Teaching Information Literacy and Computing Ethics: Are They the Same Thing?

Intl. Inform. & Libr. Rev. (2000), 32, 473^483doi:10.1006/iilr.2000.0139Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Teaching Information Literacy andComputing Ethics: Are They the SameThing?BRUCE GILBERT*

INTRODUCTION

Educators of all stripes, from librarians to technology trainers to teach-ing faculty, are today engaged in teaching something called ‘‘informa-tion literacy’’. Information literacy, for the purposes of this paper, canbe de¢ned as the process of teaching and learning about electronic tech-nology, such as personal computers and the Internet, in order to gleanand manipulate useful information from that technology. I may beoverly presaging the rest of this piece by noting how even this basic de-¢nition is fraught with terminology that is seemingly value-neutral, butis, upon closer inspection, nothing of the kind. If we accept informationliteracy as a worthwhile practice (and it is taught, in various forms, atinstitutions of higher learning of all levels) then this de¢nition shouldmake us recognize that the multifarious abstractions of a technologicalinterface (whether the abstractions are icons or menu choices) must bemastered in order to get at what we seek; and what we seek, in the caseof information literacy, is more abstraction, that is, that much-soughtmodern commodity called ‘‘information’’.This diversion into the parsing of a basic de¢nition at the outset is

justi¢ed, I believe, if it helps us to recognize how ingrained and little-questioned many of the underlying concepts of our ‘‘information society’’have become. This is especially important in this case, as my underlyingthesis may seem either outlandish or trivial to the mind that is not opento looking at familiar concepts in new ways. I, of course, believe it isneither of these, but as an educator, I am frankly more interested in en-couraging the restless, questioning mind than I am concerned withproving my point of view right or wrong.The point of view I wish to pursue in this paper stems from an idea I

had about this process of teaching ‘‘information literacy’’. In simplest,baldest terms, my idea is this: the process of teaching information lit-eracy, if done properly, should include the teaching of information

*Director of Library Operations and Technology, Drake University.

1057^2317/00/030473 + 11 $30.00/0 # 2000 Academic Press

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ethics; because, at their base, information literacy and informationethics are the same thing. To put the underlying idea even moreplainly: the decision to use electronic information technology as a pri-mary tool in the teaching, learning, and research process is a profoundlyvalue- and ethics-driven decision, from the beginning and each stepalong the way.We are ill-serving our students and our clientele if we failto recognize this as an ethical concern, and do not attempt to addressthe rami¢cations of this underlying reality.As I pursue this thesis, I intend to, ¢rst, examine the fundamental

terms that will be used in this paper by placing them in the context ofthe thought of the original thinker, Ralph Waldo Emerson; second,brie£y review how I personally came to the above-mentioned conclu-sion; third, examine how this theory worked in a ‘‘real’’ for-credit class;and fourth, begin to explore the next steps in how this theory mightimpact the academic curriculum. I would like to start, however, withsome basic examinations and de¢nitions of the terms that will be usedthroughout; for it is the di¡erent determinations of concepts that distin-guishes this theory.It is important to stress, however, what this paper is not. It is not

particularly either pro- or anti-technology; it is not all-too-fashionablypessimistic; and it is not value-neutral or ethically relativistic. It is, if ithits its mark, a clear-eyed look at some of the philosophical underpin-nings of the electronic revolution.

THE CONCEPT OF INFORMATION ETHICS

The single most delineating concept in my thesis is the way it treats therubric ‘‘ethics’’. We all know what ethics means, or what we think itmeans, and the usual study of ‘‘information ethics’’ is re£ective of thatpredisposition. Thus, the common topics of ‘‘information ethics’’ and‘‘computer ethics’’ including computer viruses, computer etiquette, and(occasionally) even the potentially destructive environmental impact ofowning and operating a computer.These topics, however, worthy as they might be, do not re£ect the

predispostion of my view of ethics. Thus, I am arguing that the ‘‘tradi-tional’’ study of information ethics stems from a view that ethics is lar-gely a concern of what is morally ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’, (or even good andevil) and tends to revolve around discussions of what a moral or ethicalperson would do in a given situation. Thus, case studies are the mostfamiliar tool of this approach (this embrace of the case study extendsbeyond information ethics to such related ¢elds as business ethics andeven well into traditional university ethics courses).

