iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

This is the age of misinformation and fake news. Here are the best unbiased fact-checking sites so that you can find the truth.

Beneath the spread of all “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence lies society’s failure to teach its citizenry information literacy: how to think critically about the deluge of information that confronts them in our modern digital age. Instead, society has prioritized speed over accuracy, sharing over reading, commenting over understanding. Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own. Schools no longer teach source triangulation, conflict arbitration, separating fact from opinion, citation chaining, conducting research or even the basic concept of verification and validation. In short, we’ve stopped teaching society how to think about information, leaving our citizenry adrift in the digital wilderness increasingly saturated with falsehoods without so much as a compass or map to help them find their way to safety. The solution is to teach the world's citizenry the basics of information literacy.

Every day, critics of the American president decry his penchant for "false or misleading claims," while he and his supporters fire back with accusations of "fake news." It’s no wonder those of us who teach are worried more than ever about information literacy.

The flourishing of misperceptions makes it harder for us to do our jobs in the college classroom. Many faculty members believe a key part of our role is helping students understand and thrive in the world as it is. But to do that, don’t we need to find some kind of shared understanding of that world? To succeed in college and in life afterward, students need to be able to tell a truth from a falsehood. And clearly, that is not as easy as it seems.

I would argue that, whatever your discipline, you should be teaching information literacy — the capacity to understand, assess, evaluate, and apply information to solve problems or answer questions — as part of your courses. It’s a necessary skill to teach, even if you don’t see educating students to navigate the outside world as part of your mission as an instructor.

Here are ways to incorporate much-needed information literacy into your courses this fall.

The issue of Fake News in general isn’t likely to go away. Kalev Leetaru in Forbes sends us A Reminder That ‘Fake News’ Is An Information Literacy Problem – Not A Technology Problem

Beneath the spread of all “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence lies society’s failure to teach its citizenry information literacy: how to think critically about the deluge of information that confronts them in our modern digital age. Instead, society has prioritized speed over accuracy, sharing over reading, commenting over understanding. Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own.

Dr. Alison Head and her Project Information Literacy (PIL) research team recently released the findings of a new national study on college students and how they consume and interact with a vast and deeply polarized news ecosystem. The News Study findings are the result of an online survey of 5,844 respondents and telephone interviews with 37 participants from 11 diverse colleges and universities. The research also included computational analysis of Twitter data associated with respondents, as well as a Twitter panel of 135,891 college-age people.

In the study’s press release, Dr. Head shared:

News is fast, social, and visual and typically delivered to students in posts, alerts, tweets, and conversations that stream at them throughout the day. And young news consumers are left to assemble and interpret what news means, while many take this evaluative step, others do not.
So what? The News Study’s Executive Summary offers Five Research Takeaways as well as Six Recommendations.

Instead of struggling to find information, 21st century students are overwhelmed with it — websites, blogs, databases, magazines, books, documentaries, newspapers, television shows, organizations, advertisements, and agencies are all available at their fingertips. Teachers must guide their students through it all to achieve information literacy and become savvy consumers of information.