innovation. Postmodern literature brought volumes of dystopian fiction which many found bleak and desolate (even though much of it was quite good and who doesn’t like a good zombie story?).

The name of our current philosophical moment is not yet set in stone, but many, like myself, are proponents of the term metamodernism. In my recent book, Metamodernism and Changing Literacy, I investigate the intersection of our era in time with the need to revisit literacy as it has been revolutionized.

The Metaverse and the Death of a Single Reality

The hype over Facebook’s name change may bring the term “the metaverse” into popular culture, but it has been around since Neal Stephenson coined it way back in 1992 when he wrote Snow Crash. Facebook proports to give everyone a voice and connect them across the globe, which suggests that the company’s vision of virtual reality will build upon those connections. Jaron Lanier (often touted as the Father of Virtual Reality) opposes social media in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and the idea of Facebook creating a VR world seems the antithesis of his philosophical view of a metaverse.

The Metaverse (with a capital M as an interoperable space connecting all virtual worlds) has not evolved, but the many metaverse-esque virtual worlds that I have visited for education are a far cry from what I imagine FB is developing. Space for cartoonish avatars playing social games and dancing around has little educational value and there are many high quality virtual spaces in which one can share a sense of presence for high quality immersive learning. No doubt, multiple realities are on the horizon and my passion for digital citizenship expands alongside them.

What does this jump into metamodernism mean for us? Much of our way of life is different now, perhaps dead to us! Some people say privacy is dead. A “shared culture” of music and media with our own generation may be dead as we each create and curate our own personal dashboard. A new way of living has emerged and we are personally responsible to make it healthy, happy and ethical.

Death is a part of the circle of life and plays a role in the cycle of information and libraries. If META means dead in Hebrew, we are given yet another connotation for our philosophical time, our evolving communication tools, and the way we will live in the future. As winter brings the death to our natural world, spring burst forth anew and we oscillate among the opposites we encounter on this planet. That’s about as metamodern as it gets.

Yikes! Metaliteracy Needed Now: Young, Old and In-Between!

valibrarian

My recent article in College and Research Libraries News shares the importance of embedding metaliteracy in higher education but, if you really think about it, metaliteracy is for all of us from tiny tots to the elderly. Have you seen little ones accessing fun games and videos (hopefully somewhat educational) on their parents mobile devices? My four year old grandson recently picked up a wrapper from a kids’ treat and said, “Look there’s a QR code. Let’s see what it does on your phone!” His parents are aware of the importance of limiting screen time and provide him with lots of outdoor activities, but there is no escaping digital culture. Yes, literacy has changed and even the youngest among us juggles multiple formats of information as he becomes a prosumer– both consuming and producing digital content.

Augmented Reality apps are available now for toddlers!

ApplyDu for kids

Elderly Folks have Metaliteracy Needs

Working with elderly people in the library, I am reminded that we all have personal literacy needs. An 85 year old grandmother may want to learn ZOOM or Facetime to connect with family. Choosing which application and which device for communication is part of metaliteracy and the apps keep changing. One elderly woman asked for help setting up her new smart phone and it was her first time using a touch screen device. “Is it me or is this phone really confusing and difficult?” she asked. Learning to swipe up, down and side to side or to gently tap instead of push the screen frustrated her but her phone company told her that the flip phone she had was obsolete and sent her a new model. We have met several times in the library to help her get more comfortable. Metaliteracy includes constant changes in the way we communicate and adapting to changes in digital tools can be uniquely personal for each of us.

Metamodern Students “walk through” Instructional Design

Metaliteracy can be taught in any setting including a virtual world! To help a class of students in Dublin understand their own need for metaliteracy, I “sat on top” of my slides as the students walked through them (which is way less boring than listening to a lecture). Utilizing new digital tools may be fascinating but it requires understanding that metaliteracy is a personal responsibility. Parents, educators, and people of all ages need to think about their changing literacy skills and having conversations about it makes for a good start on becoming metaliterate.

Through the #VR Looking-Glass to Wonderland

valibrarian

A group of us (librarians and educators at the Community Virtual Library) visited the virtual world of 3rdRock to experience Alice in Wonderland in a 3D immersive environment. Wow! This was not only reading but entering the book!

A librarian at the University of Hawaii created this immersive storybook complete with various scenes from the story with passages of text. Thinking about how children (as well as readers/learners of all ages) will experience literature in the future was a fascinating topic during our tour. Talk about metaliteracy! We enjoyed conversing at the Mad Hatter’s tea party!

While we were fully immersed in the 3D storytelling, we were not wearing virtual reality headsets. Virtual worlds are viewed on a desktop and we believe they are part of virtual reality. Desktop VR allows for many productive tools built into the interface and is less uncomfortable than the “trapped feeling” I get with my VR headset. Of course, as VR evolves, it may become more comfortable. Who knows what the future holds for VR but it may not be ready for young people since research has not been done on how it impacts developing minds. In a virtual world, students could create their own storybook content or develop 3D objects on various subjects. Building in VR currently requires additional programs like Unity or Unreal Engine.

