In many readings for this week, the theme of identifying misinformation was prevalent.
“Encourage students to take the indirect route and begin their investigation of unfamiliar digital sources by leaving them.”
This quote from the reading, “How to Help Students Spot Misinformation,” highlights the importance of reading laterally rather than vertically due to the fact that vertical reading may consume students in the actual content of the source, distracting from the signs of unreliability. This relates to the overall theme of assisting students in discerning facts from clickbait: to simply always check! Searching for multiple sources to support a claim is always beneficial.
“If you’re a human being reading this on the internet and if you’re not a time traveler from some future, better world, there is less than a one in a hundred chance you do the sort of checks we’re showing regularly.”
This quote from the article “The “Always Check” Approach To Online Literacy” raises the question: why do we have such an aversion to fact-checking as human beings? Is it social, psychological, or both? Most of the information in these articles is fairly straightforward, but the human brain is an anomaly to me.
“We are all driving cars, but none of us have licenses,”
This quote from the article “How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News” should be taken with a grain of salt. Information is openly available, and searching for proper corroboration of sources does not require any special qualifications. Implying that it does may not be helpful, as it makes it seem harder than it actually is. Besides, I personally believe driving is a thousand times harder than fact-checking.
