Information Literacy, Technology, the Media and You
Information literacy and technology skills are a part of the
fundamental 21st century skills every individual need in order to be
a contributing member of society – skills that must be taught to every student
who walks through the doors of our schools. As librarians, we stand in a
position to greatly influence the ways that information literacy and media
literacy is taught within our schools. It is our responsibility to step up and
make sure our teachers and administrators understand the importance of information
literacy and places a high enough value on it to warrant explicit teaching within
he walls of the school.
So what then is information literacy? It’s about being able
to use technology effectively, access and evaluate information from various
resources, use and manage that information, analyze media and effectively
communicate using technology. Clay
Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says that we all suffer from
overcomsumption of information; keeping a healthy information diet is all about
what information we consume, the balance of it, and the quality of our
information consumption.
I’ll be the first to admit that my information diet is
heavy on the junk food side – I get a lot of information from social media and
that is absolutely NOT a reliable place to find information! Granted, I don’t
take anything I see on social media
sites seriously so at least I do know it is junk food information.
Unfortunately, a lot of people –including our students – really do rely on
social media for their news and information and take it at face value.
| https://pixabay.com/en/news-false-concept-information-2094394/ |
The podcast “Fake News & Media Literacy” from The Liturgists addresses this precise issue of misinformation, fake news and information literacy. A recommendation in the podcast really struck me as a great way to think about news and media literacy: instead of just applying it to conspiracy theories, bring the kind of scrutiny that the courts of law demand to how you evaluate information.
Libel is supposed to be punishable by law, you can’t publish
something that isn’t true that negatively affects someone else. But the
internet just about makes that obsolete; anyone can post anything on the
internet with hardly any repercussions. There isn’t any required fact-checking
to post online. So it’s important that we as librarians teach our students how
to evaluate information and news; we have to teach them how to create a healthy
information diet by getting information from reputable sources and a variety of
sources.
Hi there,
ReplyDeleteI should also hit the refresh button on my information diet. After listening to the podcast, I realized how often I just click news on social media rather than search for news on a reputable news application on my phone, or actually pay attention to the local news that is always on at my house (morning and evening). To be honest, I wonder how many students (my kiddos included) look to their parents and think to themselves that we're doing it the right way so they should follow our lead? Ah! Frightening! This week's module has definitely got me thinking how I'll better teach my own children how to consume news and other digital media. I believe part of lesson this week may have been to push us to be better consumers so we can model for our colleagues and students going forward or in the future.