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Teaching Information Literacy and Computing Ethics: Are They the Same Thing?
Intl. Inform. & Libr. Rev. (2000), 32, 473^483 doi:10.1006/iilr.2000.0139 Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
Teaching Information Literacy and Computing Ethics: Are They the Same Thing? BRUCE GILBERT*
I N T RODUC T ION Educators of all stripes, from librarians to technology trainers to teaching faculty, are today engaged in teaching something called ‘‘information literacy’’. Information literacy, for the purposes of this paper, can be de¢ned as the process of teaching and learning about electronic technology, such as personal computers and the Internet, in order to glean and manipulate useful information from that technology. I may be overly presaging the rest of this piece by noting how even this basic de¢nition is fraught with terminology that is seemingly value-neutral, but is, upon closer inspection, nothing of the kind. If we accept information literacy as a worthwhile practice (and it is taught, in various forms, at institutions of higher learning of all levels) then this de¢nition should make us recognize that the multifarious abstractions of a technological interface (whether the abstractions are icons or menu choices) must be mastered in order to get at what we seek; and what we seek, in the case of information literacy, is more abstraction, that is, that much-sought modern commodity called ‘‘information’’. This diversion into the parsing of a basic de¢nition at the outset is justi¢ed, I believe, if it helps us to recognize how ingrained and littlequestioned many of the underlying concepts of our ‘‘information society’’ have become. This is especially important in this case, as my underlying thesis may seem either outlandish or trivial to the mind that is not open to looking at familiar concepts in new ways. I, of course, believe it is neither of these, but as an educator, I am frankly more interested in encouraging the restless, questioning mind than I am concerned with proving my point of view right or wrong. The point of view I wish to pursue in this paper stems from an idea I had about this process of teaching ‘‘information literacy’’. In simplest, baldest terms, my idea is this: the process of teaching information literacy, if done properly, should include the teaching of information *Director of Library Operations and Technology, Drake University.
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ethics; because, at their base, information literacy and information ethics are the same thing. To put the underlying idea even more plainly: the decision to use electronic information technology as a primary tool in the teaching, learning, and research process is a profoundly value- and ethics-driven decision, from the beginning and each step along the way. We are ill-serving our students and our clientele if we fail to recognize this as an ethical concern, and do not attempt to address the rami¢cations of this underlying reality. As I pursue this thesis, I intend to, ¢rst, examine the fundamental terms that will be used in this paper by placing them in the context of the thought of the original thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson; second, brie£y review how I personally came to the above-mentioned conclusion; third, examine how this theory worked in a ‘‘real’’ for-credit class; and fourth, begin to explore the next steps in how this theory might impact the academic curriculum. I would like to start, however, with some basic examinations and de¢nitions of the terms that will be used throughout; for it is the di¡erent determinations of concepts that distinguishes this theory. It is important to stress, however, what this paper is not. It is not particularly either pro- or anti-technology; it is not all-too-fashionably pessimistic; and it is not value-neutral or ethically relativistic. It is, if it hits its mark, a clear-eyed look at some of the philosophical underpinnings of the electronic revolution.
T H E C ONC E P T OF I N F OR M AT ION E T H IC S The single most delineating concept in my thesis is the way it treats the rubric ‘‘ethics’’. We all know what ethics means, or what we think it means, and the usual study of ‘‘information ethics’’ is re£ective of that predisposition. Thus, the common topics of ‘‘information ethics’’ and ‘‘computer ethics’’ including computer viruses, computer etiquette, and (occasionally) even the potentially destructive environmental impact of owning and operating a computer. These topics, however, worthy as they might be, do not re£ect the predispostion of my view of ethics. Thus, I am arguing that the ‘‘traditional’’ study of information ethics stems from a view that ethics is largely a concern of what is morally ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’, (or even good and evil) and tends to revolve around discussions of what a moral or ethical person would do in a given situation. Thus, case studies are the most familiar tool of this approach (this embrace of the case study extends beyond information ethics to such related ¢elds as business ethics and even well into traditional university ethics courses).
