Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

The classic book “How to Lie With Statistics,” first published in 1954, is probably the biggest bestseller of all time on how to make sense of numbers. But it has left a troubling legacy—leading to a distrust of all kinds of statistics, even ones that can help make sense of things like today’s global pandemic.

That’s the argument made by Tim Harford, an economist and BBC journalist. And his research shows that the author of “How to Lie With Statistics,” Darrell Huff, took steps to use his arguments to actively obscure rather than to inform. “

The CILIP Information Literacy Group is working with BBC Bitesize to help with the teaching of fake news and misinformation.

Here’s my New Year’s resolution for higher education: extend the reach of research to the people.

Recently, universities and academics have begun to talk about open science (i.e., research practices used to enhance transparency from design to dissemination). There is a robust agenda for academia’s future, including code sharing, registered reports and accessibility.

It’s part of a growing recognition that research really belongs to the people. Even as the postsecondary industry opened its doors to become a more-accessible system for students, it locked up the research conducted by its faculty and staff. But it’s often individuals from outside of academia who construct topical questions of interest for scholars, serve as study participants, and fund organizations producing such work.

In this blog post, Pip Divall, Clinical Librarian Service Manager at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust and CILIP Information Literacy Group’s Health Sector rep, gathers together useful resources for tackling Covid-19 vaccine misinformation during the global pandemic.

In the past year, many educational institutions began to address the challenge of digital misinformation. As head of a multi-institutional projectthat addresses these issues, I found this heartening. Less encouraging, however, was the persistence of many myths about how misinformation works, what its risks are and how we might address it. In the hope we might have a more productive 2019, I thought I’d outline some of those myths and realities below.