Ten tips for digital dieting

Are you confusing Pinterest with poststructuralism? Your Twitter with Trotsky? Is oversharing replacing reading? Did you type 'twerking' into Google? Is the Instagram drip feeling of animal print onesies starting to transform your clothing choices at work? If so, then it may be time for a digital diet. These ten tips provide strategies to manage the information obesity and digital gluttony that punctuates our schools and universities.

1. Do not confuse more information with quality information.

Very often the rule for Kim Kardashian's makeup – more is always better - is applied to information. Actually, less is more. Use fewer media to create more meaning. Simply because information is accessible and available through the Google search engine does not mean that it is appropriate for teaching, learning and education. The caliber of information necessary for a doctoral thesis is distinct from that required for a local pub quiz. Select media platforms and channels with care. Do not choose Facebook to conduct an argument with your spouse. Do not give feedback to students via text message. PROPS? ROFL? Indeed.

2. Slow down.

The fast dominates the slow. This maxim creates problems in education. Scrolling supplants reading. Texting replaces writing. A recent study showed that the average text message is read in one minute and replied to within five minutes. Most text messages involve boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives and food. These are not important topics. But the speed of delivery (falsely) signifies urgency. Simply because One Direction is trending on Twitter does not mean anything important is happening. By slowing down, consciousness and interpretation re-enters the information landscape.

3. It's dead, Jim.

Discard dead media. For new media to be born, old media must die. At the moment, the obsession for the new has not involved the attendant emptying of the trash. This means that classrooms and curricula are punctuated by the obsolete. Do not stay wedded to old media because of fear or a lack of professional development. Do not be drawn to new media like a siren's call. Instead, consider this equation: New Media + Old Media = Useful Media.

4. Stop oversharing.

Your life is not like herpes. It is not meant to be shared with everyone. Stop the proliferation of information. No one on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yammer, YouTube, Flickr and Academia.edu needs to know about last night's party. Be considerate with the presentation of information. Select one appropriate channel, platform, medium or application for your ideas by understanding the level, literacy, aims and interests of the audience.

5. Stop the interruptions.

We live in a highly disruptive and distorted culture. Simple tasks are clouded by a cacophony of interruptions, constantly answering email, checking if anyone 'likes' your Facebook update, and monitoring LinkedIn recommendations. This creates a working day of micro-attention. Tom Chatfield recently described our current lives as based on an 'attention economy.' The problem is that Miley Cyrus's tongue gains more attention than serious problems with timetabling or assessment. To focus – to claim back our attention economy – is to control the delivery of information. Turn off the constant notifications from social media.

6. Reduce the student-dependency on learning materials (like PowerPoint slides) that can move through time and space.

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

7. Increase thinking. Reduce cutting and pasting.

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

8. Email is evil. Control the beast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Teach information literacy overtly, clearly and continually.

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

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

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