INFORMATION LITERACYAND COMPUTING ETHICS 475

While it is not my intention to denigrate this view of ethics, it is notdescriptive of the view I wish to examine for the purposes of this paper.For my model, I turn to a truly unique intellectual institution, and thatis, the Emersonian mindset or viewpoint. The speci¢c work of RalphWaldo Emerson that will be covered is his 1838 lecture delivered toDartmouth College entitled, Literary Ethics.1

EMERSONIAN ETHICS

A brief word is in order on why Emerson and this piece is appropriatefor our purposes. I felt it would be preferable to use a ‘‘pre-informationrevolution’’ ¢gure to illustrate the points in this paper. Other authors’thoughts on ethics would have been useful for this purpose, whetherthey be those of Goethe or Aristotle or deStael. RalphWaldo Emerson’sthoughts on ‘‘The American Schlolar’’, were expressed in a series of lec-tures he delivered in the 1830s. Emerson’s views on this subject are un-ique in their combination of innate optimism, wide-based viewpoint,and unprejudiced analysis of the ‘‘scholar’s’’ task. (It is probably worthnoting here that Emerson’s use of the term ‘‘scholar’’ in these essays isquite di¡erent from the way we usually use this term. A ‘‘scholar’’ forEmerson was an individual who produced original, provocative thoughtas a result of his or her life experiences as well as what we call ‘‘re-search’’. The term ‘‘writer’’ or ‘‘author’’ is probably close to a modern ana-logue to Emerson’s meaning.)Moreover, it is little recognized how Emerson was highly dependent

on, and accomplished in the use of, the ‘‘advanced technology’’ of hisday. As a lecturer who delivered many dozens of lectures all across thiscountry and Europe, he was an inveterate traveler who used trains andsteamers to visit the midwestern hinterland, delivering a speech at the‘‘lyceum’’ (rough equivalent of today’s community colleges) of smalltowns, speaking in granaries, churches and homes, and even traveledto the west coast using these and other rough conveyances in his lateryears. He even mastered, however reluctantly, the fountain pen, a tech-nology that doubtless was an aid in his lifetime production of 250 note-books full of his (and other’s) writings. (It is a measure of how far weare from that time to note how Emerson spent a great deal of time con-structing and maintaining his own manual index to this copious body ofwork.)

1Emerson, R.W. (1983) Literary ethics. In RalphWaldo Emerson: Essays and Lecture. NewYork. TheLibrary of America. pp. 93^112. Also available on the Internet at: http://www.rwe.org/works/Nat-ure_addresses_3_Literary_Ethics.htm

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So when we turn to Emerson’s ‘‘literary ethics’’, it could be said thathe was one who was a real ‘‘user’’ of the technology of his day. So whatwere some of the conclusions, and preconceptions, that were subsumedin this work?We must begin, by returning to our earlier concern of just how

‘‘ethics’’ is de¢ned. This essay is not about what sort of behaviorconstitutes ‘‘right and wrong’’, ‘‘moral and immoral’’, etc. in the lifeand actions of the scholar, except in the broadest sense. That is, Emer-son’s discussion of literary ethics is a discussion of the ‘‘ethic’’, or under-lying biases and philosophy, of the literary individual. It is notpresumptive to state that the ‘‘ethic’’ of an individual as outlined byEmerson underlies the ‘‘ethics’’ or ethical decisions and behavior of thatindividual.And what constitutes this ‘‘ethic’’ of literary behavior? Emerson is

clear on this point: it is for the scholar to be bold, creative, wide-ran-ging, and con¢dent. ‘‘..when (the scholar) comprehends his duties, heabove all men is a realist, and converses with things. For, the scholar isthe student of the world, and of what worth the world is, and with whatemphasis it accosts the soul of man, such is the truth, such is the worth,such the call of the scholar’’.2

The bulk of Emerson’s essay is devoted to the resources, the subject,and the discipline of the scholar. Of particular interest to us might beEmerson’s coverage of the ‘‘resources’’ of the scholar.For all our justi¢able pride in the modern ‘‘information resources’’

that are available to our students and professors, I cannot helpbut be struck by the relative strength and fertility of the ‘‘resources’’described by Emerson. He begins by stressing the importance ofthe internal resources (what we might call the psychology) of thescholar. Such resources are ‘‘co-extensive with nature and truth, yetcan never be his, unless claimed by him with an equal greatness ofmind’’.3

Next, Emerson moves to a discussion of biography, or a discussion ofthe study of previous great individuals as models for scholarly behavior.Here, Emerson rejects the view of biography as a process that identi¢esspeci¢c behavior to be copied by the scholar. ‘‘The impoverishing philo-sophy of ages has laid stress on the distinctions of the individual, andnot on the universal attributes of man. The youth, intoxicated with hisadmiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his ownsoul, which he admires’’.4

