As I explore the idea of developing an internet self-defence kit, I found each question I came up with led to many more. There are two aspects I am exploring in this latest post and that is how is all of our internet and app usage being paid for (as so much of the internet seems free) and how do companies work to keep our attention on-line. These two seem like part of the discussion as it brings up the question why is all of the money and expertise being expended on us, the users to keep us on-line, when, on the face of it, it would seem like it is a grand act of charity (and something tells me Facebook and Candy Crush weren’t primarily designed with altruism in mind).

I conducted searches in a number of areas (including UBC’s library site) but the riches source of information came from basic search engine searches as well as by following leads in the bibliography section of Joseph Turow’s book, The Aisles Have Eyes: How Shopping Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy and Define Your Power, a shocking exploration of how advances in computer processing speeds has opened up the possibility of corporations to essentially analyze our behaviour to best merchandize it.

I am not sure how this will fold into a lesson or unit yet but seems logical to begin with some sense of why the internet is as it is and why so much is available for so little. The below meme gives us a hint about how they are grabbing our attention.

While there are many areas of interest for me as a future teacher-librarian, the two that are of most interest to me at this point in my journey towards are exploring ways to make the digital resources we have available to our students in my district more easy to use and accessible and to help develop specific, targeted literacy training to help students navigate their internet lives both in the context of their classes and in their regular lives.

The first area, the one involving helping to facilitate access to district resources (as a start, I imagine I will then incorporate other resources once I have develop a rough methodology), relates to the curriculum in a supportive role helping students to, “use Social Studies inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze ideas, and data; and communicate findings and decisions” as mentioned in the Social Studies 10 curriculum (https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/social-studies/10/core).

Most senior courses that involve any research have similar curricular demands that are likely to involve the library. Currently, my district, the Vancouver School Board (VSB), has excellent on-line resources but accessing them without putting in a tremendous amount of time to sort through the various databases and their idiosyncrasies generally results in students heading to Google instead.

I would like to put time into exploring how to position them better, so that this wealth of resources can be better accessed so they are better equipped for research pieces.

The second area I am concerned with is what I have come to see as a major gap in my teaching as an English teacher. The traditional role of English teacher is still incredibly important but I do see a need for a unit or series of units designed to help develop specific literacies to help students navigate the on-line world.

Some of these would be in the area of determining validity of websites, how to explore a range of views to arrive at a true exploration of a topic and the like, but I also believe there is a very useful place for a kind of “Internet for Dummies” course of study could have strong potential to help students understand the nature of truth in this post-Trump world by exploring how we end up seeing what we do when we explore the internet (How websites climb the search lists; How the need to generate hit-related income affects the nature of the articles we are being fed; How is this all “free”).

Since most of our students do much (and likely most) of their reading in the on-line world, it seems essential to tackle this issue. It would likely be a series of age targeted mini sessions aimed at helping to inoculate students against the worst aspects of the way the internet is organized.