Watching a machinima of our Wonderland virtual field trip does not do is justice! You really need to “be there” inside the story, but this video is meant to archive the event. The group started out in Kitely at the CVL Hypergrid Resource Library and then jumped over to 3rdRock to visit Wonderland as part of the ACRL Virtual World Interest Group which is part of the American Library Association.

Personal Symbolic Models of Metaliteracy Built in 3D

valibrarian

Recently, the Virtual World MOOC 2020 shared presentations on numerous educational programs including one on Metaliteracy Symbolic Modeling, a creative process developed by Niela Miller. Niela provides training on facilitating symbolic modeling for various topics, subjects or purposes and I chose to utilize this creative process for understanding our personal responsibility for metaliteracy.

A session on Metaliteracy Symbolic Modeling was held in October 2020 with individuals creating models of how it feels to become metaliterate as literacy has changed. (Note: You may want to fast forward past the first 30 minutes as it is the Nonprofit Commons Meeting with introductions).

Watch as three participants share the 3D model they create and then discuss how they feel about metaliteracy. The process leads the individual to a personal reflection.

Understanding how literacy has changed in digital culture requires critical thinking. The concept of metaliteracy means we think about how we both produce and consume information. The impact of the internet and networked culture has dramatically changed the way we communicate and often we are faced with an overwhelming amount of information each day.

A Metaliteracy Symbolic Modeling Exhibit is scheduled to open soon at InfoLit Island for the Virtual World Education Round Table. Sheila Webber, information literacy expert in the UK shares regularly on the Information Literacy Weblog. Digital citizens around the world unite virtually!

Digital Citizens need Metaliteracy

valibrarian

Digital Citizenship has become my passion over the past few years. Watching the world’s obsession with digital devices and constant connectivity has been fascinating as it coincided with the toppling of the information hierarchy. I still use the word library even though library schools are now called schools of information science. When I visited with some University of Washington iSchool students a few years ago, a young male student asked about my background. I told him I was a librarian and he smiled and said, “How quaint!” I smiled back thinking there is just something about the word library I don’t want to give up.

Of course, I know we carry our libraries in our pockets now! We are globally networked prosumers– both consuming and producing content on digital apps through virtual communities. This change was revolutionary and I am thankful to have witnessed it as a librarian at the turn of the century. I often remember a moment when I stood in my school library and felt the change that was happening. Early one morning, before the students and teachers arrived, I stood looking at the library shelves and tables thinking, “What will become of all this?” It felt as if the floor was shaking because I knew the library was rapidly about to change…. and it did. The library became a “digital hub” and a makerspace filled with laptops and devices, interactive whiteboards and Skype sessions with authors.

These changes brought my passion for digital citizenship to the forefront and, as a writing trainer with a love for literature, emphasized the need to explore how literacy was changing. When I found Mackey and Jacobson’s (2011) term metaliteracy, I instantly knew it was important. Recently, I wrote a guest blog post on the Metaliteracy.org site.

My interest in digital citizenship and changing literacy has intersected with our current philosophical era, in part due to that revolutionary moment I felt in my school library. I sensed that nothing would ever be the same. Yet, I still have such love for the core values of librarianship. I felt this oscillation between a respect for tradition and acceptance of revolutionary changes for the past decade.

A new term, which I discovered while investigating postmodernism, hit me like a bolt of lightning. Just when I began to understand postmodernism, I learned that it is over! We are living in a new era which has yet to be named. One of the terms for our current philosophical moment is metamodernism (Vermeulen and van Den Akker, 2010).

Collaborating with these scholars illustrates metaliteracy in the sense of networking across distance to access, produce and share information. The foundation for my book, Metamodernism and Changing Literacy, is the merge of two theoretical frameworks: the philosophical framework of metamodernism and the information science framework of metaliteracy.

What’s in a name? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Was Shakespeare right? Perhaps it doesn’t matter what you call it because we all sense that our lives have changed along with the information revolution. Yet, agreeing on common terms helps us better understand and communicate our ideas. Giving credit to our sources still matters and realizing that we must be responsible for digital citizenship has become critical. I have great appreciation for colleagues (Mackey and Jacobson, Vermeulen and van Den Akker) for offering new nomenclature that advocates digital citizenship for us all.

Mackey, T., & Jacobson, T. (2011). “Reframing information literacy as a metaliteracy”, C&RL News 72: 62-78.

Hill, V. J. Metamodernism and Changing Literacy: Emerging Research and Opportunities. (2020) Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 1-283.

Vermeulen, T. & Van den Akker, R. (2010). Notes on metamodernism. Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2, 1-14.