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While it is not my intention to denigrate this view of ethics, it is not descriptive of the view I wish to examine for the purposes of this paper. For my model, I turn to a truly unique intellectual institution, and that is, the Emersonian mindset or viewpoint. The speci¢c work of Ralph Waldo Emerson that will be covered is his 1838 lecture delivered to Dartmouth College entitled, Literary Ethics.1
E M E R S ONI A N E T H IC S A brief word is in order on why Emerson and this piece is appropriate for our purposes. I felt it would be preferable to use a ‘‘pre-information revolution’’ ¢gure to illustrate the points in this paper. Other authors’ thoughts on ethics would have been useful for this purpose, whether they be those of Goethe or Aristotle or deStael. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts on ‘‘The American Schlolar’’, were expressed in a series of lectures he delivered in the 1830s. Emerson’s views on this subject are unique in their combination of innate optimism, wide-based viewpoint, and unprejudiced analysis of the ‘‘scholar’s’’ task. (It is probably worth noting here that Emerson’s use of the term ‘‘scholar’’ in these essays is quite di¡erent from the way we usually use this term. A ‘‘scholar’’ for Emerson was an individual who produced original, provocative thought as a result of his or her life experiences as well as what we call ‘‘research’’. The term ‘‘writer’’ or ‘‘author’’ is probably close to a modern analogue to Emerson’s meaning.) Moreover, it is little recognized how Emerson was highly dependent on, and accomplished in the use of, the ‘‘advanced technology’’ of his day. As a lecturer who delivered many dozens of lectures all across this country and Europe, he was an inveterate traveler who used trains and steamers to visit the midwestern hinterland, delivering a speech at the ‘‘lyceum’’ (rough equivalent of today’s community colleges) of small towns, speaking in granaries, churches and homes, and even traveled to the west coast using these and other rough conveyances in his later years. He even mastered, however reluctantly, the fountain pen, a technology that doubtless was an aid in his lifetime production of 250 notebooks full of his (and other’s) writings. (It is a measure of how far we are from that time to note how Emerson spent a great deal of time constructing and maintaining his own manual index to this copious body of work.) 1 Emerson, R.W. (1983) Literary ethics. In Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lecture. New York. The Library of America. pp. 93^112. Also available on the Internet at: http://www.rwe.org/works/Nature_addresses_3_Literary_Ethics.htm
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So when we turn to Emerson’s ‘‘literary ethics’’, it could be said that he was one who was a real ‘‘user’’ of the technology of his day. So what were some of the conclusions, and preconceptions, that were subsumed in this work? We must begin, by returning to our earlier concern of just how ‘‘ethics’’ is de¢ned. This essay is not about what sort of behavior constitutes ‘‘right and wrong’’, ‘‘moral and immoral’’, etc. in the life and actions of the scholar, except in the broadest sense. That is, Emerson’s discussion of literary ethics is a discussion of the ‘‘ethic’’, or underlying biases and philosophy, of the literary individual. It is not presumptive to state that the ‘‘ethic’’ of an individual as outlined by Emerson underlies the ‘‘ethics’’ or ethical decisions and behavior of that individual. And what constitutes this ‘‘ethic’’ of literary behavior? Emerson is clear on this point: it is for the scholar to be bold, creative, wide-ranging, and con¢dent. ‘‘..when (the scholar) comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses with things. For, the scholar is the student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the truth, such is the worth, such the call of the scholar’’.2 The bulk of Emerson’s essay is devoted to the resources, the subject, and the discipline of the scholar. Of particular interest to us might be Emerson’s coverage of the ‘‘resources’’ of the scholar. For all our justi¢able pride in the modern ‘‘information resources’’ that are available to our students and professors, I cannot help but be struck by the relative strength and fertility of the ‘‘resources’’ described by Emerson. He begins by stressing the importance of the internal resources (what we might call the psychology) of the scholar. Such resources are ‘‘co-extensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind’’.3 Next, Emerson moves to a discussion of biography, or a discussion of the study of previous great individuals as models for scholarly behavior. Here, Emerson rejects the view of biography as a process that identi¢es speci¢c behavior to be copied by the scholar. ‘‘The impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the distinctions of the individual, and not on the universal attributes of man. The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires’’.4 2
Ibid., p. 96. Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 99. 3
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This discussion of the study of the ‘‘great individual’’ evolves into an embrace of the ‘‘highest power’’ of the individual. ‘‘The growth of the intellect is strictly analogous in all individuals. It is a larger reception. . . [the able individual] is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely £ows. . .’’5 I have included this discussion of Emerson’s scholarly ethic for a number of reasons. First and foremost is to note the wide-ranging nature of what constitutes ‘‘ethics’’. For Emerson, development of the talented individual into the creative individual is behavior that is innately ‘‘ethical’’. For the talented individual to either languish through indolence or become sidetracked by worldly concerns or mimicking tendencies is ‘‘unethical.’’ Thus, Literary Ethics clearly points out a distinction between ‘‘ethical’’ questions as they are usually viewed, that is, ethical behavior as a practice of responding to certain occasional occurrences, and the ethical behavior of the engaged, striving, questioning individual. The former view is necessarily reactive: the latter is not only proactive but positive, and re£ects a view of the dauntless individual constructing their own highly ethical agenda from a foundation of unique scholarly activity. Before we turn from Emerson, we should be reminded that ethics in the more conventional sense, that is, questions of ‘‘right and wrong’’ based on individual worldly concerns, were not foreign to his activities; for example, he spoke widely against slavery, and delivered as many as 200 lectures a year on the anti-slavery cause.
I N FOR M AT ION E T HIC S :
THE
B ROA D V IEW
Thus, as we return to the term ‘‘information ethics’’ for the purposes of this paper, if we are to use Emerson as a source of inspiration, we must take a broad-based view. ‘‘Information ethics’’ must refer to the philosophical underpinnings of the individual; they must take into account questions, such as, why does one want to pursue the life of a scholar in the ¢rst place? And, what are the rami¢cations of attempting to harness information in the same way we harness tap water or electricity? These musings would seem, on the face of it, to have little to do with the world of teaching about bits and bytes. I would like to brie£y turn to some of my own thoughts and experiences to attempt to bring these two seemingly disparate topics towards the common basis I believe they share. 5
Ibid., p. 100.
