Ten tips for digital dieting

With all the focus on mobile phones and m-learning in teaching and learning, the capacity for materials to move through space and time has become a determinant of educational innovation. But a displacement culture follows such mobility. Students – at best - listen to a lecture and participate in a tutorial in real time. Do not assume that students will review the video at a later date from a learning management system. Studies show that they will not bother. Make information choices in real time and space. Become the master or mistress of those choices.

7. Increase thinking. Reduce cutting and pasting.

Note-taking is a lost art. The capacity to read the work of others, select important ideas, gather resonant quotations and create independent interpretations is being replaced by CTRL C and CTRL V. One of the reasons that plagiarism is increasing – or the folk devil of proliferating plagiarism is emerging in our universities – is that software enables easy copying. But simply because software permits an action does not mean it is the useful for scholarship. Information literacy is necessary to create interpretation and clarity from facts and ideology.

8. Email is evil. Control the beast.

You are not Doctor Who. You will not regenerate. For most working days, our constant companion is email. People, who would never dream of walking into our offices or classroom or posting a letter to us, feel completely at ease when sending an email. These are the people that insist on CC'ing half of New South Wales into their witty reply, which supposedly demonstrates their intelligence. It confirms the exact opposite.

Create strategies to manage email. Only answer emails for a designated period each day, rather than being shunted, burnt and cut by every micro-trauma. Scan all emails before opening them. Delete spam, jokes and Facebook notifications – indeed turn them off in the first place – and ignore messages between colleagues who are having a much publicised fight with CCs to the entire building. Then, handle each important email with efficiency, clarity and precision. Give yourself a time limit. Schedule email time like a class or a meeting.

9. The simple is not the best. Push. Develop. Transform.

Time is precious. We make choices each day. Should we flick around on Facebook, liking and commenting on our friends' updates, or read scholarship that is transformative? If the option is to read an original and provocative academic article located via Google Scholar, why would we settle for a generalized, anonymous entry on Wikipedia?

The answer to these questions is that it is easier to find and read simple material. Our vocabularies, world views and literacies are not challenged. As we move through the internet – and particularly social media – most writing is very basic. There are comments about food, shopping and celebrities. We are drawn to these topics because they do not challenge us. It is pleasant to live in a world where we are never unsettled by ignorance. To activate the old cliché – without the Donald Rumsfeld corrective – we do not know what we do not know. There are known knowns, but there are also unknown unknowns. Instead of thinking and reflecting, we comment, 'like' and retweet.

It is easy to blame 'the young people' and/or 'the internet' for the troubles in education. It is much harder to censure and condemn the politicians, managers and administrators who have slashed funding for libraries and librarians, reduced the number of teaching staff and provide only minimal support to students. Obviously, students will use Google if they do not know that Google Scholar exists. They will bounce around Facebook rather than discover new scholars on Academia.edu. They will watch a bloke trip in the snow via YouTube rather than seek out a lecture by Michel Foucault. Our goal as teachers is to move students from dependent to independent learners and thinkers.

10. Teach information literacy overtly, clearly and continually.

Ensure that the key course readings are international, current and model excellence for the students. Widen student vocabularies to improve their engagement with the Google interface. Encourage the use of Google Scholar and the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The problem is that accompanying the high quality publications and materials is a glut of nonsense. But the burgeoning trash that clings to the quality data would not be a concern if there was a commitment to information and media literacy throughout the managerial layers of higher education. Put another way, information obesity would not be a challenge if the principles and practices of digital dieting were followed.

Teachingcareers are like a country music song. We work hard. Then we die. Even our dog will not miss us. All that is left are the students we taught, the fine colleagues who accompanied us along the trail and a beeping email inbox that will not acknowledge that we have actually died. Search engines are not the end of the rainbow for human progress. Educators and students must gain sufficient media and information literacies to enable independent, conscious choices. Google is the start of an information journey. It is not the end.