2 Ibid., p. 96.3 Ibid.4 Ibid., p. 99.


This discussion of the study of the ‘‘great individual’’ evolves into anembrace of the ‘‘highest power’’ of the individual. ‘‘The growth of theintellect is strictly analogous in all individuals. It is a larger reception. . .[the able individual] is nothing else than a good, free, vascular organi-zation, whereinto the universal spirit freely £ows. . .’’5

I have included this discussion of Emerson’s scholarly ethic for anumber of reasons. First and foremost is to note the wide-rangingnature of what constitutes ‘‘ethics’’. For Emerson, development ofthe talented individual into the creative individual is behavior that isinnately ‘‘ethical’’. For the talented individual to either languish throughindolence or become sidetracked by worldly concerns or mimicking ten-dencies is ‘‘unethical.’’Thus, Literary Ethics clearly points out a distinction between

‘‘ethical’’ questions as they are usually viewed, that is, ethical behavioras a practice of responding to certain occasional occurrences, andthe ethical behavior of the engaged, striving, questioning individual.The former view is necessarily reactive: the latter is not only proactivebut positive, and re£ects a view of the dauntless individual constructingtheir own highly ethical agenda from a foundation of unique scholarlyactivity.Before we turn from Emerson, we should be reminded that ethics in

the more conventional sense, that is, questions of ‘‘right and wrong’’based on individual worldly concerns, were not foreign to his activities;for example, he spoke widely against slavery, and delivered as many as200 lectures a year on the anti-slavery cause.

INFORMATION ETHICS: THE BROAD VIEW

Thus, as we return to the term ‘‘information ethics’’ for the purposes ofthis paper, if we are to use Emerson as a source of inspiration, we musttake a broad-based view. ‘‘Information ethics’’ must refer to the philoso-phical underpinnings of the individual; they must take into accountquestions, such as, why does one want to pursue the life of a scholar inthe ¢rst place? And, what are the rami¢cations of attempting to harnessinformation in the same way we harness tap water or electricity?These musings would seem, on the face of it, to have little to do with

the world of teaching about bits and bytes. I would like to brie£y turn tosome of my own thoughts and experiences to attempt to bring these twoseemingly disparate topics towards the common basis I believe theyshare.

5 Ibid., p. 100.

478 B. GILBERT

INFORMATION LITERACY AND ETHICS: WHATTHEY HAVE

IN COMMON

My professional position is that of a librarian whose career is more orless dedicated to the e¡ective use of information technology in the edu-cation process. Yet, my own personal interests have always lead to pur-suits that place this technology in a wider context. One of these interestslead me to a symposium at the University of Iowa in 1999 on the for-ging of partnerships between teaching faculty and librarians; the topicof integrating information literacy into the curriculum was a widely dis-cussed topic at this symposium.6

As we entered the second day of this conference, a nagging concern¢nally articulated itself. The process of information literacy was an ex-citing and engaging one, only to the extent that it re£ected some speci¢csubject matter. Those sessions which dealt with information literacy inthe context of, say, the journalism or mathematics curriculum, re£ecteda much higher level of inspiration and involvement, it seemed to me,than did those which dealt with general information literacy issues andsessions. (Such sessions are normally those which are required of ¢rst-and second-year students, and have taken the place, in many academiclibraries, of traditional ‘‘bibliographic instruction’’ courses.)This concern about the lack of inspiration £owing from general

information literacy courses combined with another continuing concernabout the ongoing role of computers in education sparked an oddmoment of epiphany; my thought at that moment was, could it reallybe all that simple? I confess to not having a decisive answer to thatquestion to this day.This moment of convergent epiphany resulted in the following

thought: the missing factor in most general information literacy pro-grams is any kind of value-driven context. Information literacy, for themost part, is taught as if what one researched, and for what reasons, was ofno particular importance as long as one knew how to do it; in short, it isskill-driven, rather than driven by discussion of questions of why, and towhat end.Thus, my epiphany ran, a great opportunity was being missed. It is

no great revelation that the Internet is, in addition to being a potentiallyvaluable research tool, also a vast ethical wasteland, where individualswhose existence revolves around hating other individuals di¡erent fromthemselves, are able to ‘‘make connections’’ with the similarly-bent.Those seeking pornography, sites glorifying the mistreatment of women

6 The Proceedings of this symposium are to be published, as of this writing, in a volume titled:Library User Education: Powerful Learning, Powerful Partnerships by Scarecrow Press in 2001.


and children, and help in pursuits ranging from gambling to explosivesconstruction, may also ¢nd the Internet to be a fertile ¢eld. In short,giving individuals in classroom settings the skills to navigate the watersof the Internet without any discussion of the moral climate they areabout to encounter, is akin to teaching the nascent sailor how to tackand use the rudder in calm conditions, and then allowing them to sailsolo without ever mentioning that the sailor is certain to encounter badweather and treacherous eddies along the way.

