Welcome to Literacies, a four-part audio series where we talk to experts about why media, data, information, and financial literacies are critical skill sets for modern life. Each installment will be a fast-paced and engaging dive into what it means, how it impacts you, and things you can do to skill up.
Ep. 1, Media LiteracyAir Date: October 22, 2024, 12 noon CST
In this episode, Katherine Hicks takes over as guest host while the series' regular host, lisa Hooper, participates in the conversation with Dr. Muira McCammon. According to The National Association for Media Literacy Education, Media Literacy is the "ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication (Media Literacy Defined)." In our conversation, we hone in specifically on the theme of Analyze. In fact, this episode's launch on Tuesday, October 22, 2024, is timed to coincide with the daily theme of Analyze during International Media Literacy Week. See what else is going at Tulane during Media Literacy Week on our event webpage.
Literacies, a 4-part Audio Series
Episode 1: Media Literacy
Aired 10/22/2024
[musical introduction]
Katherine Hicks: You're listening to literacies, conversations about literacies that can change your life. In this four-part series, we're talking to experts about why media, data, information, and financial literacies are critical skill sets for modern life.
We'll give you a quick dive into what it means, how it impacts you, and things that you can do to skill up. This episode is all about media literacy. To talk about media literacy, I'm joined by two guests, Dr Muira McCammon and librarian Lisa Hooper.
Muira McCammon: My name is Muira McCammon, and I am a professor of platform studies at Tulane’s Department of Communication. I also hold a courtesy appointment with the Law School here, and I teach classes that relate to emerging technology and internet law. My… the research that I do is primarily on how government agencies and democratic institutions in general have attempted, and often failed to rely on corporate social media platforms to communicate with public.
Lisa Hooper: All right, and I'm Lisa Hooper. I'm head of Media Services here at Tulane University Libraries. And so in that role, it starts out as buying film for faculty and students to use in their teaching, learning, and research. And so I have seen it transition, or have been part of the transition from DVDs, which used to be super easy to get and provide access to within the library framework and academic framework, to streaming film, which is a really interesting, increasingly complex task, and that is my entry into media. And I think we're going to talk a little bit later about platform power and how streaming film impacts how we can interact with it in very weird ways.
Katherine: So the National Association of Media Literacy Education defines media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act. This is obviously a very broad definition that encompasses many things.
Dr. McCammon, your research focuses on internet law and digital culture. Can you talk about what that means in relation to media literacy?
Muira: Sure, you know, part of what I do as an educator at Tulane is to try to think through different types of data that users of platforms create when they log on to places like Instagram, WhatsApp, and so part of what I do in my class is trying to figure out how to talk about that data and also how to go looking for it online. And I'm also thinking about data through the lens of public records requests, it's still possible to use something called the US Freedom of Information Act and public records requests more broadly to understand how public institutions, government agencies, how are those agencies relying on platforms to get the word out about what they do.
Lisa: I sort of heard you say the word data and access to data and access to information thinking about access to streaming film. And our streaming film platforms both academic, but especially the commercial ones. So, Netflix are the ones that comes to everybody's mind, but we also have Hulu and Disney Plus and Amazon Prime and a host of others, right? And so thinking about how those platforms use data, the data they collect, what they the data they have access to, compared the data us as users have access to, and we have these, this huge data asymmetry going on there that all influences what we can do, how we can control our own access to what we see and how we interact with it.
So when, when I'm thinking about data asymmetry and the streaming film platforms, so when we think about when we log in and we create those initial profiles, they are gathering information, which to us, we tend to give away really easily, like, this is me, this is my name, this is where I live, these are my topical interests. But then again, every time you click on a film description, they are gathering data. And then, if you watch it, how long did you watch that film? And so as you watch more and more films, and as you click through all of that data is being gathered and scooped up by these big platforms, and then it's being used to try and get a sense of how is this person feeling today. And based on what we think this person is feeling today, we are going to feed them, or sort of surface, films and content that we've tagged as meeting that feeling. And so that sort of means they know a lot about us, we know very little about them. We have little to no control over our data, and they are making decisions for us about what we want to see, and in that manner, controlling what we can even see.
Muira: Yeah, and I think that it's important to remember, even though platforms maintain and exert a lot of power over our daily lives, they evolve and they change and they can be I think it's important to think of them as dynamic.
Researchers are doing a lot of really meaningful work to think about internet history, essentially how platforms have evolved over time. And you know, there's an effort even, for example, to keep track of how terms of service agreements on some of the platforms you mentioned have evolved. One case study that I bring up a lot in my own class: there was a person who had subscribed to Disney Plus and Disney used the fact that this gentleman had agreed to their Disney Plus terms of service as a sort of a legal tactic to try to basically exert their power, not just online, but offline.
And so when we're talking about platform power, I think it's important to remember that we are also at a time of turbulence, experimentation, where platform companies (not just Disney Plus) are trying to figure out what they can squeeze into a terms of service agreement. And we as users have to be particularly proactive, it's no longer just about reading the fine print, right? It's also about making sure that the fine print doesn't change, you know, in the in the darkness of the night, in the middle of a update.
So, part of what I think a lot about in my own research is what methods can we – we as users, we as students of the internet – what methods can we use to keep track of platform companies and the different business decisions that they are making along the way?
There is a really wonderful cohort of researchers in communication studies, who have essentially committed themselves to analyzing platform governance and how it changes over time, basically, how do the rules and regulations that you know, Tiktok and Twitter and other companies that they're creating, how does that change the potential of what we can do online.
And you know, to get back to your point, Lisa, you know, I'm also thinking about the fact that platforms are also reckoning with what types of relationships can make them money, a thing so simple as password sharing, for example, might be an ingrained part of Tulane students' daily lives, but is something that many platforms are considering coming down on users for because when you share passwords, you make it harder for streaming companies to make money off of subscriptions, right?
Lisa: And that was really in the news, especially with Netflix. When they came down hard on password sharing, they made it much harder, and not shockingly, once they made it much harder to share passwords, their subscriptions skyrocketed. They never want to plateau in earnings, there's always this expectation of increased earnings, which means they either need to continually get new subscriptions or really push in different ways for content creation. But you also mentioned that they are increasingly looking to exert influence and power outside of the platform. We have platforms like Netflix where they're like, ‘Okay, we are sort of reaching peak subscribers, let's also start creating content and do it in a way that is really industry disruptive, because that is where how we're going to get yet more subscribers.’ And they've done a really good job with that. So, anybody you have a conversation with about Netflix are like, ‘Oh, so you're about to talk about House of Cards,’ so yes, House of Cards. When you look at the history of House of Cards and its development, it was intentionally disruptive. They were like, ‘Nope, we're going to release the whole season all at once, and we want people to stay home from work and sit down and watch the whole thing, episode one to the last episode of the season.’ So they, that is where binge watching really took root. It was sort of kind of there they saw it in their data and they're like, ‘Okay, let's make binge watching a thing.’ And by in their design of House of Cards and really leaning into the binge watching, they not only changed like the whole release schedule for normal television series, right? That's also completely upended marketing, the marketing industry for TV, it has dramatically shifted how television narrative is written. So it's really interesting how just that one company not only controls a lot of data about us, but it also, frankly, effected a massive shift in multiple industries as well.
Muira: And I think it's important to remember that platforms business models are often in motion and in flux, right, not just because of concerns from shareholders, but because the technology itself is sometimes not built to live for forever, right? And so something that comes to mind in thinking about kind of the political economy of platforms, is that many corners of the internet that were initially thought to be places of unmoderated expression (I'm thinking about Reddit, for example) you know, there have historically been questions about, well, how can a place like Reddit make money, right? And I think one of the things that was interesting to me as someone who researches this space was Reddit's decision to partner with Open AI, right? And effectively sell a lot of that data to another company whose, you know, reputation and commitment to copyright might be somewhat in question, right? And so that, for me, is also an example of how even the agreements that we make with platforms in a given moment can change, and we can be forced to change with them if we wish to remain connected.
