digital literacy

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

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This week for the digital pedagogy workshop we continue our explorations of digital/information/media/civic/web literacies by working with Mike Caulfield’s curriculum, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers.  Mike has now published the curriculum in an attractive Pressbooks format, which invites further additions and revisions via the Hypothes.is online annotation platform (we’ve explored both Pressbooks and Hypothes.is here in previous posts).

Last week we introduced a central component of the curriculum, the Digital Polarization Initiative, a structured set of practices by which students evaluate claims found in online sources. Students use practices and tools native to the web, such as wikis, tags, links, and annotations, to marshal evidence, enable analysis, and reach at least tentative judgments about the claims they find in online news sources. The practices build various forms of literacy (digital, information, media, web, civic) as well as domain knowledge in particular fields. No matter what subject you teach, there are sure to be numerous opportunities to help your students become more proficient in assessing the information they access online.

We’ll gather again this Friday, February 17, at 1:30 in the Johnson Center space (Abell 102). Join us then or here online.

A Student Powered Snopes: Building Digital Literacy with the Digital Polarization Initiative

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Fake news, misinformation, hoaxes, alternative facts … there is a growing sense of urgency to equip students with the resources, skills, and critical thinking necessary to establish the credibility of truth claims, the authoritativeness of sources, and the soundness of evidence. On topics ranging from politics to science, health, environmental issues, foreign policy and more, we now live in an information ecosystem that circulates claims with near instant speed and with little context for evaluation. In the face of this, calls for specific forms of literacy are multiplying–whether these be digital literacy, information literacy, media literacy, web literacy, or some combination of all of these. The problem is not new, and for some time we have had rubrics and heuristic guides, such as CRAAP and RADCAB, to provide students with at least a basic framework for the analysis of claims and documents.

But increasingly, we see the need for a more robust set of resources that will help build student competence in the analysis and evaluation of truth claims, especially those found in online environments and social media spaces. One of the more promising projects that has emerged is the Digital Polarization Initiative, developed by Mike Caulfield with the support of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The “DigiPo” initiative goes well beyond a simple checklist, and involves an infrastructure and space for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context for information that appears on the web and in their social media feeds. The Digipo site, which functions as a wiki, is open to any user but is specifically oriented toward college students and classes. Here is how Mike Caulfield introduces the initiative:


Beginning this week and over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll have workshop gatherings to discuss strategies for addressing these issues in your classes and to work through the process of participating in the Digipo initiative and the other elements of the curriculum for digital/information literacy that Mike and others are building. We’ll begin this Friday at 1:30 in the Johnson Center space (Abell 102). If you can’t make it then, let me know and we’ll work out other arrangements.

For further reading:

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