The following word bank is a compilation of keywords and buzzwords, I have come across in my readings online (and in books) on the topic as well as crowdsourced contributions from my online network.
Tag: Media Literacy
Classroom activities, curriculum links and teacher resources for using the material on the media literacy site.
A collection of media resources, including videos exploring bias, finding sources and ethical journalism.
The primary skill of a person in an attention-scarce environment is making relatively quick decisions about what to turn their attention toward, and making longer term decisions about how to construct their media environment to provide trustworthy information.
Critical media literacy has readers interrogating text to examine and challenge the dominant power structures that audiences work to make meaning between the dominant, oppositional, & negotiated readings of media.
Ian O’Byrne continues his discussion of the importance of critical literacy for students today in response to the changing ways that networked publics consume and critique information online. It is interesting to compare O’Byrne’s prompts for interrogating texts with Mike Caulfield’s four moves. Another interesting read on this topic is Clare Wardle’s lessons on for the age of disinformation.
If Facebook was a tool for confirmation bias, that would kind of suck. It would. But that is not the claim. The claim is that Facebook is quite literally training us to be conspiracy theorists. And given the history of what happens when conspiracy theory and white supremacy mix, that should scare the hell out of you. I’m petrified. Mark Zuckerberg should be too.
Mike Caulfield explains the dangers of fake news and the way in which the repetition and familiarity with such lies can lead to an odd sense of truth.
People exposed themselves to Facebook multiple times a day, every single day, seeing headlines making all sorts of crazy claims, and filed them in their famil-o-meter for future reference.
As I say — it’s the internet — you’re not stuck with that one story that comes to you. By going out and actively choosing a better story you will not only filter out false stories but also see the variety of ways an event is being covered.
Mike Caulfield shares a series of videos summarising his work around Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. Although it only touches on the basics, it still provides a useful introduction to the ‘Four Moves’ approach.
danah boyd discusses concerns about the weaponising of media literacy through denalism and says that there is a need for cognitive strengthening. This includes:
- “Actively taking things out of context can be helpful for analysis”
- “help students truly appreciate epistemological differences”
- “help students see how they fill in gaps when the information presented to them is sparse and how hard it is to overcome priors [confirmation bias and selective attention]”
Benjamin Doxtdator raises the concern that focusing on the individual:
Would boyd’s cognitive strength training exercises have helped here? No. Turning inwards to psychology, rather outwards to the political context, is precisely what gives us ‘lone wolf’ analyses of white supremacy.
Instead Doxtdator suggests considering the technical infrastructure. Interestingly, she does touch on platforms in the Q&A at the end:
One of the things that is funny is that these technologies get designed for a very particular idea of what they could be used for and then they twist in different ways.source
The original text that the keynote was based on can be found here, while a response to some of the criticism can be found here.