I have always been passionate about information literacy and getting the facts straight. I used to get in trouble as a kid for talking back, which was usually just me trying to correct an adult's factual error. In high school, I wrote a strongly-worded letter to one of our local journalists because he misidentifed turtles as amphibians in a piece about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I screamed myself hoarse when people in powerful positions started using phrases like "alternative facts". In an ideal world, I would teach a compulsory course at my high school that is solely devoted to information evaluation. So when, in the fall of 2022, I learned about the shortcomings of that long-touted librarian tool, the CRAAP test, I went straight to work with my colleague Nadia to come up with something that would be more effective, but still suit our students' needs.
Credibility.
- web domains ( .orgs have been available for anyone to purchase since 2019, y'all, and top-level domains [TLDs] are an ever changing beast)
- the open web versus databases (Check out Dr. Kristen Mattson's blog post "Academic Databases are the Netflix for Nerds!" if you struggle to teach this concept to your students)
- how human psychology predisposes us to trust information shared by people we know, and how social media blurs the lines between people we actually know and people we feel like we know.
This is also where we learn about and practice Lateral Reading. If nothing else, learn about and teach lateral reading. This is a totally transferable skill that is used by professional fact-checkers and will serve our students (and everyone, really) well in our increasingly online worlds, even as we ramp up interactions with generative AI.
One of my favorite lateral reading thought experiments with our students is talking to them about how to lateral read a social media post. People speak with such confidence on TikTok, YouTube, etc... how do you know you can trust what they say on a topic? How do you investigate the user behind the username? We've gotten to put this into action in a really cool assignment for World Literature I (the brainchild of my colleague, Kirsten Reed) wherein students are actually required to use some type of social media as a source. The feedback from the students has been overwhelmingly positive, and it has the twin benefits of transferring this skill to their real online lives and forcing them to understand how to construct a properly formatted citation by hand (I have yet to find an automation for generating a citation from a TikTok URL).
Relevance.
- Perform a search while logged into my work account.
- Open a window in another browser and perform the same search while logged into my personal Google account.
- Open an Incognito window and perform the same search without being logged in to a Google account.
- Show all 3 windows side-by-side. The results are always different, though sometimes the differences are subtler than others.
This is a segue into a discussion about the algorithms that personalize everything we experience online, from our Google searches to our social media feeds to our streaming media recommendations. We talk about the dangers of echo chambers, how important it is to recognize our personal biases, and some strategies for doing good research in spite of this (using library resources, naturally, but also using Incognito windows and comparing search results with friends).
That's just level one of Relevance.
Level two is mostly subconscious: if I'm writing about high-speed rail, do a search for "trains", and there's a result about training animals, my brain filters that out for me automatically.
Level three is more intentional: I'm writing about high-speed rail, do a search for "trains," and have to choose between an article about existing train systems in the US and existing train systems in Japan-- I'll probably need to look into those sources to decide which one is more relevant to my topic. This is a great place to dive into search strategies that can help dial in those investigations to return a limited number of results that are most relevant to your topic. (This is really a whole lesson in and of itself.)
Level four is what students seem to struggle with the most: they have a good source, but they need to pull out the most relevant quote to support their argument. As this is a little more English teacher territory, I usually do a short practice with my students so they know where it fits, then move on to the next letter.
Intention.
- to Document (raw footage or audio with little to no commentary; primary source)
- to Inform ("news" in the traditional sense; straight-forward reporting with some added context)
- to Entertain (self-explanatory; sometimes overlaps with media in other categories)
- to Persuade (to change someone's mind)
- to Sell (to persuade you to part with your money)
- to Provoke (to persuade you to react strongly; to persuade you to take a certain action)
This is a great place to talk about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation (and to once again plug the benefits of using vetted library resources) and tie back to any classroom discussions students may have had about propaganda. If the intention behind media or information is difficult to determine, this is also a good place to call back to and practice lateral reading.
Additionally, we can talk about what types of sources are appropriate for school research when, covering the differences between Scholarly vs. Trade vs. Popular sources, and when it might make sense to use social media in school projects-- for example, you would not cite an Instagram post, even one meant to inform, as factual evidence on its own, but you could cite it as an example of the cultural opinion on a topic.
Finally, we come to
Timeliness.
Conclusion
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