But, you know, part of what I'm trying to inspire students to do at Tulane is to remember that even in the face of platforms, they too, wield considerable power. It is important to remember that the kind of platform-centered moment that we are having in civil society is not necessarily one we have to accept in the future. Part of what I try to do as a researcher and educator is, is asking the question of one, what are platforms like Tiktok doing with the data that we give them? And also, what are platforms doing for or against democracy?
And so one thing that Tulane students can do is try to be comparative, right, in their everyday technological practices, and not accept one platform's rules as something they have to opt into for the rest of their lives.
And I think another thing that I try to remind students of too, is that platforms in general, I would say, want their users to think of them as invincible.
Katherine: I think it's so interesting to see this generation that is now maybe going through the first Great Migration off of Twitter and onto a new platform. It's so interesting seeing this as a millennial who started on MySpace and then had the great migration onto Facebook and then the Great Migration onto Instagram, that these things that you were talking about Muira, about the ephemerality of certain platforms and how these things are not permanent. It's maybe easier for people of a slightly older generation to recognize that, you know, the modes of communication on places like Tiktok - it's very right now, but it's not going to be for very much longer.
Lisa: sure. So it's like, you're right. It's totally ephemeral. And from where I stand, it's deeply impacting our information consumption practices, and it's deeply influencing the design and shape of that information and the depth of that information.
And I love that that, that you're talking a lot about teaching modes of regaining agency and modes of disruption, and in my, every once in a while, I sort of dig into my computer to look up this resource. I'm very much of the first step is awareness for me. There's so much that happens that we're just not aware because it's so, like you were saying, it's almost invisible, right? So, this is making me think of we have all these fabulous resources.
Lisa: Which brings us to what the sort of resource sharing, which is, are there things that you would recommend in particular that students read or listen to or look at in order to increase their awareness of media literacy and all these things?
Muira: Yeah. You know, I was thinking about just how overwhelming it can be to keep up with tech news writ large, and so sometimes just even subscribing to a single newsletter, a single round-up, can make the granularities of our everyday technological landscape clearer and less scary. You know, I try to tune into Wired regularly.
Lisa: Wired is so good.
Muira: Wired is really wonderful. But I also just want to give a shout out for like the op eds and tech coverage in Teen Vogue. I think that their politics and tech editors really, are really intentional about what they're publishing.
There's so much to read out there. I'm a big fan too, of MIT Press and all that they're publishing, not just around platforms, but also the history of technology.
So, I assign Hidden Systems in most of my classes because it's such an easy read, but it unearths kind of the complexity of our everyday socio-technical lives.
Lisa: There’s this fabulous anime, it's a bit old by now, but it's still really great. It's called Psycho Pass. Oh, it's so good. It's very, very good anime. It should really have a warning, the very first opening scenes of the very first episode are extremely violent. That level of violence does not recur in my memory throughout the rest of it. So people who do not like to see violent murders in a public place, maybe skip the first episode, even though it is important for setting the scene. There is government data collecting everybody's moods, and then, how are they feeling? How “stable” are they again, using air quotes, and then interventions that they try to do to maintain a balanced society. It's really interesting, but that was my first like, oh, data, personal data. How is it being used? And it's just a great show to watch.
But just for listening things I, and more contemporary things, Media Matters is one that I really enjoy. I don't always agree with them, but you don't have to agree with everybody to be able to listen to it and learn from it, right? So that's such a really great podcast series. I really enjoy listening to them and learning from them.
My sort of more academic entry into the concept of platform power and media literacy, in that sense, is a book. It was written, we have the e-book in the library, it was by two people, Nielsen and Ganter. It's called Platform Power: Shaping Media and Society. And that, again, gets into how these platforms can influence society and culture, which is sort of a big thing.
And then I do there are two authors, and, well, actually three authors that I think really are important for people to read at least a little bit of. So there is a book. It's a bit old. When I was published in 2016 called the Netflix Effect. You can find it, but in that book, it's a collection of contributed chapters. One of the authors is Sarah Arnold, “Netflix and the Myth of Choice: Participation in Autonomy,” and then the other one, the other author in that book is Neta Alexander, and she wrote a chapter called “Catered to Your Future Self: Netflix, Predictive Personalization and the Mathematization of Taste.” If you're like me and do not like math, don't worry, it's still totally accessible for us non-math people.
And then, as you were thinking, I'm like, Oh, wait, but there's also this book, and then there's also this thing. So I'm just gonna do three more like things that I think people should… Another book by Tara Fickell, this one is more recent, is called the Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities, and that, again, looks at how data and demographics play into the shape of everything, of these things that we interact with on the daily. It's a really good book to look at.
Thinking of that book reminded me, naturally, of Dr. Jacque Howard. She is in the Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science, which by itself is a really great organization to start following and seeing what events they're offering. But Dr. Howard offers a TIDE class, it's TIDE-1485. She's teaching it this semester, and that class is called Surveillance, Data, and Society, and Dr. Howard does really interesting stuff with that class.
Katherine: I don't know I would my recommendations would be to go analog, to just spend a week going analog. Make a zine, talk to your neighbor, talk to an elder millennial about MySpace.
Muira: Is the library, Is the library offering any workshops on zines this semester? Is that something…
Katherine: we are.
[some cross -talk]
Lisa: yeah, well, I'm looking at you, Katherine.
Katherine: because I'm doing it. Lisa is doing a whole week of workshops on media literacy in October.
Lisa: yeah, which is actually also the very same week when this episode airs!
Katherine: Yeah. We're going to be talking about creating zine versions of your research as a sort of radical way of resisting these platforms by doing things analog. We're going to be physically making zines out of materials that are provided by the library. So it's going to be a lot of fun talking about radical politics, but then also physically making and community building. So it should be a lot of fun.
Muira: That’s great.
Lisa: I have no doubt that it's gonna be fun. So, the workshops and events for media literacy week again are in October. All of the library's workshops are available on the Library's website, under workshops and events.
Katherine: Thank you to our guests, Dr. Muira McCammon and Lisa Hooper, librarian at Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.
Muira: Thank you.
Lisa: Thank you, Katherine.
[background music begins]
Lisa: All right friends, you’ve been listening to Literacies, a 4-part audio series. What you just heard was a shorter excerpt from a much longer conversation.
To listen to the whole conversation, read the transcript, learn more about today’s guests, or check out any of the resources mentioned just now, visit our website libguides.Tulane.edu/literacies
This episode was recorded in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library using equipment available for anyone in the Tulane community to check out from Media Services in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.
Don’t miss our next episode, where we’ll be talking with Dr. Victoria Elmwood and Professor David Rodriguez about Information Literacy. The next episode will drop at noon on November 4th. To be sure you don’t miss it, follow Tulane University Libraries’ YouTube channel and Instagram.
Our host for this episode of Literacies was Katherine Hicks, our audio engineer and audio producer is Justin Green, and Alan Velasquez is our video producer.
Wired - an online magazine for staying up to date on the latest tech in our lives news
Hidden Systems : Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day by Dan Nott (Penguin Press, 2023)
Psycho Pass (Funimation, 2012)
On the Media (WNYC Studios). Note, what i said was Media Matters but what I was thinking of is actually called On the Media.
The Power of Platforms: Shaping Media and Society by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and Sarah Anne Ganter (Oxford University Press, 2022)
The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century edited by Kevin McDonald and Daniel Smith-Rowsey (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities by Tara FIckle (New York University Press, 2019)
The Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science (CAIDS)
Dr. Muira McCammon is a professor in Tulane’s Department of Communication, where she researches government speech, digital culture, and the politics of media technologies.