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I N F OR M ATION L I T E R AC Y A N D E T H IC S : W H AT T H EY H AV E IN C OM MON My professional position is that of a librarian whose career is more or less dedicated to the e¡ective use of information technology in the education process. Yet, my own personal interests have always lead to pursuits that place this technology in a wider context. One of these interests lead me to a symposium at the University of Iowa in 1999 on the forging of partnerships between teaching faculty and librarians; the topic of integrating information literacy into the curriculum was a widely discussed topic at this symposium.6 As we entered the second day of this conference, a nagging concern ¢nally articulated itself. The process of information literacy was an exciting and engaging one, only to the extent that it re£ected some speci¢c subject matter. Those sessions which dealt with information literacy in the context of, say, the journalism or mathematics curriculum, re£ected a much higher level of inspiration and involvement, it seemed to me, than did those which dealt with general information literacy issues and sessions. (Such sessions are normally those which are required of ¢rstand second-year students, and have taken the place, in many academic libraries, of traditional ‘‘bibliographic instruction’’ courses.) This concern about the lack of inspiration £owing from general information literacy courses combined with another continuing concern about the ongoing role of computers in education sparked an odd moment of epiphany; my thought at that moment was, could it really be all that simple? I confess to not having a decisive answer to that question to this day. This moment of convergent epiphany resulted in the following thought: the missing factor in most general information literacy programs is any kind of value-driven context. Information literacy, for the most part, is taught as if what one researched, and for what reasons, was of no particular importance as long as one knew how to do it; in short, it is skill-driven, rather than driven by discussion of questions of why, and to what end. Thus, my epiphany ran, a great opportunity was being missed. It is no great revelation that the Internet is, in addition to being a potentially valuable research tool, also a vast ethical wasteland, where individuals whose existence revolves around hating other individuals di¡erent from themselves, are able to ‘‘make connections’’ with the similarly-bent. Those seeking pornography, sites glorifying the mistreatment of women 6 The Proceedings of this symposium are to be published, as of this writing, in a volume titled: Library User Education: Powerful Learning, Powerful Partnerships by Scarecrow Press in 2001.
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and children, and help in pursuits ranging from gambling to explosives construction, may also ¢nd the Internet to be a fertile ¢eld. In short, giving individuals in classroom settings the skills to navigate the waters of the Internet without any discussion of the moral climate they are about to encounter, is akin to teaching the nascent sailor how to tack and use the rudder in calm conditions, and then allowing them to sail solo without ever mentioning that the sailor is certain to encounter bad weather and treacherous eddies along the way.
T H E N ET WOR K E D C OM P U T E R
AS AN
E T H IC A L Q UA N D RY
This discussion does not even begin to tough on the many-faceted ethical concerns that arise from general computer usage within the learning process. For example, considerable coverage, both in the popular press and in higher education, has been given to topics such as computer ‘‘viruses’’ that can wreak havoc on individual computers or entire computer networks. Unfortunately, these viruses are often treated in a manner similar to the side-e¡ects of medication; such side-e¡ects are not on the ‘‘side’’ at all to the patient; they are just as real as the positive, healing e¡ects! Similarly, computer viruses are treated as aberrations, and little more than temporary inconveniences by many advocates and teachers of information technology. Such a view is comforting, no doubt, to the teacher, but it is hardly reassuring to the user who rightly fears losing both data and privacy. Nor is it even accurate: a computer virus is, after all, nothing more than another program, or another facility such as a macro that is designed to make the computer behave in a certain way, and is thus no di¡erent to the computer than a Web browser or a word-processing program. The only di¡erence is that the author of the virus has malicious intent; your computer (and this is my main point) could not care less about intent, however. Another example that was suggested by this initial evaluation of the ethical nature of information technology is the almost staggering ubiquity of that technology. To a very great extent, when it comes to choosing a ¢eld of study, whether it be medicine, physics, journalism, or languages and literature, it makes no di¡erence; you, as a student, will be using computers. In fact, your future success in these areas will largely be determined by how facile you are with technology, regardless of the ¢eld! Such a realization is hardly news, but the next step in analysis is more unusual: what does it say about us as individuals and as a society when the worth of all individuals, regardless of calling, is çjudged by how well they interact with logic-based machines? What are
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the implications when entire academic disciplines are given over to those who work at them only through the abstract worlds of Graphical User Interfaces and programming languages? It should be noted at this point that what should be strived for is an addition to the curriculum that is not anti-computer; it is just computerrealistic. We are living in a world where the solutions to our problems are always only one more piece of hardware, or one more software upgrade away. (Nor is this phenomenon limited to the computer industry: the parallel wasteland of the entertainment industry has, for years, promised us that the ‘‘next new thing’’ will bring us contentment when all it has brought us is the ‘‘old thing’’ endlessly re-packed in ever more lurid and insensate ¢nery.) Modern schools and businesses demand that we produce graduates with computer skills, but what are we giving up if that is all that we give them? To put it more directly, it is not very likely that 10 or 20 years from now either organizations or individuals will care or remember what we taught about the vagaries of the ‘‘Start’’ menu, or the relative virtues of Lycos vs Yahoo! as Internet search engines; that information will long since have been rendered irrelevant. What both organizations and individuals will remember, and be transformed by, is if we teach a more questioning, less sanguine approach to the machines that were, after all, created to serve our needs.
