Digital Literacy FLC (Spring 2021)

Discussion Questions

• Where do see students experiencing successes or challenges with searching for, evaluating, and/or selecting sources?
• What concepts, ideas, or strategies from today’s core resources stood out to you? Did you see certain connections between any of these resources and your discipline and/or your teaching? 

• What strategies, activities, or assignments do/might you use to help students to evaluate sources and to manage information overload when searching for and selecting sources?

Core Resources

• Video “Click Restraint” (Stanford History Education Group): 
• “A Source’s Neighborhood,” in Choosing & Using Sources: A Guide to Academic Research (Ohio State University) 

• “A History of CRAAP” (Mike Caulfield)

Additional Resources

• Evaluating Expertise, University of Louisville Library
• Crash Course video “Evaluating Evidence”
• JSTOR "Managing Information Overload" videos

Assessment of student learning: 

• How do we know that what we are teaching is working? 
• Are we, as educators who are struggling to contend with the constantly moving goal posts of this problem falling back on ineffective strategies and materials and search engine optimization?

Information access and the digital divide: 

• Access to resources and frustration with paywalls 
• The privileging of certain voices (e.g., academic sources) and the marginalization of others (e.g., indigenous knowledge, personal experience), and the continued need for a greater diversity of voices
• The false dichotomy of “good” and “bad” sources (which is often synonymous with “scholarly” and “unscholarly” sources)
• The value of learning to do Internet research and to critically evaluate online sources, activities that will continue to be essential outside of academic settings and in everyday life

The complexity of teaching about bias

• Almost all sources have implicit or unconscious biases. No source is perfect.
• Many students are under the assumption that, because no sources are perfect and humans have implicit or unconscious biases, every source must be corrupt and no sources are entirely trustworthy. This can lead to setbacks in their understanding of research.

Distinguishing sources:

Students often have a difficult time distinguishing between legitimate news sources and propaganda sites.

• Click restraint is the practice of reviewing the overall results on a search results page before deciding what to click on. Here is a related classroom activity. Give students a printout of the first page of Google results for a particular query (e.g. "fishing environmental impact"). Have them practice "click restraint" by evaluating each result as it appears on Google. Since the results are on paper, they really can't click through to the source: they have to evaluate each result based on the URL, heading, and snippet text.
• Use the metaphor of a source’s “neighborhood” to explore the context behind different information sources and the relationships among them. This metaphor can also be used to consider where to find sources that are likely to be relevant and credible for answering a given question. 
• “Intro to Lateral Reading” lesson plan (Stanford HIstory Education Group)
• An English professor creates a “Research Archive” in Canvas to help students find sources for literature papers. For each paper prompt, the professor chooses several credible secondary sources (written at the appropriate level) and posts them in a folder on Canvas. Students then browse through the folder and choose which sources to use in their papers. This method exposes students to multiple journal articles/book chapters, so that they see what credible sources look like.
• Henry Jenkins et al.’s introductory chapter from Spreadable Media is really accessible for students to understand key concepts like “sticky” (infinite scroll and profitability of social media platforms) vs. “spreadable” media (virality and networks). This chapter is long-ish, but you could assign excerpts or summarize key ideas. It’s also a little dated, in the examples used, so it’s a nice opportunity for students to update the ideas here with more contemporary examples. 

• “Reuters finally decides to charge you for its online news stories with a paywall,” The Verge, April 15, 2021 
• Proposed Information Literacy Curriculum Bill for NJ public education: Senate Bill 3464 – Requires instruction on information literacy for students in grades kindergarten through 12.