PHI THETA KAPPA

How does the dissemination of information influence the individual and the community?

Study Questions

1. To what extent does an individual have a right for his/her personal information to remain private, and who is responsible for its protection?
2. How do individuals use information to represent or misrepresent themselves online?
3. How has the democratization of information led to more or less civility, and what role does anonymity play?
4. What impact has increased access to information had on informed debate?
5. With increased access and sharing of information, who owns the rights to what, and how has that changed with time?
6. To what extent should employers be able to prescreen employees by accessing their social networking communities?
7. To what extent should individuals and/or communities have the unfettered ability to disseminate hateful or potentially dangerous ideas?
8. Through the years, how has increased access to information affected our awareness of the world around us or our civic engagement?
9. With today’s shared information, is any work ever truly “original,” and how can we know?
10. What impact has the democratization of information had on our time management and quality of life?
11. Have social networks engendered new forms of bullying or simply increased the opportunity for an age-old activity?
12. If individuals develop online addictions (pornography, shopping, gambling), should communities be expected to respond and, if so, to which addictions?
13. To what extent do we live our “real” lives versus our “cyber” lives, and who are we in each?
14. In what ways are we more inclined to use information to become more informed and aware or to support our entrenched beliefs and positions?

Honors in Action

Sensory Garden

Investigation of the Honors Study Topic (Research): Conduct general research on blindness and the democratization of information. What is the percentage of the population that is blind or vision impaired? How do the sight challenged use email, navigate the Internet, etc.? What are the ways different groups experience sensory information? What are the special challenges the vision impaired face regarding the democratization of information? How are they active participants in it? Set up a meeting with honor students at your local school for the blind. As you get to know each other better, begin discussing how the visionimpaired students receive and process information.

Leadership Role(s): Meet with administrators from the school for the blind with your proposal for the sensory garden and to receive final approval to proceed with the garden. Invite members of the local press to the opening of your garden. Share your results with other chapters at your regional Phi Theta Kappa convention and encourage those chapters to develop sensory gardens in their communities.

Leadership Development: Organize a workshop on diversity and working sensitively with blind and vision-impaired students for chapter members.

Action: Plant a “sensory” garden that could be experienced and enjoyed by all. To prepare for planting the garden, visit your local botanical garden with vision-impaired students. Work in teams, with each blind student accompanied by one “blind for a day” blindfolded Phi Theta Kappa member and a second Phi Theta Kappan serving as a helper for each pair. Ask the blind students to guide the “blind” Phi Theta Kappa members and explain how to “see the garden” through sound, smell, and touch. Based upon your experiences in the botanical garden, plan and plant your own garden. Select garden flowers for their fragrant and tactile qualities. Add a water fountain for aural enhancement, and plant a vegetable garden so that students can use their sense of taste to enjoy the garden.

Collaboration:

• Chapter members
• Phi Theta Kappa members beyond your chapter
• Faculty from your college campus
• Community members from the school for the blind and local media

Reflection: Work with a faculty member from your local school for the blind to develop a reflection writing exercise for participants from the school and your chapter. Compare experiences and discuss ways everyone grew as scholars and leaders. What would you do in a different way if you were to organize the project again?

The Truthiness Project

Investigation of the Honors Study Topic (Research): Organize a research team to investigate the ways in which members of your community access information. What newspapers are most read? Which news broadcasts are number one in terms of viewers in your area? Which radio shows draw the most listeners? What websites are most visited by students on your campus? To what extent do you have access to information from a variety of sources with different interpretations of news and events?

Leadership Role(s): Organize your research team as well as the team that will develop the “truthiness” Academic Forum on campus. Invite faculty members to work with participants to better understand how to analyze sources of information and ask all faculty members to bring their classes to the forum. Meet with your college librarian before the symposium begins to discuss the goals of the session.

Leadership Development: “How do we know what is true?” Have a faculty member and/or research librarian present to conduct a workshop for chapter members and other students who plan to participate in “The Truthiness Project” on how to find and evaluate valid sources.

