5.2.3.1: A Wide and Concerning Gap

More than anything, findings from this study identify a wide gap between students and faculty as algorithms, put to both good and bad use, are changing the online information landscape in opaque and unknown ways. In a major finding to emerge from this study, students were far more eager than their faculty to fight back in practical ways against algorithmic control with strategies they learned from friends and peers, but not in class. They realize that it takes reading across different content producers to get the full story, and that this takes time and effort. They know that “choice” is a tricky prospect with online news, so some have figured out how to use social media sites, like Twitter and Reddit, as their “news editors” to help them exert a little control and break out of filter bubbles.

While students’ willingness to contest the workings of these internet giants is encouraging, our findings suggest the age of algorithms demands that teaching strategies be reconsidered as we redefine information literacy. Students should not have to learn these critical information skills on their own. Nor should it be assumed that all of their strategies are necessarily effective.

In our focus groups and interviews, we found a troubling trend aligned with what we already know about students and their information practices from a decade of PIL research studies. That is, the critical work of understanding the torrent of information flowing through a variety of channels, from social media to commercial search engines, is rarely considered in assignments and classroom discussions.

It was surprising to discover how rarely current information systems, and the social and economic conditions that shape and influence their design, were discussed in the classroom. The persistence of this static approach to information, which fails to acknowledge how the world has changed in the 20 years since Google began capturing and exploiting individuals’ digital trails, has powerful consequences. While our exploratory study sample was small and the methods qualitative, these findings warrant further investigation by future researchers.

Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that the information environment our students inhabit is not a cloister of scholarly knowledge. It more closely resembles an overgrown jungle where every resource must be tested for toxicity, and where students are stalked relentlessly, their data harvested as fodder for unknowable uses.

We do a disservice to our students and to society by confining research assignments and information literacy instruction efforts to the walled garden of peer-reviewed scholarship, where truth is plucked from well-pruned sources and carefully packaged for instructors following explicit instructions. When students are given so limited a range of exploration that they graduate feeling ill-equipped to ask their own questions, higher education has failed them.

Contributors and Attributions

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