A W E B -B A S E D E X P E R IM E N T: A C OU R SE ON T H E I N T E R N ET
THE
I N T E R N ET A B OU T
I could have easily forgotten these reveries about information literacy and ethics when I returned to the daily necessities of life as a computer and operations librarian at Drake University. In the next few months, I kept these thoughts alive and fermenting, at least, through conversations with colleagues, primarily our instructional librarian, Karl Schaefer. Yet it seemed these thoughts might go the way of many promising ideas that never ¢nd su⁄cient soil to take root. Then, an opportunity presented itself. Drake has a set of vibrant and growing Web-based courses that are taught every year during summer session. I co-taught a one-credit course during the ¢rst summer iteration in 1995; this course was very representative of what I have characterized as traditional information literacy, in that the usual suspects of search engines and ftp sites as they relate to the research process were covered (in those earlier, benighted times, one entire session was spent on the merits of gopher, Archie, and Veronica). This time, however, I was approached to construct an entire undergraduate (third-year level) course, by myself, on the Internet as a
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research tool. I was to o¡er the course under the auspices of Drake’s School of Education. I decided that I could undertake this if I limited my e¡orts to a two-credit course; moreover, I felt that it would be worthwhile for me professionally only if I somehow incorporated the value- and ethics-based concerns that I have outlined above. I will not go into the details of writing, designing and assembling this course (which is taught entirely over the World Wide Web; no face-toface contact between student and teacher is required, although a modicum of extra credit was given to those individuals who paid me a pre-session ‘‘real-life’’ visit). Su⁄ce it to say that, in June of this year, I ‘‘went virtual’’ with a two-credit course entitled Research and Learning on the Internet.
T HOUG H T F U L T H U R S DAYS I will be the ¢rst to tell you that my design and execution of the course as a vehicle for ethical thinking about the Internet was far from perfect. When I ¢rst envisioned this course, I imagined an environment wherein discussions of ethical concerns permeated every activity. However, given the short time period of the course (less than three weeks between when the course began and when the ¢nal paper was due), and that there was a lot of ground to cover, I cannot say that I succeeded in producing an ‘‘ethics-saturated’’ course. However, I did follow the following strategy: every week, I created a session that was called ‘‘Thoughtful Thursday’’. These readings, and the on-line discussions that followed, were the locus of our coverage of ethical issues. The Thoughtful Thursday readings were written by a number of individuals (including myself ) and were geared towards the skills and subject matter that had been covered in the previous three assignments for that week. The readings were selected to represent a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. In the third and ¢nal week, I included a few ethical case studies, in the Wednesday session, and then had a dialog in Thursday’s session between a proponent of networked information and education (Eli Noam) and a skeptic on these topics (Stephen Talbott). I need to make one point clear, and that is that the ethical component of this course was not designed to make the students believe what I did, or even to take a stand on the all-too-religious issue of computer vs individual. What I did try to do was to make it clear that there was an ethical underpinning to the use (or non-use) of the computer; and that
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these ethical concerns were always there, regardless of whether we, as individuals, chose to heed or ignore them.
S T U DE N T R E AC T ION Although the course was not heavily subscribed (¢ve students, all of whom ¢nished the course, an anomaly in itself in a Web course), it was fairly diverse from an academic standpoint: there were two business/IS majors, a journalism major, a sociology major, and an education student. (All did quite well in the course, incidentally, although the nonIS people actually did a better job of engaging the subject matter and the ethical approach.) When I asked and received qualitative evaluations from all students near the end of the course’s run, I was pleasantly surprised to ¢nd that several students referred to the ‘‘Thoughtful Thursday’’ portion of the course as their favorite part of the course. ‘‘You challenged us’’, one wrote, while two referred to the ‘‘guest speakers’’ as ‘‘a great addition to the course’’. The students were nowhere near as unanimous in their relative views on the value of technology in the learning process. One opined that the Internet made her life easier in a number of ways, such as ‘‘not having to go to the library to look up stu¡’’, while others said that they felt they missed something by taking a course entirely on-line. This diversity of opinion indicates, at least, that one of my goals was reached, and that was to be thought-provoking; all had opinions (quite strong ones, in some cases) and expressed them to me and their fellow classmates.
O F W E B C OU R S E S , E M E R S ON,
AND
I N F OR M AT ION E T H IC S
Let me turn from these speci¢c Web-based experiences to some ¢nal summary remarks. Emerson would have written more had he written on a computer; but, would he have written better stu¡ ? How many general information literacy programs ever contemplate such a question? And how much more is the pity? If there is only one point to be gleaned from this paper, it is this: there is never an excuse to teach information literacy as ‘‘content neutral’’; the nature of the computer and networked information constitutes a basic ethical framework, if we only are willing to do the Emersonian hard work of looking and thinking for it.
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Moreover, as I indicated earlier, this value-based approach to information literacy represents a tremendous opportunity to invigorate not just this ¢eld, but also the entire general education curriculum. This is true because, to pose the question, ‘‘What does it mean when we rely on the network to provide us the resources to become an educated person?’’ should lead directly to the question, ‘‘What does it mean to be an educated person in the ¢rst place?’’ This last philosophical question is de¢nitely an ethical concern if we take Emerson’s broad-based view. We are impoverishing our curricula and our students if we pretend that these question don’t exist or don’t matter; and we are certainly not being true to any Emersonian ideal of a scholarly learner. Emerson challenged us to be brutally self-aware, and to be optimistic and creative; we must not shrink from this duty just because we are speaking of our machines.
