Scholarly Communication in the Context of Digital Literacy: Navigation and Decision Making in a Complex Landscape

As digital technologies have come to dominate the conduct and dissemination of scholarship, seasoned and budding scholars alike may have little knowledge of what happens with the data that are gathered from their scholarly products, online profiles, and community platforms. Growing commercialization, mergers, buyouts, and venture capital investment lend credence to the idea of research results as “big data” to be mined and scholarly communication as “big business”. The scope of the issues that now govern the funding and sharing of knowledge is formidable and international. How does one even begin to understand what is needed to navigate and make decisions in such a complex environment? Not just a concern of faculty, these issues can have profound influence on student learning, academic services, and society at large. Scholarly communication is often viewed as a mechanistic and closed system; we should reframe it in a larger context and apply concepts of digital literacy and social justice

Encounters beyond the interface: Data structures, material feminisms, and composition

This dissertation argues that data literacy should be taught in college writing classes along with other new media literacies. Drawing from several areas of study, this dissertation establishes a definition of data literacy, introduces a feminist methodological approach to Big Data and data studies, and makes a case for teaching data literacy in first year composition and professional writing courses as a foundational writing-related literacy. Information written into and read from databases supports research activities in any number of fields from STEM to the humanities; while different disciplines approach databases and data structures from diverse perspectives, all students need foundational data literacies. Nearly all digital environments are facilitated in some way by databases. They drive a range of web applications in ways that most users do not realize. On the surface, only GUIs are visible, and sets of data could be presented in any number of ways through them in the form of visuals, texts, and sound. It is important that students learn how data structures influence what comes across in the interface. By having students rhetorically analyze databases and then create them, composition teachers can help to demystify these ubiquitous yet invisible technocultural objects. Becoming aware of data structures gives students insight into how digital compositions emerge, empowering them to be more than “users” or “subjects” that use technological “objects.” Ideally, they would gain insight into how both “sides” of this encounter arise in dependence on many contributing factors, such as the standards, classifications, and categories perpetuated by techno-cultural infrastructures. Developing a socio-ontological methodology that combines scholarship in both feminist new materialisms and feminist rhetorical methodologies, this dissertation discusses the importance of researcher positionality. The socio-ontological methodology developed here expands on social constructivist theories to view all participants in a situation, including non-human ones, as mutually existing in dependence upon each other. Within this framework, contemplative mapping helps to articulate how the researcher does not exist outside of the research situation and assists in helping to make the situation uncanny, so that we can question assumptions and think through processes. Providing a foundational understanding of why data structures have become important to our professional and personal lives, this dissertation explains the public fascination with Big Data and exposes the ways that individuals can be affected by data collection practices, examining how the data structures that enable what comes across in user interfaces can be understood and taught in the context of writing studies

In Search of a “Fair Explanation”: Helping Young People to Consider the Possibilities, Limitations, and Risks of Computer- and Data-Mediated Systems

Significant resources have been directed towards K-12 computing and data education over the past ten years, as part of what has come to be known as the CSforAll initiative. This initiative has focused on raising awareness of computing education among parents and students, developing situated learning progressions that resonate with many different interests and pursuits, training teachers, and addressing issues of underrepresentation in computing among females and racial minorities. In this dissertation, I argue that as the CSforAll initiative continues to expand, it is important for the education community to also reflect on the forms of knowledge that are believed to be essential, and the presumed benefits of computing and data education. Specifically, how might the goal of producing citizens with robust computing and data literacies change what is considered to be fundamental to a computing education; as well as the kinds of contexts in which computing and data science are situated?I use the term sociotechnical literacy to name this vision for computing education, which I define as a broad set of social and technical practices, strategies, ideas, and dispositions that can help people to reason about the computer-mediated systems that shape their everyday lives. As the term suggests, I argue that it is important for learners to engage with technical ideas as well as their social applications and implications. To examine what this might mean for teaching and learning, I describe two design experiments that I conducted with young people (ages 14 – 22). Each approach aimed to make the applications of computing primary (rather than treating applications as the backdrop from which the abstractions of computation are motivated), so that learners could examine some of the specific ways in which data and computing might be directed to particular goals, subject to real possibilities and constraints, and in relation to alternative forms of participation. I examine the possibilities and limitations of each approach. I also analyze some of the assumptions that framed the design experiments – which were naïve, but also reflective of a broader ethos that pervades CSforAll. I reflect on what these studies collectively reveal about the possibilities, limitations, and risks of data and computing, as situated in the lives of young people; as well as what this might mean for helping young people develop a robust sociotechnical literacy. There are very real limits to what can be accomplished with computing and data alone. There are also significant benefits and risks associated with the many sociotechnical systems that shape our lives. As such, I argue that rather than positioning computing education as a remedy to various social ills, we instead offer young people a fair explanation of what computing is and is not capable of, grounded within specific contexts involving real people. I conclude with what this fair explanation might include, and how it might be fostered