She is an organizational, institutional, and socio-legal scholar, who studies how government data, information, and communication flow through corporate social media platforms. Her present research draws on archival data, digital ethnography, and other qualitative methods to understand, document, and reimagine government communication practices. In her work, she is committed to thinking through the power of absence, ephemerality, and ignorance in civil society.
Katherine Hicks is a Scholarly Engagement Librarian at the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library and serves as the subject liaison for Communication, Art, Architecture, and Philosophy. She graduated from Pratt Institute in New York with an MS in Library Science and an MA in History of Art and Design. Her master's thesis explored taxonomies for video game visual style, exploring the history of animation and illustration as well as the different technologies used to create and render graphics. She previously worked in Pratt's special collections department acquiring, cataloging, and maintaining films, artists books, and zines. She also holds a BA in History with a concentration in Public History from Hood College in Frederick, MD. In her spare time, she likes to talk about Star Wars and read fantasy novels.
Ep. 2, Information LiteracyAir Date: November 4, 2024
In this episode, Dr. Victoria Elmwood and Professor Dave Rodriguez deep dive into the importance and intricacies of being an information literate person in today's technology-rich environment. The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) describes Information Literacy as "the set of integrated abilities encompassing the reflective discovery of information, the understanding of how information is produced and valued, and the use of information in creating new knowledge and participating ethically in communities of learning (Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education)." This core concept guides much of the work that Dr. Elmwood and Professor Rodriguez engage in their work with students and throughout this conversation.
Literacies, a 4-Part Audio Series
Episode 2: Information Literacy
Aired 11/8/2024
[musical introduction]
Lisa Hooper: You're listening to literacies, conversations about literacy that can change your life. In this four-part series, we're talking to experts about why media, data, information, and financial literacies are critical skill sets for modern life. We'll give you a quick dive into what it means, how it impacts you, and things you can do to skill up.
This episode is all about information literacy. To talk about information literacy, I'm joined by two guests, Victoria Elmwood and David Rodriguez.
Victoria Elmwood: All right hi, I'm Victoria Elwood. I'm the Scholarly Engagement Librarian for the Humanities here.
David Rodriguez: Hi, I'm Professor David Rodriguez. I'm a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English, who typically teaches English 1010, our freshman composition course here at Tulane.
Lisa: Okay, thank y’all for being here today. And let's just jump in with our very first question. What is information literacy?
Victoria: I think probably the easiest way to explain it quickly is to say that information literacy is the ability to find, evaluate, and use information, right? And so it really is all about the whole gamut of the process of not only knowing when you need information, but going all the way to the back end of using information, recording how you've used something, and even saving information. So it spans kind of a big spectrum, but each action has its own sort of challenges that come with it.
So I think the find part of information literacy, I think, has gotten a lot easier because Google. You know, I think digitization and the internet has made it a lot easier to find things. But the problem with that is that there are so many more things to find now.
That kind of leads us to the next problem of evaluating information. And I think this is probably one of the things that we spend the most time on, is trying to teach students what's good information, what's not so great information, and what's really bad information.
And then using information, I think, sort of grows out of the evaluation piece, but it also asks the user to think about what their information needs are.
David: As expected, Dr. Elmwood has hit the nail on the head. So what I can offer here is on that issue of using and finding and evaluating sources where do students typically struggle with. Even if you funnel students' requirements down to a library database source, as Victoria said, one of the principal focuses they might have is just hitting a number of sources that they gotta meet for the assignment. And so you try and fight against that as a teacher by emphasizing pre-research, learning about the scholarship and the conversation, importantly, the conversation around the topic, and then finding your way into that conversation on the basis of kind of a cursory knowledge at the very least of what you're writing about.
So long story short, we really have to kind of start from the beginning – what is information literacy? How is it enacted? And then how can you purposefully and meaningfully and usefully and valuably instill all of those skills into the actual output you’re doing as a student? It's very difficult. It's a tough ask when somebody is also adjusting to all of the other new experiences of college.
Victoria: I also love that Dave picks up on the idea of growth and change because I think it takes students a little bit longer to realize that it's okay that as you learn more information about your topic, your ideas should change, right? Like what you think you're going to say at the beginning of a paper should change by the time you get to the point where you're drafting it because that's the point of looking for information is becoming more informed about whatever question or topic you're most interested in.
Lisa: If you wanted to expand beyond just the research paper, what would you say is the reason why information literacy is important for students?
Dave: I don't think it's alarmist to say that we need information at all times in order to act responsibly, but above that level of things, to live an educated life dedicated to lifelong learning, to set appropriate goals for yourself, to understand what opportunities are available and how to responsibly pursue those things.
Those things are tied to information literacy and then above all else, the truth is tied to information literacy. So understanding what is actually happening amidst complex data sets in the world around you which are constantly evolving, downflows to all the things, happiness and living a balanced life and so on and so forth, but also has to do with the health of the nation, your ability to vote for someone knowing what they've actually done and not just what they said and what they stand for, not just what they tell you, they stand for is likewise tied to information literacy.
So it's a daily practice skill that requires active engagement with the world around you and that is a very big ask for an 18-year-old coming into college for the first time, but it is the truth of life unless the internet goes away and life fundamentally shifts, but we don't expect that to happen.
Lisa: Victoria, what would you say?
Victoria: I guess, you know, why should we care, you know, picking up on what Dave was saying about being able to check facts. When we go to a website, sometimes it's hard even for trained professionals to necessarily know exactly what it is they're looking at and so a lot of times you run into folks who are reading an opinion piece as though it's factual. Being able to teach people to distinguish between those two things is really important because you run into so many different types of documents or graphics online, it really is important to know how you as a reader should be using this, should be taking this.
And you know, I think also understanding the source of information and also understanding that there are people out there with agendas. Everyone has bias, right, that's just a fact of life, that's a fact of having a brain and living in this world, but I think being able to distinguish between bias and agenda and that might be behind a piece, I think that is a particularly useful thing to worry about.
And then again, to go back, you know, to why we care. An example I use sometimes is grain-free dog food, is grain-free dog food actually good for dogs or does it cause problems, have we seen some kind of, you know, cases that are cropping up and so again, that's where having information literacy skills, maybe that you build in an academic context, is great because you can bring them back to a personal context because again, the stakes are really high when we get to personal context a lot in ways that are maybe less immediate to us in an academic context.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah, it's very true. How should students skill up to learn these things, to learn the skill? Besides taking English 1010, in addition to taking English 1010.
David: That's a great start with Professor Rodriguez, or whoever, we have wonderful faculty. [laughing] It's a difficult question to answer, part of the frustration is that this is a life skill and it takes a lot of practice and that practice has to be engaged probably every single day for all the reasons we just laid out because life situations on a daily basis depend on your information literacy.
It starts with becoming aware of what information literacy is and then it probably moves into what's a basic process, what are a set of questions by which you can ask: who is writing this source, what are not only their biases but also their agendas, as Dr. Elmwood pointed out, what is the purpose, in other words, of this thing being there, how much do I know about this subject, how much don't I know about this subject and therefore, how might I reasonably fact check this thing before using it for whatever that intended purpose is and by the time you weed whack your way through all of that, you don't end up with ‘so here's the one website you go to’, it's entirely context dependent, what am I trying to do, where am I getting the information from and what are the responsible steps I might take to deal with that.
But beyond that, you've got to practice and so there are websites you can go to where you can practice. Sometimes in 1010 we look at a website called Spot the Troll where it gives you a bunch of different social media profiles and says is this a bot or not. And there is an overconfidence problem in the classroom early on and there is an under-confidence problem in the class by the end of it all because it's difficult but you do learn through just checking yourself on your own overconfidence. You do learn, so what am I supposed to be paying attention to.
