Social Media and Learning in Europe

Here's an interesting paper (warning, pdf) on the role of social media in Europe in terms of learning.  Lots of useful stats, neato maps, and fascinating factoids about the Internet in general and social media in particular (scroll down to page 6 for social media stuff, if that's your thing).  The focus is mostly on formal education and the role the Net will play.

Learning Online

Short piece in today's NYTimes suggests that learning online may be superior to face-to-face instruction. Obviously there are a lot of methodological and self-selection issues in play here, yet an interesting if brief article. The actual report, if you feel brave enough to take on 93 pages of pdf, can be found here. It's a meta-analysis, meaning statistical tests from 46 studies (out of a thousand studies on this topic). It's a powerful tool. You have to wade through the methods section to see the criteria for studies to be included, but basically they find -- within the studies that meet their criteria -- that web-based studies work better than face-to-face in K-12 learning. BUT ... the authors caution the small number of studies that meet their criteria makes it difficult to generalize to the K-12 population as a whole. Though important, this kinda gets lost.

Education and Political Knowledge

A study in the latest Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media points out how important education is in understanding how different media help people learn about politics and public affairs. The study by Grabe, Kamhawi and Yegiyan examines how medium (TV, newspaper, web) interacts with education to predict different levels of learning.

No surprise, if you're immersed in this literature, that they found participants with greater education got more out of the print versions and those of lower education got more out of the TV version. Oddly they didn't hypothesize this, despite a recent consensus among scholars that TV best serves those who know little (or have less cognitive ability -- measured badly by education). That's a quibble about what otherwise is a pretty damn good study, especially in the part where they examined effects over time, something you don't often see.

The study is framed in the knowledge gap hypothesis and the tongue twisting LC3MP, which I first thought was a character from Star Wars but instead is Limited Capacity Model of Mediated Message Processing. Not sure what the hell the 3 is all about, but the model is basically a fancy mass comm restating of a history of social cognitive work on how much, or how little, we can process at one time.

So what's it all mean? First, education is just a surrogate for cognitive ability, and not a particularly good one. Indeed one study found an interviewer's estimation of a respondent's cognitive ability to be a better predictor of how well respondents did in a survey than their level of education. So education is a blunt instrument, but it does suggest the importance of TV news for those who don't know much, or spend a great deal following, public affairs. It helps close the gap that would otherwise exist if only print news existed. And it shows how important print is for those with greater cognitive ability, those who want more depth and context and actual news.

Education has always been a powerful predictor of what people know about public affairs. A study I missed somehow from a couple of years ago probes this relation ship and find some interesting stuff. As the authors note:

Our analysis has shown that the relationship between education and knowledge varies along with changes in the information environment. Increases in newspaper coverage primarily benefit the highly educated, thereby reinforcing the relationship between education and knowledge. By contrast, increases in the volume of television coverage benefit the least educated, in absolute terms, almost as much as the most educated.

We've known this from other studies, that TV helps most those who know little about politics and public affairs. But the above study, from a 2006 issue of American Journal of Political Science (volume 50, 266-282), goes into great detail, the kind that suggests we may now have a growing information underclass.

How do we fix this? How about providing more information? Nope. The authors write:

Simply providing more information is likely to reinforce the knowledge gap that exists between people with low and high levels of education.

In other words, no help there. The less educated -- those who have little motivation to keep up with public affairs or little ability to do so -- gravitate toward the spoonful of sugar of TV news, if they consume any news at all. Many use TV as a means of escaping any news content, thanks to hundreds of channels available via cable and satellite. And any TV news they do get, especially the crap on local tv news, won't do them much good when it comes to having a clue about politics and public affairs.

Cable news, CNN and Fox and all the rest, aren't much better. As newspapers die, I'm afraid for many, so will political knowledge.

Political Knowledge, in History

Only tyrants, and the friends of arbitrary power, have ever taken umbrage at a turn for political knowledge, and political discourse, among even the lowest of people.

Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education
by Joseph Priestley, 1778.

You gotta love Google, which can hunt old books for key terms, saving guys like me hours of countless time in the stacks hunting for old quotes to use in a blog. It's a great line because it works even today, over 200 years later. On the one hand, scholars and pundits will plead the case of "the lowest of people" while on the other hand criticize them for a lack of adequate political knowledge. It's an interesting problem. People of less education, working to get through the day, have other things to do than keep up with public affairs. They have little motivation, little ability, and quite frankly little reason to bother.

Education is the single most powerful predictor of what people know, though some have argued it's a lousy surrogate for cognitive ability and motivation. The greater your education, the more likely you have a stake in what's happening, the means to keep up with the news, and the ability to do so. Education works, though imperfectly. That's why tyrants often look at the educated classes, or educators, with suspicion.

Fortunately, "tyrant" doesn't really apply to western democracies, despite what the crazy talk radio people might suggest. And while everyone positions themselves as looking out for the little guy, the "lowest of people," the way some information and news today is served up, heavily laden with partisanship, the "little guy" has a hard time actually voting in a way that helps him or her.

Knowing Specialized Stuff

I am going to do a flip here and talk briefly not about about what people in general know, but rather what people who do specialized jobs need to know.

Being a journalism guy, obviously I'll talk about reporters, mainly due to a report out today on education reporting. Here's the lede:

Reporters who cover education believe overwhelmingly that the beat requires specialized knowledge. Yet 39 percent of education reporters surveyed in February 2008 by the Hechinger Institute say they've received no such training, and just 6 percent report to an editor whose sole responsibility is supervising education coverage.

This is an old story in journalism -- assign someone a beat but provide them no special training. "You'll pick it up as you go," some grizzled editor says. "It's not brain surgery."

Only, sometimes, it is.

In the real world, companies train their people. Not journalism. Sure, a lucky few visit Poynter or the American Press Institute. Damn few. But it is vital we keep those country club memberships available for publishers, who have more or less led newspapers to their doom.

What people know is sometimes how to do their job, the little details. Psychologists often call this sophistication, as in picking up on nuances and using a base of knowledge to recognize and learn new facts. Journalism is gutting itself to remain profitable. The ultimate losers? People who care about the world, because what journalists know about what they cover will become more and more threatened in a world that becomes more and more complicated.