Roughly 650 Washington highschool college students, lecturers and librarians traveled to native college campuses this month for MisinfoDay, an academic media literacy program that’s developed in recent times via a statewide partnership between the College of Washington’s Heart for an Knowledgeable Public and Washington State College’s Edward R. Murrow Faculty of Communication.
Because the CIP’s MisinfoDay program coordinator, it’s been gratifying to see this necessary work develop since I helped co-organize the primary occasion on the UW Info College in 2019 as a Grasp of Library and Info Science scholar.
In Washington, we’re fortunate to have so many passionate lecturers, librarians, and college students embrace this work, whether or not it’s educators adapting these classes for his or her school rooms or highschool college students working with us to offer suggestions and insights about MisinfoDay’s core classes and actions.
Throughout this yr’s occasions on the UW in Seattle and WSU Vancouver, our UW colleague Mike Caulfield, co-author of “Verified: How you can Suppose Straight, Get Duped Much less, and Make Higher Selections about What to Consider On-line,” famous that whereas questioning whether or not one thing is true or false is certainly necessary, generally it’s higher to begin with the query: “Is that this what I believe it’s?”
To exhibit, Caulfield requested college students to evaluate a viral information video from 2022 that confirmed local weather protesters throwing a can of tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh portray. The video racked up greater than 50 million views and sparked astonishment and anger across the globe.
When many individuals noticed this video, they thought they had been watching protesters destroy a priceless murals. Had they stopped to test this impression, a fast Google search would have turned up loads of information tales that affirm the existence of the tomato soup incident on the Nationwide Gallery in London and present a key piece of lacking context: the portray, “Sunflowers,” was behind glass, and suffered no injury. The video didn’t imply what folks thought it did.
Caulfield, a digital literacy professional who developed the SIFT technique for factchecking and contextualizing claims on-line, additionally pointed to the three vertical dots that seem subsequent to Google search outcomes as a useful device for navigating on-line info. When clicked, the three dots present extra particulars concerning the supply, giving searchers extra context that may assist them higher consider the knowledge they’ve surfaced.
If there’s any unifying theme among the many many classes that had been a part of this yr’s MisinfoDay occasions at UW, WSU in Pullman and WSU Vancouver, it’s the significance for all of us to decelerate (that’s the S in SIFT) — particularly when now we have a robust emotional response, like folks did to the soup protest video, to (I) examine the supply, (F) discover higher protection and (T) hint claims and media again to their authentic context.
We will all profit from practising these abilities. When folks take into consideration media and data literacy abilities, they typically consider them as one thing for different folks, not themselves. Difficult this notion is among the objectives behind escape room model video games that the CIP has developed via ongoing analysis collaborations on the UW iSchool and examined via occasions like MisinfoDay and in public libraries throughout the nation. As groups compete to unravel puzzles, the video games current gamers with quite a lot of manipulated media, social media bots, and deepfakes that present we’re all weak to being tricked and fooled.
A scholar participant from Sedro-Woolley Excessive College shared an astute remark with KUOW Public Radio’s Kim Malcolm, in a phase that aired on NPR’s “Morning Version.”
“I believe actually, adults may profit extra from it. As a result of they don’t often take into consideration that sort of stuff. We’re rising up in a really technological period. So we all know now we have to, however some adults are like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have an effect on me. As a result of I didn’t develop up like that.’”
That’s why many in our state need to see these necessary academic efforts develop to incorporate alternatives for intergenerational studying. Lately, we’ve been proud to help Washington educators in adapting MisinfoDay’s actions and classes of their colleges and the communities they serve. That features the event of social science festivals the place highschool college students, like these in Port Townsend and Ballard, share the media and data literacy abilities they’re studying within the classroom with the adults of their lives, together with their dad and mom and grandparents.
On the UW Heart for an Knowledgeable Public, our workforce is grateful for the help we’ve seen for this very important academic work from lecturers, librarians, college students, dad and mom, public officers and group stakeholders throughout Washington. Educators, public officers and stakeholders in different states — together with in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and California, the place a broad coalition in Monterey County has come collectively to host their first in-person MisinfoDay occasion in Could — are taking note of the progressive work that’s been fostered and brought root right here in Washington.
Editor’s word: That is column is produced by a collaboration between The Seattle Occasions Save the Free Press initiative and the College of Washington’s Heart for an Knowledgeable Public.