THE NETWORKED COMPUTER AS AN ETHICAL QUANDRY

This discussion does not even begin to tough on the many-faceted ethi-cal concerns that arise from general computer usage within the learningprocess. For example, considerable coverage, both in the popular pressand in higher education, has been given to topics such as computer‘‘viruses’’ that can wreak havoc on individual computers or entire com-puter networks. Unfortunately, these viruses are often treated in a man-ner similar to the side-e¡ects of medication; such side-e¡ects are not onthe ‘‘side’’ at all to the patient; they are just as real as the positive, heal-ing e¡ects!Similarly, computer viruses are treated as aberrations, and little more

than temporary inconveniences by many advocates and teachers of in-formation technology. Such a view is comforting, no doubt, to the tea-cher, but it is hardly reassuring to the user who rightly fears losing bothdata and privacy. Nor is it even accurate: a computer virus is, after all,nothing more than another program, or another facility such as a macrothat is designed to make the computer behave in a certain way, and isthus no di¡erent to the computer than aWeb browser or a word-proces-sing program. The only di¡erence is that the author of the virus hasmalicious intent; your computer (and this is my main point) could notcare less about intent, however.Another example that was suggested by this initial evaluation of the

ethical nature of information technology is the almost staggering ubi-quity of that technology. To a very great extent, when it comes to choos-ing a ¢eld of study, whether it be medicine, physics, journalism, orlanguages and literature, it makes no di¡erence; you, as a student, willbe using computers. In fact, your future success in these areas will lar-gely be determined by how facile you are with technology, regardless ofthe ¢eld! Such a realization is hardly news, but the next step in analysisis more unusual: what does it say about us as individuals and as a

çsociety when the worth of all individuals, regardless of calling, isjudged by how well they interact with logic-based machines? What are

480 B. GILBERT

the implications when entire academic disciplines are given over tothose who work at them only through the abstract worlds of GraphicalUser Interfaces and programming languages?It should be noted at this point that what should be strived for is an

addition to the curriculum that is not anti-computer; it is just computer-realistic. We are living in a world where the solutions to our problemsare always only one more piece of hardware, or one more software up-grade away. (Nor is this phenomenon limited to the computer industry:the parallel wasteland of the entertainment industry has, for years, pro-mised us that the ‘‘next new thing’’ will bring us contentment when all ithas brought us is the ‘‘old thing’’ endlessly re-packed in ever more luridand insensate ¢nery.) Modern schools and businesses demand that weproduce graduates with computer skills, but what are we giving up ifthat is all that we give them? To put it more directly, it is not very likelythat 10 or 20 years from now either organizations or individuals willcare or remember what we taught about the vagaries of the ‘‘Start’’menu, or the relative virtues of Lycos vs Yahoo! as Internet search en-gines; that information will long since have been rendered irrelevant.What both organizations and individuals will remember, and be trans-formed by, is if we teach a more questioning, less sanguine approach tothe machines that were, after all, created to serve our needs.

A WEB-BASED EXPERIMENT: A COURSE ON THE INTERNET ABOUT

THE INTERNET

I could have easily forgotten these reveries about information literacyand ethics when I returned to the daily necessities of life as a computerand operations librarian at Drake University. In the next few months, Ikept these thoughts alive and fermenting, at least, through conversationswith colleagues, primarily our instructional librarian, Karl Schaefer. Yetit seemed these thoughts might go the way of many promising ideas thatnever ¢nd su⁄cient soil to take root.Then, an opportunity presented itself. Drake has a set of vibrant and

growing Web-based courses that are taught every year during summersession. I co-taught a one-credit course during the ¢rst summer iterationin 1995; this course was very representative of what I have characterizedas traditional information literacy, in that the usual suspects of searchengines and ftp sites as they relate to the research process were covered(in those earlier, benighted times, one entire session was spent on themerits of gopher, Archie, and Veronica).This time, however, I was approached to construct an entire under-

graduate (third-year level) course, by myself, on the Internet as a


research tool. I was to o¡er the course under the auspices ofDrake’s School of Education. I decided that I could undertake thisif I limited my e¡orts to a two-credit course; moreover, I felt thatit would be worthwhile for me professionally only if I somehowincorporated the value- and ethics-based concerns that I have outlinedabove.I will not go into the details of writing, designing and assembling this

course (which is taught entirely over the World Wide Web; no face-to-face contact between student and teacher is required, although amodicum of extra credit was given to those individuals who paid me apre-session ‘‘real-life’’ visit). Su⁄ce it to say that, in June of this year, I‘‘went virtual’’ with a two-credit course entitled Research and Learning onthe Internet.

