Monthly Archives: December 2009

Dear Facebook: Leave Me Alone

By IRIS Posted on by

My friends know that I have a complicated relationship with Facebook. Simply put: I hate it, but I can’t leave. The interface never made sense to me, the multiple audiences made participation hard for me, the quizzes cluttered everything up, college friends flaunted their perfect lives in my face (without meaning to, but it still hurt), and Hasbro took away Scrabulous, which was really the only redeeming feature of Facebook. So why can’t I leave? My local friends assume I’ll know what they’ve posted when we meet on the weekend.

I’d finally figured out a balance that worked for me: I put my local friends and my family members on a list of their own, dragged that list to the top of my list of lists, and now when I open Facebook, they’re all I see. But then Facebook started messing with privacy settings again. For a more full story, check this out: Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. But here are the four things I did this morning in my battle to coexist with Facebook:

  • Overwrote and then deleted some parts of the newly designated set of “publicly available information” (this includes your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of). I overwrote what I could because I wanted to actually change the cached information in Facebook’s database, and then I deleted it because a) I don’t want to give that information away, and b) it was now bogus anyway.
  • Clicked “edit profile” and then the little “edit” icon next to my Friends list and unchecked the box that says “show my friends on my profile” because that seems to be the only way to keep my friends lists out of the hands of apps and random passers by.
  • Went to Facebook > Settings > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What Your Friends Can Share About You and unchecked everything. I don’t like the idea that having a friend who answers quizzes on Facebook means that the quiz creators can gain access to a lot of my information.
  • For good measure, took the opportunity to go through all the other privacy settings and make sure they still reflected my wishes.

Is this overly paranoid of me? Probably. (Tinfoil hats help keep warmth in, remember, and it’s pretty incredibly cold out right now.) The thing is, I’m not invested enough in Facebook to feel like the privacy trade-off is worth it for me. I’m there so I can keep up with my local friends. Full stop. I’m already making concessions by making myself available to the students who want to friend me there and by grudgingly admitting that I like the rolodex function it plays. But I feel zero motivation to give up more than I can help to Facebook and its third party developers. They can kindly leave me alone, please.

Communities of Inquiry

By IRIS Posted on by

I spent the last two afternoons in a workshop for professors who are thinking of teaching Carleton’s new first year seminars next year, so I’m now well steeped in thoughts about first year students. And the more I think about it, the more I think that my main goal for first year students is for them to understand the far-reaching impact and usefulness of understanding the concept of communities of inquiry.

Say What?

This is a stuffed cow. (Photo by Catherine Woolley)

Think about it. If you know who you’re talking with in this vast thing we call “scholarly communication,” it helps you make appropriate choices about everything from topic to citation style to rhetorical style. It reinforces the idea that you’re contributing something to a conversation rather than just parroting back a set of facts. It allows you to evaluate sources and arguments (none of which are inherently “good” or “bad” regardless of context). It helps you know which words are meaningful and therefore ripe for use as search terms. And perhaps most important, it helps you decide what you’ll need to back up with evidence in the first place. After all, only the things that count as odd or new or controversial within your community need explicit backing up, and these things can change radically from community to community. The omnipresent pieces of your community’s world rarely need explanation.

What is Information Literacy Anyway?

By IRIS Posted on by

Tomorrow I’m supposed to stand up in front of a group of faculty, all of whom are considering teaching one of the college’s new curriculum-wide freshman seminars next year, all of which must include some explicit practice developing information literacy. My task: explain information literacy to them in 10 easy minutes so that they can start thinking of ways to build it into their syllabi.

I wish I knew what information literacy is.

My co-workers have heard me say that I’m particularly confused by two things about information literacy: “information” and “literacy.” “Information” can refer to everything from color and smell to poetry to data to formal research articles. And while all of these things could be included in the definition of “information literacy,” for the most part we mean something more specific than that, something more like “facts or approaches or primary sources or secondary sources.” I know, I know, there are exceptions to that. But really, we don’t mean “the amount of the data after data compression” (Shu-Kun), or many of the other meanings proposed by Wikipedians. And “literacy” feels like a remedial skill to me, whereas I tend to think of sophistication in this area as a combination of concrete skills and an omnipresent habit of mind, both of which are useful in and out of the classroom and research contexts.

But this doesn’t really help me with my presentation, so I looked back at a couple of the position documents my department has produced in the last couple of years: Information Literacy in the Liberal Arts and the List of 6 and more. Then my co-workers and I plagiarized the second one, tweaked it a little, and came up with a list of questions that would be useful for first year students. This we developed into a handout for the presentation: Finding, Evaluating, and Ethically Using Information.

For my purposes tomorrow, these questions sketch out the habit of mind that information literate people exhibit. They don’t cover “knowing you need information,” and they don’t cover concrete search skills or strategies, but they are a start.

[edit: I should have linked to Steve's post and didn't, so here are his thoughts on the topic.]

Shu-Kun Lin (2008). ‘Gibbs Paradox and the Concepts of Information, Symmetry, Similarity and Their Relationship’, Entropy, 10 (1), 1-5. Available online at Entropy journal website.