Digital Diligence: Building Mindful Practices Into a Crowded Curriculum

Purpose & objective

Every day, our students are inundated by information – as well as opinions and misinformation – on their devices. These digital texts influence what they buy, who they vote for, and what they believe about themselves and their world. And, as noted in the ISTE Standards, we need to “[e]stablish a learning culture that promotes curiosity and critical examination of online resources and fosters digital literacy and media fluency.” Moving students toward the deep analysis and creation of arguments with digital medial could be our greatest possibility to improve dialogue across cultures and continents… or it could contribute to bitter divides. In the spirit of a true teaching demonstration, during this session we will invite participants into active learning, with their devices and in conversation with one another.

To practice mindful use of technology, Dr. Hicks will prepare a Google Slide deck with embedded links, all of which will lead participants to additional resources and collaborative activities. In an effort to engage in substantive dialogue, and in the spirit of sharing and utilizing openly available resources, this session will rely on three websites that are free for any use, including educational use: Google Docs, AllSides, and Voyant Tools.

Google Docs is a fairly familiar tool and the other tools will be employed in a critical and creative manner to explore the bias inherent in articles from various ideological perspectives. Participants will be invited to make copies of the "Argument in the Real World" activity, via GDocs, and will be led through the activities as they would be facilitated in middle or high school classrooms.

The second tool we would explore is an online tool for exploring articles across the political spectrum, AllSides.com. Described as a tool to "[s]trengthen our democracy by freeing people from filter bubbles so they can better understand the world - and each other," AllSides aggregates news from the political left, right, and center, displaying articles side-by-side for closer analysis. In his work on how experts develop knowledge and discern accurate sources, Sam Wineburg and his colleagues from the Stanford History Education Group have demonstrated that the ways that experts read online differs from novices in one key way; rather than clicking back and forth between search results and links, experts will generally open up a series of tabs and explore what they are researching through "lateral reading." In this segment of the workshop, participants are encouraged to explore a topic laterally, using the skills that they have developed heretofore in an effort to become even more discerning with the various sources that they encounter.

Then, in the second segment of the workshop, we will explore the texts using a tool that linguists use: Voyant Tools. As Tom Liam Lynch notes, "we can use quantitative data to deepen our hearts' qualitative readings (2015, 72). We will draw texts from opposite sides of the political spectrum (from AllSides) and then analyze the text structure to create word clouds and look for word frequencies with Voyant Tools, "a web-based text reading and analysis environment."

By the end, participants will develop "an argument of one's own" using sentence templates from Graff and Birkenstein's book "They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Argument Writing." We will share our writing and consider next steps for implementing the strategy in participants' classrooms.

Outline

Introduce Hyperdoc and Share bit.ly Link to "View Only" GDoc for Copying (apx 5 minutes)
Brief Overview of AllSides, ProCon, and Voyant Tools (apx 5 minutes)
Model lesson with Hyperdoc, moving sequentially through the lesson (apx 30 minutes)
Reflect on experience (remaining time)

Supporting research

AllSides: https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news

ProCon: https://www.procon.org/

VoyantTools: https://voyant-tools.org/

Hicks, T. (2021). Mindful Teaching with Technology: Digital Diligence in the English Language Arts, Grades 6-12. The Guilford Press.

Graff, G., & Birkenstein, C. (2021). “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Fifth edition). W. W. Norton & Company.

Lynch, T. L. (2017). The hidden role of software in educational research: Policy to practice (Vol. 143). Routledge.

Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2017). Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information (SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3048994). Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3048994