Just when you think you know what you're getting into...
You immerse yourself in this week's readings, podcasts, and other resources from 761 this week on information and digital literacy - whew! I learned many new terms this week. No kidding when Dr. Green said that we would probably be teaching teachers and other staff about these topics! It is pretty overwhelming at first to think that one of my responsibilities is to teach students and other staff about something that seems so daunting and can have such dire consequences. However, like anything else, you start small and go from there.
For me, starting small meant understanding the basics of spotting "fake news." Like Dr. Green mentioned, The Liturgist podcast was invaluable for breaking this down. I learned the importance of verifying authors, dates of publication, editorial review boards, and citing studies or other sources used. It had an immediate effect on my information diet - another new term I learned this week. I found myself looking more critically at publications, studies, and authors much more than in the past. Another thing I learned was how some organizations, publications, and ad agencies take advantage of the emotional reaction you will have to some information. They want that fear or anger to take over so you will share and be too distracted to think about investigating their sources.
Being information literate starts with myself as a citizen. I loved that the speaker mentioned the importance of local news. In his words, it is more "observable and actionable" because you can fact-check with your eyes and ears. You don't get those opportunities very often at a national level. In many cases you can make more of an impact on a local level, and I agree with this. Your school district has decided to go virtual and you think students should be face-to-face? Ask them what information they've used to make this decision. Fact-check it! Then provide your own (fact-checked) sources to support your opinion.
Another new term for me was information diet. Again, it was fascinating to me how much the media depends on your emotional reaction to the information you consume. I never thought about how when you share similar things in the same circle of people who mostly feel the same way you do, it makes it harder to break away and have independent thoughts about what you read, view, or listen to. The speaker also discusses how you can't go to the grocery store on auto-pilot and expect to lose weight from the things you bought. The same applies with your information diet. I will admit that I am on auto-pilot too much when it comes to my information diet. I need to be more critical of the media I consume not just because of the profession I am about to embark on, but for myself and my family. Like I mentioned early, that began this week!
The blog post by Joyce Valenza confirmed many of the same points in the podcast about fact checking, but also goes (many) steps further by applying this to a school librarian's job. Even though this post is 4 years old, so much has happened in the news literacy world since then (mainly, the madness that was 2020). I think Valenza has created an invaluable list of resources for librarians to explore as they embark on the daunting journey of teaching this life-skill to students. I know I will be visiting this in the near future as I build my "post-truth" toolkit.
Speaking of which, I think that I will need to expand my information diet to include a larger variety of formats and publications. I am guilty of what many of the authors of this week's resources referred to as confirmation bias. My students are counting on me to have a collection of materials that expose them to different viewpoints. I need to do the same in my own life. I am not a big social media user and I know that will also need to change as I prepare for this profession. I need to be able to prepare my students, most of whom rely heavily on social media as their primary news sources. I must be knowledgeable of that world. I am thankful for documents like the P21 Framework that help librarians and other educators embed this instruction into content areas and make the skills that students need to apply very clear.
References:
Association of College & Research Libraries. (2016) Framework for information literacy for higher education [PDF]. American Library Association. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework
Gungor, M. (Executive Producer). (2017, March 7). Fake news and media literacy (S3 E18) [Audio podcast episode]. The liturgists. https://theliturgists.com/podcast/2017/3/7/fake-news-media-literacy
Valenza, J. (2017, December 20). Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. Retrieved January 27, 2021, from https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/
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DeleteAmanda,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your truthfulness in your reflection of this module's materials. I am really passionate about reliable resources and the importance of teaching the young adult community (that I will work with in my future career) of how to determine what information is true in order to make informed decisions and opinions about the world. The podcast truly blew me away and made me want to put it on every educator's playlist or in their queue. As educators, we need to be the foundation of teaching our youth the skills of detecting fake news. It is worrisome that we are discussing this in a Master's course so intently, when it really should be drilled in during high school. Thanks to social media and this world of information overload, I think we as librarians are to carry that load.
Information diet was a new term for me as well, and as I reflected on it, I realized that I really use social media to find out information (because it is so instant, whether true or not) and then will research the topic from there. With all of the media and news bias, it is difficult for me to choose what to follow regularly. After reading other posts and listening to the liturgist's podcast, I think I will focus on my local news and most likely NPR to start off. I look forward to being a model of using legit sources to make informed decisions so that the community I serve will see and ask questions or follow suit.
Hi Amanda! All of your points really resonated with me. Especially the parts about information diets and confirmation bias. My youngest sister is studying algorithms and privacy (or lack there of) in regards to the internet and social media. Even though we all sign contracts and waivers, learning more about the invasiveness and control companies like Facebook and *whispers* Google (haha) have over our lives. Most of the time they are spun in positive ways and can be used as helpful tools. However, my sister told me to look at the facebook account under privacy and ad sense. I suddenly saw that facebook saw everything had researched, looked up, clicked and read on multiple internet browsers even when I was not logged in. This feature can be turned off, but when you try a message pops up trying to explain the benefits of allowing them to track your searches. While this might mean we have more relevant ads (maybe not such a good thing), it also means that they know your political affiliation, know if you are single or married, and are able to accurately guess whether you have kids or not. This was a very long winded way to say, I found what my sister is studying to be so relevant to our topic this week because we are more likely to see news articles on our news feed that confirm our own viewpoints. It makes it easy for us to not even see other perspectives, whether they are accurate or not, and makes it easier for confirmation bias to occur. After listening to the Liturgists podcast, I also realized I need to be more careful about the types of media I am consuming and checking off their helpful list of tips before I dive into an article. Thanks for sharing!
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