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Transliteracy: An Essential Competency for the Open Informational World. Carl Bereiter Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology University of Toronto. The “ Open ” Informational World. No boundaries around the information usable in knowledge building and problem solving
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Transliteracy: An Essential Competency for the Open Informational World Carl Bereiter Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology University of Toronto
The “Open” Informational World • No boundaries around the information usable in knowledge building and problem solving • Superabundance of information • Variable and uncertain quality • Indexed by topics, not purposes • Contrasts with the relatively closed informational world of traditional education
New Opportunities Afforded by Opening Up of the Informational World • Taking charge of one’s own learning. • Becoming creators rather than just acquirers of knowledge. • Pursuing goals previously accessible only to experts (e.g., sophisticated health care). • Learning outside formal institutions.
New Challenges • Assessing information quality. • Assessing information relevance. • More of the task of processing information into knowledge falls to the user. • The IKEA syndrome: Information comes in pieces, “Some assembly is required.”
“Transliteracies” Term coined by Alan Liu, referring to the varied adaptations of literacy to new informational environments • Considers what is lost as well as what is gained by the new technologies • Concerned about the fate of “long forms of shared attention,” traditionally represented by books. • Cachan conference, 2011, focused on educational implications and on “transliteracy” as a necessary competence.
Transliteracy: Competence to Meet the New Challenges • Transliteracy includes multiliteracy, but adds another layer. • Multiliteracy = ability to read, write, and interact across a wide range of platforms, tools and expressive and information media. • Transliteracy ~ knowledge skills layered on top of media skills. • Transliteracy’s main task is building coherent knowledge out of incoherent bits and pieces.
A Mundane Challenge to Transliteracy: Important but Unconnected Pieces of Information
Parking is forbidden during certain parts of certain months The other side of the street reverses the dates Except on change dates, the easy way to tell which side you can park on is to look at the cars already parked A sign that is essential but that can usually be ignored
They see a 1-hour parking limit, which is a common rule They ignore “at other times” “At other times” is ambiguous unless you connect it with information on another sign. This sign misleads people
They do not immediately see that it applies to them They think the “1-hour” parking sign takes precedence When two signs appear to conflict, how do you decide which to obey? People do not know what to make of this sign in relation to the other signs
Typical conversation between helpful neighbor (HN) and parking ticket victim (PTV) PTV: See, it says 1 Hour Parking and I’m parked on the right side of the street, and yet the #*%$# gave me a ticket. Thirty-two dollars! HN: But this sign says no parking from 12:01 AM to 7 PM. PTV: Yes, but here it says one hour parking, and I haven’t been parked an hour. PTV drives away feeling unfairly treated.
Why do people fail to integrate information from the 3 signs? • Even with normal working memory limitations, people should have enough capacity to integrate the three essential items of information. • Schema theory explanation: Parking schema does not have all the necessary slots. • Effort-minimizing strategy (“copy-delete”): Process text one item at a time without relating one item to another. • Failure to recognize comprehension failure and mobilize comprehension strategies.
All these explanations apply to larger scale failures of transliterate comprehension • Working memory limitations: Often there is more information to integrate than our working memory can handle.. • We apply schemas or scripts that over-simplify. • We process single propositions, sometimes just keywords, rather than constructing a coherent subtext. • We fail to recognize comprehension failures and so do not take strategic action.
Transliteracy is difficult for humans m • Because of severely limited working memory capacity, we humans are poorly equipped for integrating multiple pieces of information. • To get past this limitation, we construct simplified text and situation models. But we fall into error if our mental models are too simple. • Authors can help us by producing “considerate text” — books and lectures in which connections among ideas are made explicit. • But despite MOOCs, “considerate text” is playing a declining role in knowledge acquisition: cf. Twitter, Facebook, and Wikipedia.
A “Considerate” Parking Sign The boldest text is designed to make people stop and think, which is their most common failing They will then look for exceptions and will find them clearly stated
Transliteracy in School Subjects • Schools are moving to engage students with multiple forms and sources of information. • There is sorting and arranging of information, but integrating it into coherent understanding remains the job of the teacher, with students gaining little experience in it. • Argumentation, the new favorite in progressive education, favors “weight of evidence” versus knowledge integration and “explanatory coherence.”
Transliteracy challenges in elementary science • Example is from a WISE (Web-Based Inquiry Science Environment) unit on light. • It features multiple forms and sources of information bearing on the question of whether light goes on forever until it is absorbed or whether it dies out as it gets farther from the source. • It was designed as a one-week unit and so provides little time for coherence building, but it illustrates the potential for a more sustained knowledge building effort.
Bicyclists at NightRider wearing white is more visible than rider wearing black
Searchlight PhotoShowing high light intensity at source, becoming less as it goes farther away
Galaxies in the Young UniverseOrdinary camera on left, Hubble photo on right, enlargement in corner
What is Missing from the Standpoint of Transliteracy • Students organize information but do not integrate it: Evidence is sorted according to which hypothesis it supports. • Students argue on the basis of weight of evidence rather than explanatory coherence.