THOUGHTFUL THURSDAYS

I will be the ¢rst to tell you that my design and execution of the courseas a vehicle for ethical thinking about the Internet was far from perfect.When I ¢rst envisioned this course, I imagined an environment whereindiscussions of ethical concerns permeated every activity. However, giventhe short time period of the course (less than three weeks between whenthe course began and when the ¢nal paper was due), and that there wasa lot of ground to cover, I cannot say that I succeeded in producing an‘‘ethics-saturated’’ course.However, I did follow the following strategy: every week, I created a

session that was called ‘‘Thoughtful Thursday’’. These readings, and theon-line discussions that followed, were the locus of our coverage of ethi-cal issues.The Thoughtful Thursday readings were written by a number of in-

dividuals (including myself ) and were geared towards the skills andsubject matter that had been covered in the previous three assignmentsfor that week. The readings were selected to represent a variety of view-points and perspectives. In the third and ¢nal week, I included a fewethical case studies, in the Wednesday session, and then had a dialog inThursday’s session between a proponent of networked information andeducation (Eli Noam) and a skeptic on these topics (StephenTalbott).I need to make one point clear, and that is that the ethical component

of this course was not designed to make the students believe what I did,or even to take a stand on the all-too-religious issue of computer vs in-dividual. What I did try to do was to make it clear that there was anethical underpinning to the use (or non-use) of the computer; and that

482 B. GILBERT

these ethical concerns were always there, regardless of whether we, asindividuals, chose to heed or ignore them.

STUDENT REACTION

Although the course was not heavily subscribed (¢ve students, all ofwhom ¢nished the course, an anomaly in itself in aWeb course), it wasfairly diverse from an academic standpoint: there were two business/ISmajors, a journalism major, a sociology major, and an education stu-dent. (All did quite well in the course, incidentally, although the non-IS people actually did a better job of engaging the subject matter andthe ethical approach.)When I asked and received qualitative evaluations from all students

near the end of the course’s run, I was pleasantly surprised to ¢nd thatseveral students referred to the ‘‘Thoughtful Thursday’’ portion of thecourse as their favorite part of the course. ‘‘You challenged us’’, onewrote, while two referred to the ‘‘guest speakers’’ as ‘‘a great addition tothe course’’.The students were nowhere near as unanimous in their relative views

on the value of technology in the learning process. One opined thatthe Internet made her life easier in a number of ways, such as ‘‘nothaving to go to the library to look up stu¡’’, while others said that theyfelt they missed something by taking a course entirely on-line. This di-versity of opinion indicates, at least, that one of my goals was reached,and that was to be thought-provoking; all had opinions (quite strongones, in some cases) and expressed them to me and their fellow class-mates.

OF WEB COURSES, EMERSON, AND INFORMATION ETHICS

Let me turn from these speci¢c Web-based experiences to some ¢nalsummary remarks.Emerson would have written more had he written on a computer;

but, would he have written better stu¡ ? How many general informationliteracy programs ever contemplate such a question? And how muchmore is the pity?If there is only one point to be gleaned from this paper, it is this:

there is never an excuse to teach information literacy as ‘‘content neu-tral’’; the nature of the computer and networked information constitutesa basic ethical framework, if we only are willing to do the Emersonianhard work of looking and thinking for it.


Moreover, as I indicated earlier, this value-based approach to infor-mation literacy represents a tremendous opportunity to invigorate notjust this ¢eld, but also the entire general education curriculum. This istrue because, to pose the question, ‘‘What does it mean when we rely onthe network to provide us the resources to become an educated person?’’should lead directly to the question, ‘‘What does it mean to be an edu-cated person in the ¢rst place?’’ This last philosophical question is de¢-nitely an ethical concern if we take Emerson’s broad-based view. We areimpoverishing our curricula and our students if we pretend that thesequestion don’t exist or don’t matter; and we are certainly not being trueto any Emersonian ideal of a scholarly learner. Emerson challenged usto be brutally self-aware, and to be optimistic and creative; we must notshrink from this duty just because we are speaking of our machines.

Teaching Information Literacy and Computing Ethics: Are They the Same Thing?

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