Teaching Information Literacy and Computing Ethics: Are They the Same Thing? BRUCE GILBERT*
I N T RODUC T ION Educators of all stripes, from librarians to technology trainers to teaching faculty, are today engaged in teaching something called ‘‘information literacy’’. Information literacy, for the purposes of this paper, can be de¢ned as the process of teaching and learning about electronic technology, such as personal computers and the Internet, in order to glean and manipulate useful information from that technology. I may be overly presaging the rest of this piece by noting how even this basic de¢nition is fraught with terminology that is seemingly value-neutral, but is, upon closer inspection, nothing of the kind. If we accept information literacy as a worthwhile practice (and it is taught, in various forms, at institutions of higher learning of all levels) then this de¢nition should make us recognize that the multifarious abstractions of a technological interface (whether the abstractions are icons or menu choices) must be mastered in order to get at what we seek; and what we seek, in the case of information literacy, is more abstraction, that is, that much-sought modern commodity called ‘‘information’’. This diversion into the parsing of a basic de¢nition at the outset is justi¢ed, I believe, if it helps us to recognize how ingrained and littlequestioned many of the underlying concepts of our ‘‘information society’’ have become. This is especially important in this case, as my underlying thesis may seem either outlandish or trivial to the mind that is not open to looking at familiar concepts in new ways. I, of course, believe it is neither of these, but as an educator, I am frankly more interested in encouraging the restless, questioning mind than I am concerned with proving my point of view right or wrong. The point of view I wish to pursue in this paper stems from an idea I had about this process of teaching ‘‘information literacy’’. In simplest, baldest terms, my idea is this: the process of teaching information literacy, if done properly, should include the teaching of information *Director of Library Operations and Technology, Drake University.
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# 2000 Academic Press
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ethics; because, at their base, information literacy and information ethics are the same thing. To put the underlying idea even more plainly: the decision to use electronic information technology as a primary tool in the teaching, learning, and research process is a profoundly value- and ethics-driven decision, from the beginning and each step along the way. We are ill-serving our students and our clientele if we fail to recognize this as an ethical concern, and do not attempt to address the rami¢cations of this underlying reality. As I pursue this thesis, I intend to, ¢rst, examine the fundamental terms that will be used in this paper by placing them in the context of the thought of the original thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson; second, brie£y review how I personally came to the above-mentioned conclusion; third, examine how this theory worked in a ‘‘real’’ for-credit class; and fourth, begin to explore the next steps in how this theory might impact the academic curriculum. I would like to start, however, with some basic examinations and de¢nitions of the terms that will be used throughout; for it is the di¡erent determinations of concepts that distinguishes this theory. It is important to stress, however, what this paper is not. It is not particularly either pro- or anti-technology; it is not all-too-fashionably pessimistic; and it is not value-neutral or ethically relativistic. It is, if it hits its mark, a clear-eyed look at some of the philosophical underpinnings of the electronic revolution.
T H E C ONC E P T OF I N F OR M AT ION E T H IC S The single most delineating concept in my thesis is the way it treats the rubric ‘‘ethics’’. We all know what ethics means, or what we think it means, and the usual study of ‘‘information ethics’’ is re£ective of that predisposition. Thus, the common topics of ‘‘information ethics’’ and ‘‘computer ethics’’ including computer viruses, computer etiquette, and (occasionally) even the potentially destructive environmental impact of owning and operating a computer. These topics, however, worthy as they might be, do not re£ect the predispostion of my view of ethics. Thus, I am arguing that the ‘‘traditional’’ study of information ethics stems from a view that ethics is largely a concern of what is morally ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’, (or even good and evil) and tends to revolve around discussions of what a moral or ethical person would do in a given situation. Thus, case studies are the most familiar tool of this approach (this embrace of the case study extends beyond information ethics to such related ¢elds as business ethics and even well into traditional university ethics courses).
