Blog Post 4
Last week in class, we discussed information literacy and whether this concept should extend beyond libraries. As with most of the course, I agree that this is a skill that many students need and requires critical thinking beyond the library setting. With Facebook and other online blogs pushing the definitions of what real news is and how we classify fake news, students need to be able to assess the validity of literature and online sources quickly and efficiently for all classes. In addition to talking about information literacy, we also viewed some of our classmate's screencasts. I was really impressed by how calm and clear my peers were in their videos and the overall level of quality of the videos, considering the constraints placed on us.
After careful design and testing of exercises, The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) (2016) present approaches students can take to evaluate the validity of online information. The activities span middle school, high school, and college, and carefully consider the academic levels of students. These exercises prompt students with specific questions to get them thinking about how to tell fact from fiction - something the News Literacy Project also aims to helps students with. For example, the SHEG asks students to explain why one source is either fact or fiction and will use these responses to determine whether the student is appropriately evaluating a source. On the other hand, the News Literacy Project helps students learn the difference between fact and fiction by linking to https://checkology.org/, a virtual classroom using natural language processing to evaluate student's ability, to tell the truth from fiction.
Marchi (2012) conducts interviews with teens from a diverse background to better understand how they make sense of online articles to become informed about current events. The author finds that although youth may be tuning into news channels on TV and newspapers, this does not mean they do not want to keep up on current events or are not keeping up. Instead, the way we want to access information is changing, such as through articles and information on social media. Today, students are networked together and can access hundreds of News titles on a daily basis, without ever having to go to a specific website, like NYTimes or CNN; they can access all of these articles on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Whether these people are more or less informed may be up to debate, but people still care about current events, and this will force us to change the way we use online news articles.
Marchi (2012) conducts interviews with teens from a diverse background to better understand how they make sense of online articles to become informed about current events. The author finds that although youth may be tuning into news channels on TV and newspapers, this does not mean they do not want to keep up on current events or are not keeping up. Instead, the way we want to access information is changing, such as through articles and information on social media. Today, students are networked together and can access hundreds of News titles on a daily basis, without ever having to go to a specific website, like NYTimes or CNN; they can access all of these articles on sites like Facebook or Reddit. Whether these people are more or less informed may be up to debate, but people still care about current events, and this will force us to change the way we use online news articles.
I thought the Marchi article was really interesting because she argued against the notion that young people don't care about the news and are poorly informed. Instead, young people are just differently engaged, using social media and satirical TV shows to catch their news, without ever having to read traditional news like newspapers or news outlets like NYT or CNN as you point out. I don't think one way is better than the other because both traditional news and less traditional news like social media have bias issues. It all depends on how people think about what they are reading, and hopefully they are at least somewhat capable of detecting bias.
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in the News Literacy Project and their online classroom. I found it fascinating that they had shifted the focus away from information literacy to media literacy and how that changes structures of intellectual authority. One of the lessons in the News Literacy Project was to show students the "watchdog role" of the news on politicians. Basically, the Project was teaching students to trust the news while Trump is trying to convince the USA not to trust vetted news sources. Meanwhile, us in the libraries are trying to show students that is doesn't really matter where the source comes from, there will be a bias, the only question is if the source is still usable to develop an accurate argument.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the definition and practice of information literacy needs to extend beyond library sciences. We live in an information rich world and interfaces as common as Facebook are influencing its users' thought processes and, potentially, voting decisions. How we consume information has changed since the first definitions of information literacy were established, and I'm sure they'll change again in the next five years. It is important to maintain a current pedagogical system to help young minds navigate this fast-paced, ever-changing, information-based world.
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