Our Mission and Products
Public Learning Media Laboratory’s (PLML) solutions address the significant challenges young people encounter in becoming intelligent consumers of the information and data in our digital world.
By developing teaching strategies and digital tools, PLML provides what educational organizations, schools, teachers, and parents need to help students develop skills for understanding, using, and synthesizing information and data, and for turning that data into usable knowledge.
The Need
The oft-repeated1 assumption that young people are digital natives2, developing strong information literacy and fluency without adult intervention, is incorrect. Young people do grow up accompanied by digital devices. In 2011, 50% of children 0-8 used a computer at least several times per week 3 and use, including Internet use, was much higher (above 90%) for teens. About 65% 4 of the US’s 20 million 5 teens and young adults performed at least one search per day. However: Heavy media use and expert media use are fundamentally different.
Significant academic research 6 informs us that middle and high school students struggle with the basic skills required to use technologies as tools to think with. Specifically, research literature describes the difficulties students have to initiate research, tap background knowledge, gather, validate and relate information, create, explore and learn from data, and synthesize information into knowledge or a cohesive argument. Together, these skills are known as information literacy; and the difficulties of information literacy exist across grades, from middle school through college.
Why is this important? At and after college, work is digital. The current and future workplace emphasizes research, synthesis, communication and collaboration. Work-related research, presentations and reporting rely on the ability to find, validate, explore and synthesize information; workplace demands will place even more emphasis on these, ‘expert thinking’7 skills in 2012 and beyond 8.
In short — information literacy is comprised of skills critical to future work, and it is very important that students learn good practices early.
Our Solutions
College and workplace success for the digital generation depends on two critical factors: (1) our teaching and modeling of how to think and learn with digital technologies and (2) the availability of quality tools that promote good research.
Challenges arise in part because of the disconnected and ad-hoc nature of current information literacy instruction, and in part because of the imprecision of the current information seeking, exploring and synthesizing tools. In short, we have not yet developed a cohesive plan of action, and the correct tools, to address the evolving information worlds.
Public Learning Media intends to address the need with teaching techniques that explore how information and data seeking and synthesis can be woven into instructional time, and with digital products that solve specific challenges that people encounter when exploring and thinking with information and data.
Our techniques and technologies explore the following seven critical themes, each of which is a component of information literacy:
- Teaching about how networks work
- Helping apply prior knowledge to the research process
- Supporting search, research and seeking
- Exploring authorship, trust and authority
- Understanding origin and derivation
- Explicating information and confirmation bias
- Considering intentionality, pause and time
Examples of our current tools include:
- Boolify, a graphical search engine that teaches how changes to Boolean impact search results;
- Comparison Search, a comparative search tool that help students confront their inherent information and confirmation biases;
- WhoIs, a search tool that helps students investigate the authorship and ownership of a website by structuring various web data.
More broadly, Public Learning Media intends to establish a strong identity, and action-oriented leadership, in a space that has typically researched much, but acted little to guide technological advancement.
The result? Public Learning Media’s work will help teens to become agile, adept learners, able to successfully navigate school and college, and positioned to assume responsibilities in the evolving, digitally-reliant workforce and citizenship.
- Bennett, S., Maton, K., Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology. 39:5 pp.775-786. ↩
- Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon. MCB University Press. 9:5. ↩
- See http://cdn2-www.ec.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/zerotoeightfinal2011.pdf ↩
- http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Search-and-email/Report.aspx ↩
- http://www.censusscope.org/us/chart_age.html ↩
- Public Learning Media: Information Literacy lit review synthesis. Forthcoming web publication. ↩
- Levy, F., Murnane, R. J. (2004). “The New Division of Labor: How computers are creating the next job market”. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. ↩
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2010-11 Edition. Retrieved 1/24 from http://www.bls.gov/oco/ . ↩
