I think every single student my age has learned the same amount of Digital Literacy in school, and that amount is low. We were told the following information: Don’t use Wikipedia, use good sources like Britannica. Which, to be fair, Britannica is a good place to find information, but I don’t think a single one student in my school every used it. Wikipedia was always the way to go, just taking Wikipedia’s sources as your own. Other than that, we didn’t learn anything else about Digital Literacy from school. Instead, we mostly learned through trial and error online. Getting baited by a fake article and learning not to trust things online, driving us to make sure we check for sources on information. Getting messaged by a random troll online and learning to be safer and ignore random peoples posts and opinions.
I think our generation sits in an interesting position when it comes to digital literacy. At least in my school, most teacher didn’t grow up with the internet. At least, not like we did. Most of the teacher in my could have taught my parents (and a few did), and the ones younger than that weren’t too young either. We, however, have learned quite a bit more, and we have the ability to teach what we know to the future generations.
Image taken from LarryFerlazzo.com
In todays age of the internet, finding accurate information can be difficult. You can see wildly different articles giving different takes and statistic on topics, many coming from well known and credible resources. However, you must take bias into account. Now, we all know how bias can affect an individual’s opinion, which would then go on to effect what they share and post. This then leads to others in the same group with those same bias’s seeing this, and trusting its true at face value, which therefor reinforces their own opinion. Now, we can see this pretty often at the individual level (like, everyone knows we shouldn’t take some random tweet at face value) but what’s less commonly discussed is the bias’s of the media. We have many news sources and media outlets that we often don’t realize are biased. Take the Washington Post, for example, with an article titled: “Think twice before changing the tax rules to soak billionaires” . Then, take into account the fact that the website is owned by Jeff Bezos, a billionaire. Now, I won’t tell you whether or not increasing taxes on billionaires is a good thing, but I can tell you that billionaires think increasing their taxes would suck. Another huge influence influence on someone bias comes from advertising. Many people and companies are just paid to have positive opinions on certain topics and products. “Lessons in Critical Thinking” is a great place to learn about more about how these bias’ can be seen, and how you can educate others about this.
Another thing you have to take into account is learning who on the internet is worth listening to. There are many people out there with the goal to spread misinformation, for whatever the reason. Learning how they do this, and what it looks like, is incredibly important. I’d recommend playing “Spot the Troll” with your class, as it even opened my eyes a bit more to what a “troll” could look like. As well, “Break the Fake” is a great way to see how misinformation works. It’s not just blatant lies, but twisting truth.
The NCTE’s “Definition Of Literacy in a Digital Age” gives some important goals for us to reach as teachers. We need to teach students how to research, how to spot a biased or fake article, how to find out if a source is really reputable. I think an interesting lesson you could use to showcase this to a class, could be choosing some topic, and then giving students different sources to learn about it, and present what they learn. Then, see if there’s any different information gained from different sources. Hopefully, it can help showcase to students that checking multiple sources is super important, as you might miss out on certain pieces of information. Students need to learn today, more than ever, what Digital Literacy really means.