Understanding User Experience of COVID-19 Maps through Remote Elicitation Interviews

During the coronavirus pandemic, visualizations gained a new level of popularity and meaning for a wider audience. People were bombarded with a wide set of public health visualizations ranging from simple graphs to complex interactive dashboards. In a pandemic setting, where large amounts of the world population are socially distancing themselves, it becomes an urgent need to refine existing user experience evaluation methods for remote settings to understand how people make sense out of COVID-19 related visualizations. When evaluating visualizations aimed towards the general public with vastly different socio-demographic backgrounds and varying levels of technical savviness and data literacy, it is important to understand user feedback beyond aspects such as speed, task accuracy, or usability problems. As a part of this wider evaluation perspective, micro-phenomenology has been used to evaluate static and narrative visualizations to reveal the lived experience in a detailed way. Building upon these studies, we conducted a user study to understand how to employ Elicitation (aka Micro-phenomenological) interviews in remote settings. In a case study, we investigated what experiences the participants had with map-based interactive visualizations. Our findings reveal positive and negative aspects of conducting Elicitation interviews remotely. Our results can inform the process of planning and executing remote Elicitation interviews to evaluate interactive visualizations. In addition, we share recommendations regarding visualization techniques and interaction design about public health data

Metalinguistic awareness in literate and illiterate children and adults: a psycholinguistic study

One of the major goals of psycholinguistic research is to be able to account for those mental operations which enable native speakers not only to perform the basic linguistic capacities such as comprehending and producing an illimited number of utterances, but also to exercise such metalinguistic abilities as to judge utterances, segment words, identify sounds and detect ambiguities. The primary concern of this thesis was to elucidate the processes underlying certain aspects of metalinguistic awareness and to trace their relationship to advances in maturation and acquisition of literacy. The guiding principle has been to determine how much of what has been considered normal cognitive development is in fact an age-bound developmental phenomenon, or to what extent it reflects the result of experiences associated with the degree and extent of literacy. The need for this is apparent on examining previous research which, as we demonstrate, has confounded such theoretically important variables as Age, Literacy and peculiarities of the native language. The aim of the methodology employed here was to deconf ound such variables and add more insight as to the nature of metalinguistic abilities. First, by employing literate and illiterate children and adults, the design optimizes the likelihood of tapping a precise relationship between maturation, literacy and metalinguistic awareness. Second, by using native speakers of Arabic, the general design offers the opportunity to add insight from language yet another typologically different from English in which most previous research was conducted. Third, by employing more than one type of linguistic measure for the same population, the design also hopes to answer one empirical question, namely',, whether metalinguistic awareness can be conceptualised as either multidimensional or unitary in nature. The Subjects who participated in the study were 120 Moroccan Arabic speaking literate and illiterate children and adults drawn from a relatively homogeneous socio-economic background. A total of seven experiments -- some with subtasks -- were used. Six chapters make up the study. In Chapter 1 we have tried to provide an introduction to the theoretical issues which we think are of central importance to the topic under investigation. Because our approach is essentially psycholinguistic, Chapter 2 describes and discusses the methodology employed to gather the necessary data for the study. It is also concerned with the procedures used to evaluate these data. Chapters 3,4, and 5 form the main bulk of the research. Using various experiments, they examine the extent to which Ss deploy their metalinguistic knowledge in the process of attending to and manipulating the following linguistic units: (i) words (Chapter 3); (ii) syllables (Chapter 4); (iii) segments (Chapter 5). Typically, each one of these chapters considers various hypotheses and research questions which concern the specific linguistic unit. Finally, Chapter 6 draws general conclusions from the general study and addresses some implications for linguistic theory, psycholinguistic research and, although not extensively, education research