Action: Organize “The Truthiness Project” on campus. Invite students and fellow Phi Theta Kappa members beyond your campus to participate. Have each project participant partner with a faculty member on campus to draft two statements. One statement for each paper will be demonstrably true, but one will be clearly false. Have each student write two “position papers” using sources found from books and journals in academic libraries and/or from Internet sources. Convene a panel of faculty and students to select the top two students to present their papers. After the top two students present their papers, hold short discussions about the information gleaned from each presentation. What questions do audience members have about the work? Reveal which of the papers supported valid claims and which papers used “truthiness” to support invalid claims. Ask audience members, “How do we know what is true?” and “What is our responsibility as information consumers to seek a variety of sources before formulating our beliefs?” Write a research guide to be placed in your college’s library that will assist students in evaluating sources. Conduct source evaluation workshops in individual classes. Offer information to the college assessment team.

Collaboration:

• Chapter members
• Students on your campus
• Faculty on your campus
• Fellow Phi Theta Kappa members beyond your chapter

Reflection: Before students begin work on their position papers, conduct a “pre-survey” to gain information on the audience members’ current understandings of accessing and evaluating academic sources when conducting scholarly research. Conduct a “post-survey” to discover what audience members learned about finding and evaluating sources. Compile the results of your symposium and seek to have them published in an academic education journal. Track the students who attended the symposium to see if their approaches to using sources in academic research and writing have changed.

Bibliography

Bauerlein, Mark. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). 2009.
Bauerlein begins by addressing the assumption that the digital age and the “information superhighway” were supposed to revolutionize knowledge as we know it, producing more informed, astute, and engaged citizens. Instead, he argues that during the current information age, young people are more intellectually disengaged, professionally unmotivated, and civically uninterested than ever.

Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason: Revised and Updated. 2009.
Drawing on the work of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), Jacoby skewers what she perceives to be a decidedly anti-intellectual, anti-rational approach to life in modern-day America. She argues that not only is anti-intellectualism accepted, but it is actually encouraged and even celebrated as people who are “just folks” are somehow more authentically American than intellectuals or experts. Jacoby examines the Internet, among other things, as a source of this anti-intellectualism and discusses the consequences of this growing trend.

Klingberg, Torkel. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory. 2009.
Klingberg points out that today’s average person is inundated with vastly much more information than members of past generations received; however, physiologically and cognitively, human brains have not
changed much since the Stone Age. Klingberg posits that our “Stone-Aged brains” may be reaching their limits to absorb this seemingly limitless amount of information, producing a sense of disconnect among individuals; and he suggests strategies for “exercising” our brains to better meet the challenges of receiving today’s levels of information.

Manjoo, Farhad. True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post–Fact Society. 2008.
In the age of eyewitness accounts and instant technological documentation, the truth is more verifiable than ever. However, Manjoo argues that facts are becoming less and less important as people simply see and interpret events through the lens of previously held beliefs.

Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser. Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives. 2008.
Palfrey and Gasser identify today’s young people as “digital natives” who have grown up with sophisticated technologies, as opposed to “digital immigrants” for whom new technologies and avenues for communicating, such as social networks, are often baffling. The authors explore the pros and cons of growing up as a digital native and ask questions concerning the construction of a personal identity, online safety, the impact of the digital age on democracies, and the intersection of technologies and creativity.

Shenkman, Rick. Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the TRUTH about the American Voter. 2008.
Shenkman argues that American democracy is more direct than ever, yet Americans are more ill–informed on basic political facts that ever before, resulting in decisions being based on personal opinions and even misinformation instead of facts. He argues that the media has simplified the workings of American politics while actual political machinations are more complicated than ever and that Americans are ill–equipped to make wise political decisions. Instead of merely blaming the government or media, Shenkman asks the American people to take a hard look at themselves and suggests strategies for becoming better informed.