The connection that can be drawn between information literacy and a lifespan and, by the way, at Tulane our mission statement ties the idea of research to living a life of integrity. The connection that can be drawn from one to the other is that you can end up in a state of confusion, exhaustion, rage, whatever else might come out of that because you lack a skill set that's necessary to life in the 21st century and it's about patience probably more than anything else, just slow down, don't immediately type a reaction, don't be provoked by the things that exist to provoke you. It's a daily practice of active engagement rather than a passive acceptance of just the information that is applied to you.
Victoria: I want to kind of pick up on what Dave was saying about the emotionality. The emotionality of research and taking in information is something we don't think about a lot because we think of information as a very dispassionate thing, as something that's not necessarily something that we can get up in arms about, but I think being able to reserve judgment, being able to restrain your impulse to click.
I think another thing that's difficult is not only are our emotions being played on, but we're being distracted in a lot of ways. I don't know if anyone has noticed their attention span changing or felt like their attention span has been changing.
Another thing that's sort of a problem in a world where we feel like we can find out anything we want to know. And so, not that it’s a bad thing to do that, but being able to practice a little self-restraint, have sort of a little bit of control over your emotions and think, okay, I need to find out more about this before I get enraged about what sounds like something outrageous.
Sam Wineburg is my guy. He recommends (and he's not the only one who recommends this), but he really recommends the process of lateral reading. What that means is when you are looking at something that you need to evaluate, you don’t necessarily look closely at that thing. He wants people to leave that website and open tabs and go to other websites and see what research they can do to find out the identity of that organization. And so, that process of lateral reading asks the user to go outside the document itself, outside the site itself, and see what the rest of the world has to say about a certain organization.
I really like that idea of lateral reading because it's a quick thing you can do. If you look at your Google results, you'll see a little, I think it's like three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner of every result. Click on that because that will actually do the Googling for you. It shows you information, takes you to information about that particular site.
Lisa: I just learned something. [crosstalk] I never looked at it.
Victoria: I know.
Lisa: I'm going to look for that now.
Victoria: For years I ignored that. So yeah, yeah, try it out.
Lisa: That's very cool. Okay, so we have Sam Wineburg, we have Spot the Troll [unclear], which I am absolutely going to go and look for next, we have taking English 1010s class, which is required, but a lot of students place out of English 1010, so they might not get, like, a structured hour in the library with a librarian. Are there other things that students can do, so they could go and read Sam Wineburg, look at those websites. Like, podcasts, workshops, things that they can do to learn these skills? A little bit more hands-on?
David: well, any Tulane student has access to LibGuides, which are robust and tackle these kinds of issues. There is something called the C.R.A.P. Test, which I didn't name. It stands for C-R-A-P, Credibility, Reliability, Authority, and the Purpose of the Document, which is zingy because it's got an acronym and it walks you through the process there. It has, as all things do, some pros and cons. It can read as a kind of binary set of questions where you ask, is it current enough? Well, that seems like yes or no question. In fact, the answer might be far more complex than that, current for this topic, given what you're trying to do with it. And so you've got to be on guard about oversimplifying something when you desperately want to oversimplify something because it makes it convenient and quicker when, in fact, working through these kinds of questions is difficult and is a burden and is a bummer, but is necessary to lead a responsible life. Other ideas, Victoria?
Victoria: I mean, kind of the old-fashioned…, kind of the old-fashioned answer to that question is, look at Snopes or look at ProCon or, I mean there, and again, I think it's a lot to ask people to run up. It's a lot to ask Snopes to do. This is a non-profit organization. It's not their job to seek out every falsehood on the internet and expose it. But it's a good place to start.
Lisa: Well, I would say, well, since you are not explicitly saying it, I am going to promote the workshops. Victoria does fabulous workshops, right, as do many of our colleagues here at Tulane University Libraries. And also for students who have managed to test out of English 1010 so you don't get that one-on-one Library experience, we have librarians that we actually do like talking to students, so you can reach out to any one of us and do like a one-on-one, I call them consultations, because I think it sounds fancy, research consultations, and we could go over these basic skills, too.
David: Yeah. And the Writing Center is, or rather the Writing and Tutoring Center here on campus, and it's probably worth your time if you're interested in these topics to read an article called, “Is Google Making Me Stupid?” Just think about that question. Is Google making me stupid?
Lisa: Oh, that's fabulous. We're going to link all of these resources in our little website that we're building out for this, so we'll have access to all of these.
Do you guys have any, like, burning comments that you're like, ‘oh, I wish I said that,’ that you want to share? And if not, that's totally fine. [laughing]
David: There's more meat on the table, but that's for our listeners to pick up on and become scholars themselves and then end up on this podcast.
Lisa: Awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you both.
David: Oh, you're welcome.
Lisa: I appreciate your time and your knowledge so much. Thank you for having us.
Victoria: All right. Thank you so much, Lisa.
Lisa: No problem.
[outro music begins]
Lisa: All right friends: you’ve been listening to Literacies, a four-part audio series. What you just heard was a shorter excerpt from a much longer conversation. To listen to the whole conversation, read the transcript, learn more about today’s guests, or check out any of the resources mentioned just now, visit our website libguides.tulane.edu/literacies.
This episode was recorded in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, using equipment available for anyone in the Tulane community to check out from Media Services, also in the library.
Don’t miss our next episode where we’ll be talking with Kay P Maye, Patrick Button, and Aron Culotta about data literacy. This episode will drop at noon on Tuesday, February 11th. To be sure you don’t miss it, follow Tulane University Libraries’ YouTube channel and Instagram.
Our host for Literacies is lisa Hooper, our audio engineer and audio producer is Justin Green, and Alan Velasquez is our video producer.
Nicolas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid", The Atlantic (July/August 2008).
Wineburg, Sam and Sarah McGrew. "Lateral Reading: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information," Stanford History Education Group Working Paper No. 2017-A1 (2017).
Professor David Rodriguez is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English. He is a teacher, writer, musician, and editor based in New Orleans. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and has been published in the New Orleans Review, Southeast Review, Sandy River Review, Hawai'i Review, and Convergence, among other places. Most recently, he co-authored a research article on the decentralization of authority in Radiohead's music and digital media. As an instructor, he has won several awards and co-edited two composition textbooks. His areas of focus include critical reading and writing, literature, technical writing, film studies, and creative writing.
Dr. Victoria Elmwood Victoria Elmwood is a Scholarly Engagement Librarian at the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library and serves as the subject liaison for Classics, English, French & Italian, and Germanic & Slavic Studies. A veteran instructor of college-level composition, she collaborates closely with the freshman composition program to promote students’ information literacy skills and academic documentation practices. Victoria holds a combined Ph.D. in English and American Studies and an M.A. in English from Indiana University Bloomington, as well as an M.L.I.S. from LSU Baton Rouge and a B.A. from Reed College.
Ep. 3, Data LiteracyAir Date: February 11, 2025, 12 noon CST
In episode three, we follow a wide ranging and insightful conversation with 3 guests: Kay P Maye, Dr. Patrick Button, and Dr. Aron Culotta. Like many other literacies, there are many components to Data Literacy. The Oceans of Data Project describes data literate people as individuals who understand, explain and document the utility and limitations of data by becoming critical consumers of data, controlling their personal data trail, finding meaning and taking action based on data.They can identify, collect, evaluate, analyze, interpret, present and protect data.
Literacies, a 4-part Audio Series
Episode 3: Data Literacy
Aired 2/11/2025
[musical introduction]
Lisa Hooper: You're listening to literacies, conversations about literacies that can change your life. In this four-part series, we're talking to experts about why media, data, information, and financial literacies are critical skill sets for modern life. We’ll give you a quick dive into what it means, how it impacts you, and things you can do to skill up. This episode is all about data literacy. To talk about data literacy, I'm joined by three guests.
Kay P Maye: Hello, I am Kay P Maye, scholarly engagement librarian for Social Sciences and Data at Tulane University Libraries.
Patrick Button: Hi, I’m Patrick Button. I am the director of the new Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science, where we are trying to increase data literacy on campus and especially student research around data.