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While it is not my intention to denigrate this view of ethics, it is not descriptive of the view I wish to examine for the purposes of this paper. For my model, I turn to a truly unique intellectual institution, and that is, the Emersonian mindset or viewpoint. The speci¢c work of Ralph Waldo Emerson that will be covered is his 1838 lecture delivered to Dartmouth College entitled, Literary Ethics.1
E M E R S ONI A N E T H IC S A brief word is in order on why Emerson and this piece is appropriate for our purposes. I felt it would be preferable to use a ‘‘pre-information revolution’’ ¢gure to illustrate the points in this paper. Other authors’ thoughts on ethics would have been useful for this purpose, whether they be those of Goethe or Aristotle or deStael. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thoughts on ‘‘The American Schlolar’’, were expressed in a series of lectures he delivered in the 1830s. Emerson’s views on this subject are unique in their combination of innate optimism, wide-based viewpoint, and unprejudiced analysis of the ‘‘scholar’s’’ task. (It is probably worth noting here that Emerson’s use of the term ‘‘scholar’’ in these essays is quite di¡erent from the way we usually use this term. A ‘‘scholar’’ for Emerson was an individual who produced original, provocative thought as a result of his or her life experiences as well as what we call ‘‘research’’. The term ‘‘writer’’ or ‘‘author’’ is probably close to a modern analogue to Emerson’s meaning.) Moreover, it is little recognized how Emerson was highly dependent on, and accomplished in the use of, the ‘‘advanced technology’’ of his day. As a lecturer who delivered many dozens of lectures all across this country and Europe, he was an inveterate traveler who used trains and steamers to visit the midwestern hinterland, delivering a speech at the ‘‘lyceum’’ (rough equivalent of today’s community colleges) of small towns, speaking in granaries, churches and homes, and even traveled to the west coast using these and other rough conveyances in his later years. He even mastered, however reluctantly, the fountain pen, a technology that doubtless was an aid in his lifetime production of 250 notebooks full of his (and other’s) writings. (It is a measure of how far we are from that time to note how Emerson spent a great deal of time constructing and maintaining his own manual index to this copious body of work.) 1 Emerson, R.W. (1983) Literary ethics. In Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lecture. New York. The Library of America. pp. 93^112. Also available on the Internet at: http://www.rwe.org/works/Nature_addresses_3_Literary_Ethics.htm
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So when we turn to Emerson’s ‘‘literary ethics’’, it could be said that he was one who was a real ‘‘user’’ of the technology of his day. So what were some of the conclusions, and preconceptions, that were subsumed in this work? We must begin, by returning to our earlier concern of just how ‘‘ethics’’ is de¢ned. This essay is not about what sort of behavior constitutes ‘‘right and wrong’’, ‘‘moral and immoral’’, etc. in the life and actions of the scholar, except in the broadest sense. That is, Emerson’s discussion of literary ethics is a discussion of the ‘‘ethic’’, or underlying biases and philosophy, of the literary individual. It is not presumptive to state that the ‘‘ethic’’ of an individual as outlined by Emerson underlies the ‘‘ethics’’ or ethical decisions and behavior of that individual. And what constitutes this ‘‘ethic’’ of literary behavior? Emerson is clear on this point: it is for the scholar to be bold, creative, wide-ranging, and con¢dent. ‘‘..when (the scholar) comprehends his duties, he above all men is a realist, and converses with things. For, the scholar is the student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the truth, such is the worth, such the call of the scholar’’.2 The bulk of Emerson’s essay is devoted to the resources, the subject, and the discipline of the scholar. Of particular interest to us might be Emerson’s coverage of the ‘‘resources’’ of the scholar. For all our justi¢able pride in the modern ‘‘information resources’’ that are available to our students and professors, I cannot help but be struck by the relative strength and fertility of the ‘‘resources’’ described by Emerson. He begins by stressing the importance of the internal resources (what we might call the psychology) of the scholar. Such resources are ‘‘co-extensive with nature and truth, yet can never be his, unless claimed by him with an equal greatness of mind’’.3 Next, Emerson moves to a discussion of biography, or a discussion of the study of previous great individuals as models for scholarly behavior. Here, Emerson rejects the view of biography as a process that identi¢es speci¢c behavior to be copied by the scholar. ‘‘The impoverishing philosophy of ages has laid stress on the distinctions of the individual, and not on the universal attributes of man. The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires’’.4 2
Ibid., p. 96. Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 99. 3
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This discussion of the study of the ‘‘great individual’’ evolves into an embrace of the ‘‘highest power’’ of the individual. ‘‘The growth of the intellect is strictly analogous in all individuals. It is a larger reception. . . [the able individual] is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organization, whereinto the universal spirit freely £ows. . .’’5 I have included this discussion of Emerson’s scholarly ethic for a number of reasons. First and foremost is to note the wide-ranging nature of what constitutes ‘‘ethics’’. For Emerson, development of the talented individual into the creative individual is behavior that is innately ‘‘ethical’’. For the talented individual to either languish through indolence or become sidetracked by worldly concerns or mimicking tendencies is ‘‘unethical.’’ Thus, Literary Ethics clearly points out a distinction between ‘‘ethical’’ questions as they are usually viewed, that is, ethical behavior as a practice of responding to certain occasional occurrences, and the ethical behavior of the engaged, striving, questioning individual. The former view is necessarily reactive: the latter is not only proactive but positive, and re£ects a view of the dauntless individual constructing their own highly ethical agenda from a foundation of unique scholarly activity. Before we turn from Emerson, we should be reminded that ethics in the more conventional sense, that is, questions of ‘‘right and wrong’’ based on individual worldly concerns, were not foreign to his activities; for example, he spoke widely against slavery, and delivered as many as 200 lectures a year on the anti-slavery cause.
I N FOR M AT ION E T HIC S :
THE
B ROA D V IEW
Thus, as we return to the term ‘‘information ethics’’ for the purposes of this paper, if we are to use Emerson as a source of inspiration, we must take a broad-based view. ‘‘Information ethics’’ must refer to the philosophical underpinnings of the individual; they must take into account questions, such as, why does one want to pursue the life of a scholar in the ¢rst place? And, what are the rami¢cations of attempting to harness information in the same way we harness tap water or electricity? These musings would seem, on the face of it, to have little to do with the world of teaching about bits and bytes. I would like to brie£y turn to some of my own thoughts and experiences to attempt to bring these two seemingly disparate topics towards the common basis I believe they share. 5
Ibid., p. 100.