Weight of Evidence • Is there more evidence for or against the proposition? • Not a simple matter of counting the pieces of evidence. They are “weighed” as to significance. • But facts are not integrated into a larger whole. • In common law jurisprudence, judges decide minor cases by weight of evidence, but for major cases they look for a coherent explanation of all the presented evidence.
Light dies out as it gets farther from source Light goes on forever unless it is absorbed Weight of evidence for two hypotheses about light Searchlight beam gets dimmer higher up We can see stars many light years away Light intensity from flashlight declines over short distance Dark objects absorb light, white objects reflect it
Explanatory coherence (Thagard): internal consistency as well as consistency with evidence and coherence with other explanatory propositions in the field. +
Technology to Support Coherent Explanation:“Convince Me”(Schank, P., and Ranney, M., 1992)Convince Me guides people to cyclically (1) categorize their own propositions as either evidence or hypotheses, (2) indicate the reliability of their various evidence, (3) connect their propositions with both explanatory and contradictory/competitive links, and (4) rate each proposition's believability. After each (1-4) cycle, users can elicit feedback from a connectionist model, called ECHO, to help improve the coherence of their arguments.
How does transliteracy relate to Knowledge Building? • Marlene discussed this in SI2013 keynote, showed how KB principles uphold transliteracy and how new KF designs will provide more support for it. • Collaborative pursuit of understanding can partially overcome the limits of individual working memory capacity. • Collaborative understanding is collaborative explanation building. • Building and improving explanations is the major focus of Knowledge Building in education.
Sharpening the focus of Knowledge Building on transliteracy • Knowledge Building took shape in a more closed informational world—before Google, Wikipedia, smart phones, and the “social web.” • However, “user-generated content” has been central to Knowledge Building and CSILE/Knowledge Forum from the beginning, thus anticipating Web 2.0. • Adapting Knowledge Forum to the open informational world does not require it to become more like Facebook or other new media but it does require accessing information from an increasing variety of sources. • However, Knowledge Building’s job is to integrate this varied information into coherent and valid knowledge, and Knowledge Forum’s job is to help do this.
Positive steps toward transliteracy • Ensure that “rising above” is understood to entail integration and coherence, not merely aggregation. • Replace single-factor and multi-factor explanations with coherent explanations--often in the form of a narrative. • Treat theories as drivers of inquiry and not only as outcomes of inquiry. • Foster meta-discourse that considers the shape and connectedness of emerging knowledge. • Encourage thinking of knowledge building teams as enlarged brains, with increased ability to hold multiple dimensions in mind—a new slant on epistemic agency and collective responsibility for idea improvement.
Model of Progressive Inquiry (Toikkanen based on Hakkarainen)
Conclusions • Transliterate comprehension is a bigger challenge than formal education has faced in the past. • The necessary skills will not be acquired through strategy instruction or traditional skill practice. • Engaging students in collaborative explanation building addresses transliterate comprehension directly and provides authentic exercise of necessary skills. • The informational environment needs to be engineered to reduce the difficulties inherent in transliterate comprehension.
Transliteracy Challenges for the Knowledge Building Design Community The SI2014 program includes 4 “think tanks.” • Think Tank 1: Professional development and knowledge mobilization •Think Tank 2: Knowledge building hubs of innovation •Think Tank 3: Open source software and assessment •Think Tank 4: Teachers’ inventions, students’ discoveries, and data repositories Each think tank will address multiple questions, but each one may contribute to meeting the challenges of knowledge building in an open informational environment.
Think Tank 1: Professional development and knowledge mobilization • Raise awareness of the need for students to take on more responsibility for constructing coherent knowledge. • Develop teachers’ skills in guiding self-organizing knowledge-building processes.
Think Tank 2: Knowledge building hubs of innovation • Models for moving beyond question-answer inquiry to building complex explanations. • Experiments in collaborative comprehension of difficult texts, diagrams, charts, etc. • Finding games, simulations, and other media that promote integrated knowledge building. • Develop a coherence-building ethos among the students.
Think Tank 3: Open source software and assessment • Design “rise-above” supports that encourage really rising to higher levels of theorizing rather than merely summarizing. • Enable promising ideas to rise to the top but also allow for self-correction: Sometimes an idea that seems promising turns out to be a dead end. • Work on automated assessment of coherence, constructive use of multiple sources, and strength of explanation.
Think Tank 4: Teachers’ inventions, students’ discoveries, and data repositories • Transliteracy, explanatory coherence, and promisingness are difficult ideas to grasp; collect examples of success that are both informative and inspiring. • Configure databases to facilitate research on emerging trends, such as those indicated in the preceding point.
Summary of Challenges for the Knowledge Building Design Community • Pedagogy: How to move from answer-finding and brainstorming to coherence building. • Social innovation: How to design and support forms of collaboration that overcome individual limitations in attentional capacity. • Technology: How to support building idea structures as distinct from aggregates of topically related ideas. • Assessment: How to assess transliterate comprehension. • Knowledge transfer: How to inject into school life a fuller awareness of the new problems and challenges of the open informational world.