Aron Culotta: Hi, my name is Aron Culotta. I'm associate professor of computer science. I also lead the Center for Community Engaged Artificial Intelligence.
Lisa: So let's start at the beginning. What even is data literacy?
Patrick: There’s a lot of different ways you can define that, but I think one way to think of it is sort of like, what roles we play with data in our lives. And so one kind of paradigm to think about this is you can think of someone who is a data communicator, a data reader, a data maker or data scientist. So what are those?
So, communicator is someone who needs to be able to tell stories with data. So we have this data, how do I communicate that to a larger audience? So you can think of that skill being required in a lot of situations. You can think of that being important for journalists, be important for people involved in social media.
Um, a data reader is someone who's able to sort of interpret data and apply it to their to their lives.
Data makers are going to be people that are sort of actively working with data, um, to try to sort of identify how data can be used to solve real world problems.
And then data scientists are someone who has, like, more technical data skills, um, that can kind of really get into, like statistical methods and whatnot.
So I think all of these types of people, so communicator, reader, maker, scientists are really important when it comes to data. And just having one of these skills often isn't enough, and it can be useful to kind of pair these together.
We have to kind of think really broadly about data literacy. It's not just, Oh, can I, you know, run a regression or, can I put stuff on an Excel spreadsheet? It's sort of a little bit more than that.
Aron: Yeah, I think that's well said. I mean, it's a very general concept, right? I mean, it's sort of like, are you an empiricist or not? Like, do you, do you use data to make decisions or not? And if you do, then you need data literacy. I mean, it's embedded in everything. And of course, you know the, you know, the emergence of data science and AI has kind of like brought different terminology and different technical aspects to it. But at the end of the day, like we all have to be kind of a data scientist to operate in this world filled with data.
Kay P: Yeah, I agree. You know nothing about data literacy, like defining it as this idea of being able to use data in a way that is meaningful and critical.
Data, being able to use data, being able to use information, is something that is every day, like Aron said, right, like we all must be able to use data in order to make informed decisions, rational decisions, logical decisions, however you want to categorize it.
Lisa: How, how does data literacy impact Tulane students, or any student, or any human at this point?
Patrick: I think, ah, you know, I guess we'll start with the cynical kind of capitalist view first, and then I'll move to sort of a more interesting, broader view.
So, I think we recognize that these skills are really valuable for, for a lot of different types of jobs, right? So, students who do get sort of any kind of courses in data, whether that be statistical methods or like science communication or computer science, you know, those skills are very valuable to employers.
But even if we think about sort of sort of important societal questions that Tulane students are often thinking about like, how does this issue affect my community? How can I support this nonprofit in New Orleans? I really care about this particular justice issue. Um, you know, skilling yourself up with data literacy skills can really help you be a lot more effective at achieving those goals. So you can communicate important research, ah, you can use data to drive decisions around how nonprofit spend resources. And so I think that it just gives you a tool set that can be applied more broadly than just I can get job, you know? I think it's, I think that's why, you know these skills are so useful, is because they're so multifaceted.
Aron: Yes, so I'll bring up the word artificial intelligence. We have to do it at some point, right? [laughter and cross-talk]. So, a couple reasons I think it's even more pressing today when you think about how artificial intelligence is changing things.
First of all, people are using AI to do data analysis, right. Like, automatically. So, like, you just throw a data set at it, and it'll just spit out a bunch of correlations and insights that it's derived from that data. So, think about like, you're like, say you're not a data scientist but you're a manager. Your job is to kind of be a BS detector on what people are sending your way, right? Well, now that BS has just gotten multiplied by like infinity, because there's almost no cost to generate more BS. [laughter] So being able to critically assess the analysis of data is going to be super important for everyone for reasons like that.
The second reason I think AI is impacting this is, again, even if you say you're interested, like you mentioned, nonprofits and societal issues, right? So now AI is being used for things like resume screening or any other important life decision. And you may hear, you may read in articles like, oh, AI's being used for such and such. And your gut reaction may be, that sounds like a bad idea, right? But how do you actually show that it's bad idea? Like, what would the data that you would need to audit these systems to ensure they're fair and all that sort of stuff. You need data literacy to be able to do that.
Kay P: Yeah, I agree. And I will bring it back to this, like, point of being critical. I'm just a critical person in general, which is why I like this work so much.
Aron: You seem so nice.
Kay P: Wha..? [laughter] I mean I am, but I what I've noticed, like with the growing popularity of AI in data science as a field of its own. Because I feel like data science has, like, come around in a way where, like, it's now its own discipline in which it was like, embedded in other disciplines before. You know what I mean? And I feel like that excitement is making people very trusting of data. And so I can just tell you, like, even on Facebook, I see so many people sharing statistics, because there are statistics and numbers to people seem factual, right? And so it just makes me think, like the importance of being literate in this realm of like, big data, data science, AI, is that, just like you can’t always trust what a news article says, you can’t always trust the statistics that are run on a data set, right? Because there needs to be that human interaction. So in order for us to, like you all, have been saying like, using this, using data in these data literacy skills to make meaningful decisions, we must be critical of the information that we're taking in right, so that we're making decisions with data that does not say what we think that it says.
Aron: I think it's a great point. I mean, I think this is such a core piece of data literacy, right? Is it's not... I mean, the modeling and the statistics is all super important, but like, just recognizing that data are just like, really weak approximations of reality.
May P: yeah, right!
Aron: And understanding the nature of that approximation, for the examples you brought up, the key piece is data literacy. So when you see a statistic, you're like, Okay, well, where did those numbers come from, and how did they collect that data, and who collected the data? Etc, etc. I think that's crucial. And I know a lot of CAIDS courses cover that stuff as well.
Patrick: Yeah, we’re really trying to focus on sort of these broad data, ah, data skills in the courses that we're gradually rolling out. So we, so we currently offer Data 1010, which is our sort of signature course Introduction to Data, and that covers a lot of these different data literacy skills. So how to be a data communicator, how to be a data reader, which we've kind of talked about, like interpreting data, understanding where it comes from, how to apply it, and then, you know, a little bit of data analysis as well. So it kind of covers communicator, reader, maker, scientist.
And so we've seen students have sort of really exciting skill sets after just that one course, and they're able to see how they can leverage it in a lot of other contexts. It's also really great to see how they really dive into ‘Okay, so there is a statistic, what does this mean? How is this created? What are the implications of this?’ And sort of going deeper than just, oh, here's a number, and I believe it. And so I think that that really helps create just a more literate society in general, given how much data is present everywhere. So it's been exciting to work with the Connelly Alexander Institute of Data Science and roll out these courses.
Lisa: And then, what else can students do? Is there something they should read, something, they should watch something, they should listen to, people they should talk to?
Aron: I mean, I will, I have to advertise for my own department.
Lisa: yeah, please do!
[Laughter]
Aron: So we, of course, offer many courses related to data we have a data science minor, we have a data science course. We have courses on the artificial intelligence that are, yeah, obviously in, in Patrick's breakdown of the different, ah, kind of roles, obviously squarely in the data scientist side of things.
Um, so, you know, you take some CAIDS classes and you're like, oh, state of things. Pretty cool. Let's, you know, go get a major in a reminder, we have some options there for those students.
Um, I think, outside of the classroom, though, there's a lot of opportunities, whether that's like, you know, going to a hack night and looking at civic data sources to understand how, ah, how that could be used in the community, like engaging with people in industry that are doing this currently, right? Like, obviously internships and that sort of thing. Um, there's a lot of opportunities outside of the classroom.
Patrick: Yeah, and I think really broadly, you know, it's not like the only way to take data courses is through the courses offered by CAIDS. So, there's a lot of different data focused courses, broadly at the university, we're working to create a database of that so they're easily searchable.