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I N F OR M ATION L I T E R AC Y A N D E T H IC S : W H AT T H EY H AV E IN C OM MON My professional position is that of a librarian whose career is more or less dedicated to the e¡ective use of information technology in the education process. Yet, my own personal interests have always lead to pursuits that place this technology in a wider context. One of these interests lead me to a symposium at the University of Iowa in 1999 on the forging of partnerships between teaching faculty and librarians; the topic of integrating information literacy into the curriculum was a widely discussed topic at this symposium.6 As we entered the second day of this conference, a nagging concern ¢nally articulated itself. The process of information literacy was an exciting and engaging one, only to the extent that it re£ected some speci¢c subject matter. Those sessions which dealt with information literacy in the context of, say, the journalism or mathematics curriculum, re£ected a much higher level of inspiration and involvement, it seemed to me, than did those which dealt with general information literacy issues and sessions. (Such sessions are normally those which are required of ¢rstand second-year students, and have taken the place, in many academic libraries, of traditional ‘‘bibliographic instruction’’ courses.) This concern about the lack of inspiration £owing from general information literacy courses combined with another continuing concern about the ongoing role of computers in education sparked an odd moment of epiphany; my thought at that moment was, could it really be all that simple? I confess to not having a decisive answer to that question to this day. This moment of convergent epiphany resulted in the following thought: the missing factor in most general information literacy programs is any kind of value-driven context. Information literacy, for the most part, is taught as if what one researched, and for what reasons, was of no particular importance as long as one knew how to do it; in short, it is skill-driven, rather than driven by discussion of questions of why, and to what end. Thus, my epiphany ran, a great opportunity was being missed. It is no great revelation that the Internet is, in addition to being a potentially valuable research tool, also a vast ethical wasteland, where individuals whose existence revolves around hating other individuals di¡erent from themselves, are able to ‘‘make connections’’ with the similarly-bent. Those seeking pornography, sites glorifying the mistreatment of women 6 The Proceedings of this symposium are to be published, as of this writing, in a volume titled: Library User Education: Powerful Learning, Powerful Partnerships by Scarecrow Press in 2001.
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and children, and help in pursuits ranging from gambling to explosives construction, may also ¢nd the Internet to be a fertile ¢eld. In short, giving individuals in classroom settings the skills to navigate the waters of the Internet without any discussion of the moral climate they are about to encounter, is akin to teaching the nascent sailor how to tack and use the rudder in calm conditions, and then allowing them to sail solo without ever mentioning that the sailor is certain to encounter bad weather and treacherous eddies along the way.
T H E N ET WOR K E D C OM P U T E R
AS AN
E T H IC A L Q UA N D RY
This discussion does not even begin to tough on the many-faceted ethical concerns that arise from general computer usage within the learning process. For example, considerable coverage, both in the popular press and in higher education, has been given to topics such as computer ‘‘viruses’’ that can wreak havoc on individual computers or entire computer networks. Unfortunately, these viruses are often treated in a manner similar to the side-e¡ects of medication; such side-e¡ects are not on the ‘‘side’’ at all to the patient; they are just as real as the positive, healing e¡ects! Similarly, computer viruses are treated as aberrations, and little more than temporary inconveniences by many advocates and teachers of information technology. Such a view is comforting, no doubt, to the teacher, but it is hardly reassuring to the user who rightly fears losing both data and privacy. Nor is it even accurate: a computer virus is, after all, nothing more than another program, or another facility such as a macro that is designed to make the computer behave in a certain way, and is thus no di¡erent to the computer than a Web browser or a word-processing program. The only di¡erence is that the author of the virus has malicious intent; your computer (and this is my main point) could not care less about intent, however. Another example that was suggested by this initial evaluation of the ethical nature of information technology is the almost staggering ubiquity of that technology. To a very great extent, when it comes to choosing a ¢eld of study, whether it be medicine, physics, journalism, or languages and literature, it makes no di¡erence; you, as a student, will be using computers. In fact, your future success in these areas will largely be determined by how facile you are with technology, regardless of the ¢eld! Such a realization is hardly news, but the next step in analysis is more unusual: what does it say about us as individuals and as a society when the worth of all individuals, regardless of calling, is çjudged by how well they interact with logic-based machines? What are
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the implications when entire academic disciplines are given over to those who work at them only through the abstract worlds of Graphical User Interfaces and programming languages? It should be noted at this point that what should be strived for is an addition to the curriculum that is not anti-computer; it is just computerrealistic. We are living in a world where the solutions to our problems are always only one more piece of hardware, or one more software upgrade away. (Nor is this phenomenon limited to the computer industry: the parallel wasteland of the entertainment industry has, for years, promised us that the ‘‘next new thing’’ will bring us contentment when all it has brought us is the ‘‘old thing’’ endlessly re-packed in ever more lurid and insensate ¢nery.) Modern schools and businesses demand that we produce graduates with computer skills, but what are we giving up if that is all that we give them? To put it more directly, it is not very likely that 10 or 20 years from now either organizations or individuals will care or remember what we taught about the vagaries of the ‘‘Start’’ menu, or the relative virtues of Lycos vs Yahoo! as Internet search engines; that information will long since have been rendered irrelevant. What both organizations and individuals will remember, and be transformed by, is if we teach a more questioning, less sanguine approach to the machines that were, after all, created to serve our needs.