Beyond “An Apple A Day”: Advancing Education for Critical Food Literacy in Ontario’s School System

Food is in many ways a connective tissue of the human experience. Over the course of the last century, changes to both local and global food systems has “distanced” eaters from the sources and impacts of the food we eat and the political and ecological systems it is a part of. The agroindustrial food system has produced a wide range of crises, including impacts to the degradation of land, soil, species and water and climate, human health, culture, farmer livelihoods, food and agroecological knowledges, and citizenship. Many scholars have written about food and environmental crises as being reflections of a “crisis in education”. Numerous forms of food education, prolific in recent years, have emerged as a response to the idea that populations require more knowledge in order to “better” engage with the increasingly complex nature of food and food systems. Food education is understood as a conduit for increasing “food literacy”, which in turn is assumed to be part of the “solution” to problems caused by the industrial food system. However, expressions of food education ranging from corporate food marketing of ‘healthy’ and ‘ethical’ foods, public health campaigns which teach the individual to eat ‘better’, to notforprofit programming focused on food justice and active engagement carry disparate drivers and goals, shaped by the discourses most relevant to their locations. This has contributed to an international phenomenon where normative statements are made, largely in siloed environments (Martin, 2018), about what it means to be “food literate”. The discipline of social determinants of health has illuminated how people’s choices, behaviours, attitudes and pathways to positive health outcomes are constrained and shaped by structural and institutional factors which aren’t equitably distributed among human populations. It follows that food literacy frameworks should move beyond education which “treats” the individual, towards education which “treats” the very structural roots that make food literacy necessary. As food literacy becomes a more prominent feature of Ontario policy and subsequently shapes schoolbased learning, it’s important that we ask, What kind of food literacy do we want Ontario students to graduate with? The kind that reinforces existing crises?, Or, the kind that presents the possibility for change? The main goals of this paper are to build upon and contribute to the literature which engages with the intersection of food, environmental education, and critical literacy, to broaden popular conceptualizations of food literacy by bringing to the fore frameworks which address the root causes of food system dysfunction, to present possibilities for a food education practice that relocates the discursive space for determining “what counts as food literacy” (Kimura, 2010, p.466), and to consider how these things can respond to the increasing calls for food education to be advanced in Ontario schools. Drawing upon existing literature, education policy review, as well as qualitative data obtained through interviews with 12 people who work as teachers, formal and nonformal facilitators, and academic researchers from public schools, external organizations and universities, predominantly based in Ontario, this paper will explore the processes that would allow for critical food literacy to become an integral component of Ontario’s public education system. This goal of this paper is not to provide fixed solutions, but rather to help develop our collective understandings of what it means to nourish ourselves, our world, and each other

Coaches in the High School Classroom

Explores the choices and challenges faced by six literacy coaches working in Boston and Houston. Includes tools for assessment and analysis of coaching programs

Positioning adolescents in literacy teaching and learning

Secondary literacy instruction often happens to adolescents rather than with them. To disrupt this trend, we collaborated with 12th-grade “literacy mentors” to reimagine literacy teaching and learning with 10th-grade mentees in a public high school classroom. We used positioning theory as an analytic tool to (a) understand how mentors positioned themselves and how we positioned them and (b) examine the literacy practices that enabled and constrained the mentor position. We found that our positioning of mentors as collaborators was taken up in different and sometimes unexpected ways as a result of the multiple positions available to them and institutional-level factors that shaped what literacy practices were and were not negotiable. We argue that future collaborations with youth must account for the rights and duties of all members of a classroom community, including how those rights and duties intersect, merge, or come into conflict within and across practices.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Faculty Research Award from the School of Education at Boston University. (Faculty Research Award from the School of Education at Boston University)Accepted manuscrip

National literacy and numeracy framework and tests

"The recently published National Literacy Programme and the soon to be published National Numeracy Programme set out the actions the Welsh Government intends to implement to improve literacy and numeracy standards in Wales. The plans for a statutory national framework and for a system of national testing are integral to both programmes" - inside front cove