Ah, but one thing that's really helpful is sort of whatever your major is, or maybe you're one of those students who has three majors. Each of those majors is going to have some kind of data focused course that you need to take at some point. It's always great to take that earlier, because then you have those skills earlier on that you can apply.
Lisa: Kay P, wouldn't you recommend people do?
Kay P: Yeah, so I actually learned how to code in Python using an app on my phone. Well, okay, let me back up a little bit. I was going through this little financial trouble, so I'm gonna be listening to that financial literacy episode, but this was back in the day, and I was like, Man, I need to get a better handle on my like, finances. But I didn't know. I'm like, I don't want to sit up here and, like, use this Excel spreadsheet to, like, log these numbers, and then there are all these apps that were created. And so I was like, You know what, I am smart. I can write a script and I can categorize my finances myself. Have I done that yet? No, because I start doing other stuff, [laughter] I can't do that now, but I'm like, now I'm so excited about just all the stuff I can do with Python.
But I would say, if you're someone who likes to learn on a go, using an app is great. I use MIMO, M-I-M-O, I don't know if it's still around. I don't know when y'all are listening to this. Um, also YouTube, you know? I mean, I feel like, as a librarian, especially like a university librarian, I'm all about the free stuff, where it's the stuff that I can go to and, like, get the information at my point of need. So, there are tons of YouTube tutorials on pythons and Python R, SPSS, things like that.
Also, Python and R are open source languages, which means that no one really owns them. They're just out in the ether. So a lot of the information about the languages you can find online, right? Um, so I think that is. that's an important way to skill up. It's like finding those free resources as well, because they do exist.
Um, and then we also offer workshops at the library in Python. We've done some in R we've done some using InVivo. We haven't done SPSS, I'm gonna leave that to CAIDS, [laughter] but um, we've done some on, like, machine learning. Um, so it's been very interesting, like seeing the interests of people. I will say, like so far, the workshops have been great, because even the ones that run over time, it's like people stay the whole time.
Yeah. And also, I do want to do a call back. I don't know if this is appropriate to say after this question, but Aron, when you said the data is an approximation, that really struck me. Because when I'm thinking about like information overall, whether it's written information like, text data or numerical information, it is all an approximation, right? And so, once we add these, thinking of like AI machine learning, once we add these statistical processes, it's just going to abstract that approximation even more. So, like, you're not really even looking at reality. So how do we stay grounded in where we are and who we are as people, while also leveraging the power of these tools?
Aron: Yeah, that's a tough question. I think a lot of people are struggling with it. You're right, ever, every layer we add on top of a shaky foundation of data gets a little shakier each time.
[laughter]
Kay P: yeah, yeah. It does.
Aron: So, yeah, it's a crazy world out there, you know? And I think that's why, trying to stay grounded, trying to keep it contextualized with the people that are affected by these things, and understanding what goes into these systems. I think that's a whole… that's a topic for a much longer podcast, or whatever we're calling this.
Lisa: yeah, it is. [laughter] It is a much longer conversation. Is there anything that you all wanted to say that we haven't covered yet, that you think is really important for folks to know?
Aron: Yeah, I mean, we hit on all this, but, you know, just the focus that it's, it's not necessarily a technical thing, you know what I mean. Like, there's so many we mentioned design, we mentioned, you know, the kind of, the community aspect of it. There's so many facets to this that don't just don't be turned off by it, because if you're, if you're not into the math and algorithm side of things, there's so there's a really rich world here that I encourage you to check out.
Patrick: I think one thing I'll add is, and I think there's been some discussions of this already, I think getting these skills requires a little bit of your own kind of hustle. So we're definitely at Tulane University, broadly defining trying to create more opportunities around finding data literacy opportunities, courses, workshops, et cetera. And definitely there's a way to sort of find those skills on your own through apps and other resources, YouTube videos. But we also want to sort of, I think, highlight that we're all people that would love to talk to students about this sort of thing. So if you are ever trying to figure out, well, I'm in this particular area, I'm interested in this topic, how could I learn data skills that could be useful there? I think we're definitely happy to talk to you and see how we can try make those connections, since we're still building up these resources. So it involves a little bit of work on your end, but you should absolutely advocate for yourself and do some explorations, and I think you're going to find a lot of great opportunities.
Lisa: Y’all, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and your expertise. This was such a great conversation!
[cross-talk]
Lisa: All right, friends, [outro music starts] you've been listening to literacies, a four-part audio series.
What you just heard was a shorter excerpt from a much longer conversation. To hear the whole conversation, read the transcript, learn more about today's guests, or check out any of the resources mentioned just now, visit our website, libguides.tulane.edu, forward slash literacies.
This episode was recorded in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University using equipment available for anyone in the Tulane community to check out from Media Services also located in Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.
Don't miss our next and final episode, where we'll be talking with Tim Cody and Professor Tony Weiss, all about financial literacy. This last episode will drop just in time for graduating seniors at noon on Tuesday, April 8. To be sure you don't miss it, follow Tulane University Library's YouTube channel and Instagram.
Our host for literacies is Lisa Hooper, our audio engineer and audio producer is Justin Green, and Alan Velasquez is our video producer.
MIMO, app for code learning
Dr. Patrick Button serves as the inaugural Executive Director of The Connolly Alexander Institute for Data Science. Button has been with the initiative since its beginnings, serving as the chair of a subcommittee focused on how to engage and support undergraduate students with data education.
Button concurrently serves as an Associate Professor of Economics at Tulane, and his research focuses on discrimination in the scope of age and disability, expanding to sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and ethnicity. Interested in teaching data literacy, Button integrates data analysis in his courses on Labor Economics, Economics of Discrimination, and Econometrics.
Their research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Aging, the Sloan Foundation, the Social Security Administration, the Haynes Foundation, and the Borchard Center for Law and Aging, among others. Button is currently researching sexual orientation and race discrimination in access to mortgage loans, and gender identity, race, ethnicity, and health insurance status discrimination in access to mental health care appointments. See Button’s personal website for more information about their research.
Dr. Aron Culotta is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University and Director of the Tulane Center for Community-Engaged Artificial Intelligence. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2008, and his research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis, and their implications on society. His NSF-funded research has developed AI methods for several interdisciplinary projects in public health, law, marketing, political science, and emergency response. He has published over seventy academic articles on AI, serves on the steering committee of the International Conference on Web and Social Media, and has received best paper awards from the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing and from the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Kay P Maye is the Scholarly Engagement Librarian for Social Sciences and Data at Tulane University. He received his M.S. in Information Science from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. During his time as a librarian at Tulane and Clemson University, Maye has worked with the Data Curation Network to create instruction and reference materials for information professionals working with research data across disciplines. In 2022, Maye was awarded a LEADING (The LIS Education and Data Science Integrated Network Group) Fellowship to work with the Repository Analytics and Metrics Portal (RAMP) , a web service that aggregated use and performance use data of institutional repositories, on a text analysis machine learning project. Maye has used the skills learned through these experiences to offer research data support services through the Tulane University Libraries.
Ep. 4, Financial LiteracyAir Date: April 8, 2025, 12 noon CST
In our fourth and final conversation of the series, we're joined by business librarian Tim Coady and Dr. Toni Weiss for an informative and timely conversation about Financial Literacy. In this episode, we get back to basics with advice and exercises for freshmen and graduating seniors alike
.
Literacies, a 4-part Audio Series
Episode 4: Financial Literacy
Aired 4/8/2025
[musical introduction]
Lisa Hooper: You're listening to literacies conversations about literacies that can change your life in this four-part series, we're talking to experts about why media literacy, data, information, and financial literacies are critical skill sets for modern life. We'll give you a quick dive into what it means, how it impacts you, and things you can do to skill up.
This episode is all about financial literacy. To talk about financial literacy, I'm joined by two guests: Professor Toni Weiss and business librarian Tim Coady.
Tim Coady: Hello, thank you so much for having us.
lisa: Thanks for joining me. Toni, can you introduce our listeners just who you are what you do here at Tulane?
