Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Our public square isn’t what it used to be. But, if schools lead the way, media literacy education can help us rebuild civic society. 

If the damage to public discourse wasn’t clear already, the recent controversy over political advertising on social media platforms surely drove the point home. While Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a ban on such advertising, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s decision to keep hosting political ads without subjecting it to rigorous fact-checking. 

Our goal is to provide greater transparency in political advertising on Google, YouTube, and partner properties. This report includes information about spending on ads related to elections that feature a candidate for elected office, a current officeholder, or political party in a parliamentary system.

With all the information they ever need right at their fingertips, it is imperative to teach students how to check their facts. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to know what is true and false, and students are struggling deciphering the truths from the falsehoods. According to Stanford University, their research “shows a dismaying inability by students to reason about information they see on the Internet, the authors said. Students, for example, had a hard time distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from.”

One of the problems I've had for a while with traditional digital literacy programs is that they tend to see digital literacy as a separable skill from domain knowledge. In the metaphor of most educators, there's a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process. And there's data,…

In an age where the majority of us get our news through social media, the rise of fake news sites, hoaxes and misinformation online is concerning, especially considering that many young people lack the skills necessary to judge the credibility of information they encounter online.

Conference on Learning Information Literacy across the Globe
https://informationliteracy.eu/conference/
10.5.2019 Frankfurt am Main
#LILG_2019 #biblioVerifica #crowdSearcher #iloOER

The slides describes the BiblioVerifica blog, which is an attempt by librarians to fight misinformation by using media and data literacy, engaging citizens as awareness users of the social networks, chats and blogs.
Biblioverifica aims to be a public engagement project based on information literacy practices, implementing tips and tricks about search tools, reliable sources, verification strategies. This non-profit initiative promotes fact-checking based on open resources as data, journals, tools, etc.
contact
https://economia.uniroma2.it/biblioteca/lilg_2019/

Library and Learning Resources: Fake News: Home

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

Studies suggest that many U.S. students are too trusting of information found on the internet and rarely evaluate the credibility of a website’s information. For example, a survey found that only 4 percent of middle school students reported checking the accuracy of information found on the web at school, and even fewer did so at home (New Literacies Research Team & Internet Reading Research Group, 2006). At the same time, the web is often used as a source of information in school projects, even in early schooling, and sites with inaccurate information can come up high in search rankings.

Fake news, unreliable websites, viral posts—you would think students who have grown up with the internet would easily navigate it all, but according to a study done by Stanford researchers, that couldn’t be further from the truth.