Presentation at Brick and Click 2018 Conference on teaching students awareness of varying levels of bias in information literacy.

1. 3 RING CIRCUS
A model for understanding and teaching students about bias
Virginia Cairns ~ UT Chattanooga

2. Volunteer Note Taker

3. Opportunities to Share Your Ideas and Input
(Ideas from the Audience)

4. Caveat 1

5. Caveat 2

6. Caveat 3

7. What Are The 3 Rings?
Information Landscape

8. What Are The 3 Rings?
Information Landscape
Interlopers

9. What Are The 3 Rings?
Information Landscape
Interlopers
Individual

10. Ring 1: The Information Landscape
o What is it?
o Who produced it?
o When was it created?
o What is the intent?
o Can it be verified?
(Traditional information
evaluation skills)

11. How Do We Teach This?
o Cra(a)p Test
o Information Timeline
o BEAM Model
o (Ideas from the Audience)
o ?
o ?
o ?

12. Evaluation Game Slide Deck
0 5

13. Real or Fake?

14. Give Students an Idea of Context

15. Ring 2: The Interlopers
o Search Engine Algorithms
o Individual Search History
o Browser and OS Influences
o Device (phone vs laptop)
o Increasing Dominance of
Advertising
(Things that influence what you see in
your search results – and that we are
often completely unaware of).

16. Interloper Problems – Search Results
o Not always fair and balanced
o Reinforce filter bubbles
o Reflect programmer biases
o Can be ephemeral and elusive
o Dominance of advertising (esp. on phones)
o Dominance of a few companies

17. How Might We Teach This?

18. How Does This Happen?

19. Where’s the Information?
o Search real world questions
o Advertising increasingly dominates results
o Many "articles" are just ads

20. Two Tabs, Side by Side
o Quartz article (2018)
o Google two opposing sides of the same
question.
o Compare results
o What happens over time as Google
tracks your search habits?

21. How Else Might We Teach This?
(Ideas from the Audience)
o ?
o ?
o ?

22. Ring 3: The Individual
o Implicit Bias
o Internalized
o Automatic
o Invisible

23. How Can Librarians Possibly Help?

24. Getting Inside People's Heads is…Difficult!

25. Think in Terms of Habits of Mind

26. No One Is Immune
Bias is universal and ubiquitous
o Difficult to overcome
o Requires conscious effort
o Requires listening
o Requires questioning
o Requires admitting
o Requires discomfort

27. Strategy 1: Build In Metacognition
o You have to think about your thinking.
o Learning is a consequence of thinking
(not doing). - David Perkins

28. How Might We Do This?
o Think before you do (pre-reflection)
o Problem based learning
o Present a scenario
o Plan a strategy
o Execute the strategy
o Reflect and report
o Make students accountable

29. In Fifty Minutes? Srsly?
o Idea: Develop modules for courses
o Reusable
o Align with syllabus
o Do not require your presence
o Can accommodate longer
engagement than a one shot
o Requires Faculty Buy-In
o Just Do It

30. Other Ideas for Metacognition?
(Ideas from the Audience)
o ?
o ?
o ?

31. Strategy 2: Look for Ways to Blur the Lines
o Avoid yes/no debates or questions
o Encourage multiple perspectives
o Also perspective taking
o Identify commonalities
o In their study, these researchers found that the
subjects who engaged in a task that required them
to list characteristics that were common to both the
ingroup and outgroup, manifested less implicit bias
against the outgroup than their control group
counterparts. (Hall 2009)
o Adversarial collaboration
o Daniel Kahneman
o Requires compromise, trade offs
o Listening with respect and empathy

32. In Practice? How?
o Well crafted activities and assignments
o Multiple sources, varying perspectives
o Intentional gaps, students have to read
between the lines
o Question prompts
o Open ended
o Higher order
o Thinking, discussing, sharing

33. Other Ideas for Identifying and Reducing Implicit Bias?
(Ideas from the Audience)
o ?
o ?
o ?

34. Unified Grand Theory of Everything

35. Bare Minimum Takeaways…
o Use Carefully Designed Examples
o Build In Time for Students to Think
o Keep Things Blurry and Puzzling
o Encourage Listening and Speaking
o Ideas Can be Used at Any Level
o The goal may seem beyond our scope…
o But even SMALL efforts can make a difference

36. Sources
Bizup, Joseph. “BEAM: A Rhetorical Vocabulary for Teaching Research-Based Writing.” Rhetoric Review 27.1 (2008): 72-86. Communication & Mass
Media Complete. Web. 4 February 2014.
Otero, Vanessa. (2018). Media bias chart. Available at: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression : how search engines reinforce racism . New York: New York University Press.
Hao, Karen. (2018) Google is finally admitting it has a filter bubble problem. Quartz. https://qz.com/1194566/google-is-finally-admitting-it-has-
a-filter-bubble-problem/
Costa, Ben and Kallick, Bena. (2014). Habits of Mind chart. The Institute for Habits of Mind. http://www.habitsofmindinstitute.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/HOM.Chart_.Horizontal.pdf
Ritchhart, R., & Perkins, D. (n.d.). Making Thinking Visible. Educational Leadership, 65(5), 57–61.
Hartman H.J. (2015) Engaging Adolescent Students’ Metacognition Through WebQuests: A Case Study of Embedded Metacognition. In: Peña-
Ayala A. (eds) Metacognition: Fundaments, Applications, and Trends. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 76.
Hall, N. R., Crisp, R. J., & Suen, M. (2009). Reducing implicit prejudice by blurring intergroup boundaries. Basic and Applied Social Psychology,
31(3), 244–254.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow (1st ed.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Slamet Wahyudi Yulianto. (2015). Critical Pedagogy Principles in Teaching EFL Reading. English Review: Journal of English Education, 4(1), 25–38.

37. Additional Interesting Things to Read
Manufactured illiteracy and Miseducation
Salon on Manufactured illiteracyhttp://www.salon.com/2017/06/24/manufactured-illiteracy-and-miseducation-a-long-process-of-decline-led-to-president-donald-trump/
Neil Strauss of Rolling Stone on Why We are Living in the Age of Fear http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/why-were-living-in-the-age-of-fear-w443554
Motivated Ignorance / Willful Ignorance
Vox article on Motivated Ignorance https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/5/15/15585176/motivated-ignorance-politics-debate
Daniel Levitin on The Butchering of The Age of Reason http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-butchering-of-the-age-of-reason
Short video on Why Facts Won’t Convince People and What You Can Do About it https://www.facebook.com/saved/?cref=28
Denialism: What drives people to reject facts? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-
truth?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
Filter Bubbles
Eli Pariser on the Filter Bubble phenomenon https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles#t-515511
Unconscious Bias https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/09/the-hidden-brain-shankar-vedantam/
Confirmation Bias https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/23/confirmation-bias/
The Backfire Effect http://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe
MRI study on neural effects of conflicting political beliefs https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589

38. Bit.ly Follow Up
http://bit.ly/CairnsBC
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