Toni: Of course!
lisa: And Tim, I’m going to ask you to do the same thing after?
Toni: Thank you. So, I'm Toni Weiss. I am a senior professor of practice in the Economics Department. I'm also the executive director of CELT, which is our Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching. And as my faculty role I teach one class for the SLAM program, which is Financial Literacy and I have nicknamed that ‘How to Adult’.
Tim: That is, ah, fantastic! Yeah, to introduce, my name is Tim Coady, and I am the librarian for the Freeman School of Business. So, in that role, um, I am in charge of the collections policy for our, ah, undergraduate and graduate student populations and then for consultation and providing resources for the research needs of our faculty here at the Freeman School of Business. I also do a few different drop-in sessions on teaching some research skills and some other useful library abilities within the business education context so I'm excited to be here today.
lisa: Yeah, and I've had an opportunity at random occasions to work with both of you and both of you are just fabulous to work with.
Umm, so let's start our conversation with our very first question of what is financial literacy?
Toni: So, I'll jump in, and I think that different people would take a different perspective. Since I am viewing this class as a life skills class for our students, I think of financial literacy as their own personal literacy, their own personal finances. Um, so, a financially literate person in their own life would be somebody who is competent making financial decisions, has made financial decisions in such a way that it's not a, um, it's not a burden for them; that they will be able to live their life within a lifestyle that they, that doesn't cause undue stress and burden from a financial perspective. Does that make sense?
Tim: Absolutely, and I love the way that you put that in such a personal context because thinking about my own history with like the concept of financial literacy, I was just such not a math person in high school, and then when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life I was very much about I'm not motivated by money, I don't need to be rich and all that. But what I didn't kind of really consider in all of that is maybe I don't need to be rich, but I do need to figure out how to, well maybe if I'm taking a job that isn't paying as much as another one, how do I make that work for me? How do I figure out how to achieve these goals that I have without having finances be something that's dragging me down and preventing me from being able to do that. Empowered is one of those words that gets thrown around about everything, but it really is about this idea of being able to create your own ability to achieve goals for yourself.
Toni: And we created, I really liked the way you said that as well, Tim; we’ve created such, um, pressure around money. Like, we can’t talk about money, like it’s, it’s this taboo topic. But then the more taboo it is, our students in find in particular, have no concept! Right? And they kind of are being thrown out into the world without some of those basic skills, you know. And it affects them in every aspect of their life. Like, one of the major causes of divorce is issues over money and, so, if we can teach our students that it’s imperative to be able to understand your finances and be able to talk about them, then I think that we can help eliminate some of those really difficult life points.
Tim: 100% and, you know, I wonder how, how many of your other kind of interviews, processes you've come up with this thing about the personal ends like you’re referring to. And I think when we're talking about financial literacy I love that you talked about divorce, like anyone who's even been in just like a short-term relationship knows that money stuff can create such a big problems. And going back to that idea of empowered, if you're in a relationship that isn't working out - being able to leave and having financial independence, that is a huge thing about financial literacy. And in talking about, like, the greater stuff, racial disparities and wealth; a lot of that is due to our not having a structure to teach financial literacy to people from poorer backgrounds or people of color like that. That's a huge issue.
And so when we are thinking about this we have to remember that like it's not just this like oh money stuff It's like this is stuff that makes a huge difference in people's lives.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. I'm definitely thinking that the financial planning that my parents did, like when they were my age the way they planned, does not work for my generation. Speak, I think, maybe speaking to that a little bit in this way that it's sort of, financial literacy and financial planning might change over time.
So, we talked a lot about how it works for us, maybe at a slightly… like where we are in our lives; we're already out of university. Can you help place it a little bit more presently. Like, what does financial literacy mean for today's students?
Toni: One of the very first assignments that I have my students do is estimate how much money they think they will spend over a two-week period, and that's everything. I just want them to get a sense everything that they're going to spend. They write it on a three by five card. I Fold it up. I Staple it and I write their name on it and then they have two weeks to keep track. At the end of two weeks, I pass these cards back and they're stapled - It's, it's a personal amount and I certainly don't want any comparisons across students. But they have to figure out their percentage difference, right? So by doing a percentage it evens the score. And the students are shocked by how much more they spent than they anticipated that they spent. Almost always, the number is 25 to 50 %, sometimes more than they anticipated. And that's a great launching off spot for the semester because they begin to see, you know how much money they're spending on Ubers and coffee or, they didn't anticipate their car would break down or they would have a medical expense and both of those are really important topics. The small things that add up and having enough money for those big emergencies.
Tim: Oh Yeah, that's such a great exercise! I love that idea. Um, you know, and something that I think about when you're talking about how our parents’ generation necessarily, isn't necessarily now about same financial landscape. As librarians we think about currency of information a lot which is you know, how recent is the information I'm looking at, is this going to be is this the most recent thing or is there a scholarship or knowledge that a little bit more recent or am I looking at something outdated. And so, you have all these rules, you shouldn't spend more than your one-third of your income on rent, but when you're looking at housing markets that are so different from your parents’ generations and things like that, you need to be able to kind of like figure out what is the current situation? And so I think in terms of literacy, I think that's so important is that a lot of the financial literacy were caught as children as kind of these tidbits that might not necessarily be as accurate as they were for a previous generation.
Lisa: that's so great.
Toni: Tim, I think that that's a great point, right, that financial landscape is different, and that information is different. In one way, it's just made it so much more difficult because there's so much more out there and I think it's almost information overload that our students don't even know where to begin and so they don't start. Which is why I do try and boil it down to basic, like you start a job, you have a 401k option, just don't worry about it. Just, just check a box. Like, you don't need to worry is it more equity? Is it more bonds? Is it… Like, just start saving. When you have time to dig into it, great, but don't prevent yourself from doing the work that you need to do because you don't understand the particulars of what's happening.
Tim: Yeah, that's a great point.
Lisa: Yeah, so this idea of information overload made me sort of think about what we do in library land. And so Tim, I'm actually wondering do you, in your like research consultations and your instruction sessions, do you see that a lot when you're working with students sort of information overload and trying to sort of take a deep breath and step back? What does that look like when you were?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, but if you do just a Google search for any sort of topic that's related to a car, like a loan for an automobile or a home loan. It's one of the very few fields, oddly like political science or like any sort of campaign work where there are people who are incentivized to give you bad information, or to not quite tell you all of the information that you might need to know. And so I think what Toni is striking on the head so importantly of focusing on the basics is such a good idea. Which is that like well, maybe I don't need to know all the intricacies of how like all of these different … ideas work, but I do kind of have an idea of putting away money, having that safety net, being able to create like… Um, and then figuring out the more granular details as you kind of work along. And so I think, yeah, when you're coming in for a research consultation you're looking at this universe of data that is press releases from someone who has, you know, this incentive to tell you certain things; you have all of these different experts who you know, what credentials exactly makes one an expert in this field, you know. Um, a huge, like, press out there of people who write about financial matters. And so, being able to locate like one or two things so that you're not just drowning with all of these different opinions can be, can be tough.
I think yeah, as you mentioned libraries are a pretty good place for that.
Lisa: For sure.
Toni: I have another assignment that I give the students, and I call them expert phone calls where they have to cold call people and get information. Now for some people that's super easy, but for a lot of other people like myself that's, that's a stressful, that is a stressful thing to do. Over the years I've had to really narrow it because I would get people telling me they called their father's friend or, you know, their uncle's barber or whatever; like, that doesn't work. It has to be somebody you do not know at al,l and have no connection with and you have to have at least a five-minute phone conversation with them in which you're gathering information on some Topic.
Lisa: Wow. just yesterday I was like, oh, I need to get a hold of Tim quickly so we can schedule this recording session. And I'm like I could pick up the phone to try and call him because email will take too long, but instead of picking up the phone, I'm going to walk to the business library to try to meet Tim in person. It's this very strange thing.
