First, let's start with an example: What does it mean to "fall" for a fake news story? And can that be set to music?
Fake news is a problem so complex, and so enduring throughout history, that it requires its own mini-documentary. Join me as I provide a brief overview and interview two experts who know more about fake news than me - Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic and Michael Caulfield of the University of Washington. Here, I develop the concept of the threats that fake news incites, plus a possible solution directed at higher education learners.
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The Idea Gallery
As Caulfield mentioned above, fake news can be subverted at least in part with good news gathering and assessment habits. But what else can be done? Below are a collection of thinkers who provide a few key ideas that contribute to the conversation.
According to Matthew Overstreet, “most literacy behaviors are automated and habituated”. In his work, he expands the idea that any kind of literacy activity requires the creation of literacy as well as its consumption – in other words, students need to create information products as well as use them. Since media environments are constructed out of a bunch of different parts – video, audio, webpages and social media, for instance – students ought to learn how to create these things in order to become more digitally literate.
Molly June Roquet (left) agrees, and wants to expand that idea. A former K-8 school librarian in Oakland, CA now working in an academic library, they champion the concept of “critical digital literacy”, which they define as “the ability to seek context, imagine alternatives and build agency to create change.” They hasten to add that this new framing does not displace older, more "checklist" oriented methods of fact-checking, but adds emphasis on information architecture and evolution. Therefore, their work dovetails with already existing frameworks like Michael Caulfield's SIFT method.
"All posts, even those that do not bear characteristics of a rant, have an emotional dimension," writes Angela Laflen. Fake news is intended to play on emotion, short-circuiting the thinking of those who consume it. To measure emotion in writing, she brings up the concepts of "evaluation devices" (emotional adjectives and adverbs, either positive or negative) and "quantity devices" (words that denote size - magnifying or shrinking, or words that amplify the discourse.) In a fake news context, these devices can trigger readers into believing (and possibly sharing) a false story. This coincides with Friedersdorf's thoughts on removing emotion from informational discourse as much as possible.
Saiorse De Paor and Bahareh Heravi (left to right) mention that most of the scholarly literature regarding disinformation and information literacy focuses on a lack of skills. However, they highlight that the infrastructure of the current news climate is also an important factor to consider. They also advocate for metaliteracy, which incorporates information literacy among other literacies and gives students the ability to interact with and create information on a variety of platforms.
If we are to take Overstreet's advice (reinforced by De Paor and Heravi) and create assignments that allow students to understand information processes by creating information, then it would help to understand a bit more about information architecture itself, as Roquet states. Librarians to the rescue on this one - below is a quick overview of the Association of College and Research Librarians' Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and a brief discussion on how it relates to drafting assignments.
And to help get you started, I've included a sample assignment for you - a digital journal for first year seminar students using Adobe Spark, the very same digital tool that I used to design this site. Spark is a quick introduction to both digital tools and digital information creation. Plus, with Spark's presentation mode, the page converts easily into slides, making the skills learned for this tool transferable to any number of classes and work situations. You are welcome to use and modify this assignment as you see fit.
Sources cited:
Caulfield, Michael. "Information Literacy for Mortals." Project Information Literacy | PIL Provocation Series. 14 December 2021, https://projectinfolit.org/pubs/provocation-series/essays/information-literacy-for-mortals.html.
Caulfield, Michael. “SIFT (The Four Moves).” Hapgood, 19 June 2019, https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/.
De Paor, Saiorse, and Heravi, Bahareh. "Information Literacy and Fake News: How the Field of Librarianship Can Help Combat the Epidemic of Fake News." Journal of Academic Librarianship, Vol. 46, Issue 5, September 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133320301099?via%3Dihub.
"Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education", American Library Association, 9 February 2015. http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework (Accessed April 26, 2022)
Friedersdorf, Conor. “How ‘Big Disinformation’ Can Overcome Its Skeptics.” The Atlantic, 21 Apr. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/anti-disinformation-laws-social-media/629612/.
Laflen, Angela. "Taking the Temperature of the (Virtual) Room: Emotions in the Online Writing Classroom." In Applied Pedagogies, edited by Daniel Ruffman and Abigail Scheg, Utah State University Press, 2016, pg. 106-120
Overstreet, Matthew. “Writing at the Interface: A Research and Teaching Program for Everyday Digital Media Literacy”. Literacy in Composition Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, July 2020, pp. 47-66, doi:10.21623/1.8.1.4.
Roquet, Molly June. “Rethinking Digital Literacy.” American Libraries Magazine, 1 Mar. 2022, https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/?p=128641. See also https://www.mollyjuneroquet.com/ for their collection of research and resources regarding critical digital literacy
Wardle, Claire. “Fake News: It’s Complicated.” First Draft, 16 Feb. 2017, https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/fake-news-complicated/.
Thanks to:
Justin Hodgson and Adam Maksl, who lead the Digital Gardening Initiative at Indiana University. This assignment combines some of their ideas and almost all of their tools, especially Adobe Spark and Adobe Rush. (Sorry, I recorded audio in Audacity.)
My partner, Jef Reynolds, for being a great musician and an even better sport. Also, for being the best Cisco Houston impersonator in the Midwest.
Credits:
Created with images by Aleksey 159 - "Newspapers, world news information concept, close-up, panoramic" • Nueng - "hands with pen writing on notebook"