A W E B -B A S E D E X P E R IM E N T: A C OU R SE ON T H E I N T E R N ET
THE
I N T E R N ET A B OU T
I could have easily forgotten these reveries about information literacy and ethics when I returned to the daily necessities of life as a computer and operations librarian at Drake University. In the next few months, I kept these thoughts alive and fermenting, at least, through conversations with colleagues, primarily our instructional librarian, Karl Schaefer. Yet it seemed these thoughts might go the way of many promising ideas that never ¢nd su⁄cient soil to take root. Then, an opportunity presented itself. Drake has a set of vibrant and growing Web-based courses that are taught every year during summer session. I co-taught a one-credit course during the ¢rst summer iteration in 1995; this course was very representative of what I have characterized as traditional information literacy, in that the usual suspects of search engines and ftp sites as they relate to the research process were covered (in those earlier, benighted times, one entire session was spent on the merits of gopher, Archie, and Veronica). This time, however, I was approached to construct an entire undergraduate (third-year level) course, by myself, on the Internet as a
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research tool. I was to o¡er the course under the auspices of Drake’s School of Education. I decided that I could undertake this if I limited my e¡orts to a two-credit course; moreover, I felt that it would be worthwhile for me professionally only if I somehow incorporated the value- and ethics-based concerns that I have outlined above. I will not go into the details of writing, designing and assembling this course (which is taught entirely over the World Wide Web; no face-toface contact between student and teacher is required, although a modicum of extra credit was given to those individuals who paid me a pre-session ‘‘real-life’’ visit). Su⁄ce it to say that, in June of this year, I ‘‘went virtual’’ with a two-credit course entitled Research and Learning on the Internet.
T HOUG H T F U L T H U R S DAYS I will be the ¢rst to tell you that my design and execution of the course as a vehicle for ethical thinking about the Internet was far from perfect. When I ¢rst envisioned this course, I imagined an environment wherein discussions of ethical concerns permeated every activity. However, given the short time period of the course (less than three weeks between when the course began and when the ¢nal paper was due), and that there was a lot of ground to cover, I cannot say that I succeeded in producing an ‘‘ethics-saturated’’ course. However, I did follow the following strategy: every week, I created a session that was called ‘‘Thoughtful Thursday’’. These readings, and the on-line discussions that followed, were the locus of our coverage of ethical issues. The Thoughtful Thursday readings were written by a number of individuals (including myself ) and were geared towards the skills and subject matter that had been covered in the previous three assignments for that week. The readings were selected to represent a variety of viewpoints and perspectives. In the third and ¢nal week, I included a few ethical case studies, in the Wednesday session, and then had a dialog in Thursday’s session between a proponent of networked information and education (Eli Noam) and a skeptic on these topics (Stephen Talbott). I need to make one point clear, and that is that the ethical component of this course was not designed to make the students believe what I did, or even to take a stand on the all-too-religious issue of computer vs individual. What I did try to do was to make it clear that there was an ethical underpinning to the use (or non-use) of the computer; and that
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these ethical concerns were always there, regardless of whether we, as individuals, chose to heed or ignore them.
S T U DE N T R E AC T ION Although the course was not heavily subscribed (¢ve students, all of whom ¢nished the course, an anomaly in itself in a Web course), it was fairly diverse from an academic standpoint: there were two business/IS majors, a journalism major, a sociology major, and an education student. (All did quite well in the course, incidentally, although the nonIS people actually did a better job of engaging the subject matter and the ethical approach.) When I asked and received qualitative evaluations from all students near the end of the course’s run, I was pleasantly surprised to ¢nd that several students referred to the ‘‘Thoughtful Thursday’’ portion of the course as their favorite part of the course. ‘‘You challenged us’’, one wrote, while two referred to the ‘‘guest speakers’’ as ‘‘a great addition to the course’’. The students were nowhere near as unanimous in their relative views on the value of technology in the learning process. One opined that the Internet made her life easier in a number of ways, such as ‘‘not having to go to the library to look up stu¡’’, while others said that they felt they missed something by taking a course entirely on-line. This diversity of opinion indicates, at least, that one of my goals was reached, and that was to be thought-provoking; all had opinions (quite strong ones, in some cases) and expressed them to me and their fellow classmates.
O F W E B C OU R S E S , E M E R S ON,
AND
I N F OR M AT ION E T H IC S
Let me turn from these speci¢c Web-based experiences to some ¢nal summary remarks. Emerson would have written more had he written on a computer; but, would he have written better stu¡ ? How many general information literacy programs ever contemplate such a question? And how much more is the pity? If there is only one point to be gleaned from this paper, it is this: there is never an excuse to teach information literacy as ‘‘content neutral’’; the nature of the computer and networked information constitutes a basic ethical framework, if we only are willing to do the Emersonian hard work of looking and thinking for it.
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Moreover, as I indicated earlier, this value-based approach to information literacy represents a tremendous opportunity to invigorate not just this ¢eld, but also the entire general education curriculum. This is true because, to pose the question, ‘‘What does it mean when we rely on the network to provide us the resources to become an educated person?’’ should lead directly to the question, ‘‘What does it mean to be an educated person in the ¢rst place?’’ This last philosophical question is de¢nitely an ethical concern if we take Emerson’s broad-based view. We are impoverishing our curricula and our students if we pretend that these question don’t exist or don’t matter; and we are certainly not being true to any Emersonian ideal of a scholarly learner. Emerson challenged us to be brutally self-aware, and to be optimistic and creative; we must not shrink from this duty just because we are speaking of our machines.