Knowledge literacy: What it’s and why it issues

This text was contributed by Invoice Schmarzo, the Dean of Massive Knowledge

What do it is advisable to do to extend the information literacy of your group?

In a world the place your private information (and the preferences and biases buried in that information) are used to affect your behaviors, beliefs, and choices, information literacy is a elementary and indispensable talent. And it’s not simply companies that want this coaching. Knowledge Literacy must be taught in universities, in excessive colleges, in center colleges and even in grownup schooling and nursing properties.

Knowledge literacy coaching wants to teach EVERYONE about how their private information is being collected, analyzed, and used, in order to not be duped into actions, behaviors, and beliefs by organizations and individuals who perceive how one can manipulate your private information to their profit.

However what are the tutorial necessities that comprise an information literacy curriculum? To facilitate that information literacy schooling for my college students, I’ve created the Knowledge Literacy Schooling Framework that gives a holistic synopsis on the information and analytic coaching necessities – subject material areas – for everybody to turn into information literate.

Let’s discover every of the Knowledge Literacy Schooling Framework topic areas as a part of a two-part sequence on Knowledge Literacy. Then utilizing this framework, we are able to assemble an academic curriculum together with testing to measure and subsequently elevate the Knowledge Literacy IQ of everybody (which I’ll need to cowl in a future article…or perhaps a future ebook).

1.  Knowledge consciousness

In “The Rising Significance of Knowledge and AI Literacy – Half 1,” I mentioned the significance of information consciousness and the way everybody must turn into conscious of how organizations are gathering, analyzing, and utilizing their private information.

Knowledge Consciousness is knowing how organizations are capturing, analyzing, and utilizing your private information (e.g., demographic, industrial transactions, monetary holdings, well being and train, leisure, political, and social information) to establish and codify private behaviors and preferences that can be utilized to affect your actions, behaviors, and beliefs.

Whereas most of us intrinsically know that organizations are capturing information about us, it’s the “invisible information” (or “obscured information”) that’s buried within the superb print of that web site or cell app Finish-Person Licensing Settlement that’s most troubling.

A working example is Google, which exploits or “monetizes” your information within the following methods:

• Google Adverts.  Permits companies to focus on their merchandise on-line based mostly upon your private exercise and pursuits. Google makes use of AI to create a profile of the shoppers’ behaviors and leverage the insights to focus on the correct particular person with the correct advert.
• Gmail. Google additionally built-in a number of AI and ML algorithms to boost buyer expertise. One AI function is the good reply. Google AI analyzes all the Gmail and proposes a reply.
• Google Assistant. Based mostly upon your requests, this voice assistant can be taught your pursuits to seek for something – music playlists, eating places, finest seashores, or lodges – and make product and repair suggestions based mostly upon your pursuits.
• Google Maps. Google Maps makes use of AI to trace the motive force’s route, estimate the place they’re headed and guides them to their vacation spot. It presents suggestions based mostly upon close by eating places, gasoline stations, and so on. based mostly upon your pursuits.
• Google Images. Google makes use of AI mines your photographs to recommend photos and movies that the customers can share with their associates and households.

Many organizations, like Google, present “worth” in return on your private information resembling free e-mail, free social media platforms, customized net experiences, free on-line video games, free navigational companies, and product and repair reductions (within the case of loyalty applications). It’s simply that customers must be conscious that there’s a “value” for these “free” companies, even when the value isn’t as apparent as a month-to-month subscription payment.

What are you able to do to guard your self? This information literacy framework might help you discover the reply. Step one is an consciousness of the place and the way organizations are capturing and exploiting your private information for their very own monetization functions. Concentrate on what information you might be sharing by way of the apps in your cellphone, the shopper loyalty applications to which you belong, and your engagement information on web sites and social media.  However even then, there might be questionable organizations that may skirt the privateness legal guidelines to seize extra of your private information for their very own nefarious acts (spam, phishing, identification theft, ransomware, and extra).

2. Resolution literacy

Whether or not we comprehend it or not, everybody creates a “mannequin” to information their choices. In my weblog “Making Knowledgeable Choices in Imperfect Conditions“, I mentioned how people naturally create resolution fashions to assist their choices, whether or not it’s choices about deciding what path to take dwelling from work, what to select up on the grocery retailer, or how one can pitch to an influence baseball hitter like Mike Trout. And the great nature of the choice mannequin relies upon upon the significance of the choice and the prices related to making a flawed resolution.

• With a excessive influence resolution resembling shopping for a home, shopping for a automobile, or deciding the place to go on trip, we construct pretty intensive fashions by gathering and assessing all kinds of knowledge with the intention to help in making an “optimum” resolution.
• Different resolution fashions are much less impactful, so we use “guidelines of thumbs” or heuristic resolution fashions to assist choices resembling altering the oil in your automobile each 3,000 miles, seeing a dentist each 6 months, or altering your underwear no less than as soon as every week.

Resolution Literacy is an consciousness of how people make resolution fashions – some very complete and others utilizing “guidelines of thumb” relying upon the price of the choice being flawed – to assist us make extra knowledgeable, extra correct, extra worthwhile, and safer choices.

When making choices, how one frames the choice is all the things. In the event you come into this course of along with your thoughts already made up (i.e., to show or validate a call that you’ve got already made), then you’ll gravitate in direction of information that helps your place and fabricate causes to disregard the information that runs counter to your place.  When you’ve got a vested curiosity in a sure resolution end result, then your objectivity is threatened, and the outcomes of your evaluation are more likely to be biased.

Additionally, the human mind is a poor decision-making instrument.  Human decision-making advanced from hundreds of thousands of years of survival on the savanna.  People turned superb at sample recognition and extrapolation:  from “That appears only a innocent log behind that patch of grass,” to “Yum, that appears like an antelope!” to “YIKES, that’s really a saber-toothed tiger!!”  Necessity dictated that we turn into superb at recognizing patterns and making fast, instinctive survival choices based mostly upon these patterns.  

To make issues worse, people are awful quantity crunchers (guess we didn’t have to crunch many numbers to identify that saber-toothed tiger). Consequently, people have realized to depend upon heuristics, intestine really feel, guidelines of thumb, anecdotal data, and instinct as our resolution fashions. However these resolution fashions are inherently flawed and fail us in a world of very giant, extensively diverse, high-velocity information sources.  

One solely wants to go to Las Vegas to see our human decision-making flaws at work. Yea, casinos don’t construct these magnificent monuments to human stupidity as a result of they offer away cash.