It's I'm just imagining our students today, ah, trying to navigate the same thing. That's difficult nut also like yeah, that's really helpful. That's really helpful to do. It's, it's a skill worth developing just making a phone call for information. Wow.
Alright, so I think we covered a lot of what financial literacy is, this ability to make solid decisions so that you can, you know, live your life. Um, and the impacts of financial literacy seem very clear. And I think some of these things that people can do to skill up have already surfaced in this conversation, um, but can you give a few more like, what should students do to skill up? So Toni, I know you've got your classes. Tim, you've got some great research consultations and like this, and, we can sort of crosswalk financial literacy and understanding the information available online with information literacy, so you can do work like that with students. But are there any other like workshops or classes or books or podcast, documentaries like what would you recommend students do?
Toni: I mean, any and all. Um In there are a lot of apps that they can use, right. Again when we're thinking about financial, personal financial literacy, thinking about their own budgeting. Um, there are a number of apps that will help them track their spending that will help them, um create a budget and see whether or not they're going over under. Um, I do tell my students that when they get out of school, they need to schedule one night a month and put it on their calendar and hold it to them. Obviously, if they have an opportunity to go to you know, some major event that is the only night, don't forgo it but that they should really try and stick to that one night a month to review their finances to look at their balances in their accounts, to check their spending against their budget,
Tim: Absolutely, I mean, and I think we touched on this, too, but getting into being able to feel comfortable talking about money with other people. Like really, like being able to divorce it from this emotional, really charged context and talk about it as just another way of planning your month ahead. Um, I think can be really important.
And I would be a bad librarian if I didn’t touch on, you know, we as Tulane affiliates and Tulane students, you have access to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barons, The Economist, The Atlantic…. You have, uh, a gigantic sea of vetted, curated, really well researched information, um that, you know, on the subject of finances, these will cost, would cost you a lot to be able to get all of this information at your fingertips. So, getting used to just like taking a look at financial news that matters to you. Um, you know, not everything is going to matter to everyone but if home ownership is in your future, getting used to um, if that's something that matters to you, getting used to looking at interest rates or getting what's, you know, reading the news about the housing market. Um, and so those, those I would really strongly, you know, go to the Turchin webpage. There is 15 different really great, uh media sources. Go make an account and create customized feeds all that kind of stuff.
Toni: And with my econ hat on, building an understanding of how those macro economic indicators will, how they change and how they impact your life, right? So, it's one thing to understand the interest rate on a mortgage, you can take it one step further to understand what causes interest rates to change so you can anticipate and and and try and, and plan your spending in line with the, the movement of the economy.
Lisa: That makes a lot of sense and even just again to like… Mortgages are absolutely important, but i'm also thinking if I were an undergrad today the idea of getting a house is far in my future, but, in that sense still understanding, how things are moving is something as simple as booking a flight, right?
Toni: Or getting a car, right? Most people finance their car and so, and that's definitely the amount they'll pay is interest. Undergraduates who are graduating are thinking often about medical school, law school, graduate school, and thinking about the loans that they might need to take in order to finance that additional education.
Lisa: Well, Toni and Tim, this has been an enlightening conversation for me. Realizing there's still a lot more, um, learning and reaching out that I need to do. So, I just want to thank you both again so much for your time and expertise. It's been a delightful conversation
Toni: Thank you. I've enjoyed it.
Tim: It was great being here. Thank you.
[Music begins]
Lisa: All right friends, you’ve been listening to Literacies, a 4-part audio series.
What you just heard was shorter excerpt from a much longer conversation.
To listen to the whole conversation, read the transcript, learn more about today’s guests, or check out any of the resources mentioned just now, visit our website libguides.Tulane.edu/literacies.
This episode was recorded over zoom.
Now, normally I’d use this moment to say “don’t miss our next episode” but this was last one. If you really loved these conversations and have a literacy you want to hear about or maybe want to talk about with us, send us a line to mediaservices@tulane.edu using the subject line Literacies Pitch.
Our host for Literacies is lisa Hooper, our audio engineer and audio producer is Justin Greene, and Alan Velasquez is our video producer.
I can’t sign off this last episode with acknowledging all the folks who supported this series knowingly or not.
Thanks to Sean Knowlton of Digital Initiatives & Scholarship at Tulane University Libraries who helped me hone in on the best platform for our website, Anthony DelRosario in Scholarly Engagement at Tulane Libraries for his design work that you can see on our website, Alan Velasquez for letting me rope him into making the audio visualizer and assisting with captioning and transcripts for YouTube and our website, all of our guests: Katherine Hicks, Moira McCammon, Victoria Elmwood, David Rodriguez, Kay P Maye, Patrick Button, Aron Culotta, Tim Coady, and Toni Weiss, to the entire Scholarly Engagement team and Library leadership for humoring this somewhat wild idea of mine, and a special shout of appreciation to our audio producer Justin Greene, who brought an steady ear and an enormous sum of patience and skill to his work, and, finally, a super cheesy but still absolutely necessary thank you to everyone listening.
The Economist via Tulane University Libraries Subscription, https://libguides.tulane.edu/news_newspapers/economist
The New York Times via Tulane University Libraries Subscription, https://libguides.tulane.edu/news_newspapers/NYTimes
The Wall Street Journal via Tulane University Libraries Subscription, https://libguides.tulane.edu/news_newspapers/wsj
Washington Post via Tulane University Libraries Subscription, https://libguides.tulane.edu/news_newspapers/washingtonpost
Planet Money: The Economy Explained (podcast), https://www.npr.org/sections/money/
The Indicator from Planet Money (podcast, insight into money, work, and business in 10 minutes or less), https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money
Dr. Toni Weiss is the Lawrence MvD Schloss Senior Professor of Practice in the Department of Economics as well as the Executive Director of Tulane’s Center for Engaged Learning and Teaching (CELT). Her focus, both in the department and at CELT, is on creating an environment both in and out of the classroom that maximizes students’ academic, professional and personal growth while at Tulane. All of the work she does on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning she brings into the classroom, thus taking the theoretical and making it practical and functional.
In addition to her roles at Tulane, Professor Weiss does freelance economic consulting work. Her work has primarily focused on economic development within the City of New Orleans as well as on economic impact studies measuring the effects of a variety of special events that occur in and around New Orleans.
Tim Coady is the Librarian for the A.B. Freeman School of Business. In this role, Tim collects, makes discoverable, and provides support for information resources to meet the education and research needs of the faculty, students, and staff of the School and greater campus community. Tim is passionate about the need for informational literacy both within business education and broadly. His interests focus on the way access to information impacts the way we make decisions.
Audio Engineer & Audio Producer
Justin Green is a Tulane University sophomore from New Orleans, LA. He is studying Legal Studies in Business and Computer Science. He is in the Legislative Scholars Program, Tulane Black Student Union, Alliance of Black Business Students, Gulf Scholars Program, and College Scholars Program. He serves as the Cohort Programs Student Intern with the Office of College Programs.
Video Producer
Alan Velasquez is the Digital Media Production Unit Coordinator in Digital Scholarship & Initiatives, providing audiovisual production, post-production, and digitization services for Tulane University Libraries. He manages the Tulane University Libraries YouTube channel and works with library and campus partners to create video content. He offers accessibility services for audiovisual content and provides digital scholarship support by creating and maintaining guides and tutorials. Links: Audiovisual Services Library Guide Tulane University Libraries YouTube Channel.
Host
lisa Hooper is Head of Media Services at Tulane University Libraries. In this role, she develops technology collections, workshops, and programming to support equitable opportunities for interdisciplinary discovery, innovative scholarship, and skill development through creative play with multimedia collections and media tools. In her role as a member of the Scholarly Engagement team, lisa serves as the subject liaison for music, dance, and theater.
