Curriculum and Instruction Commons^™

Both Facts And Feelings: Emotion And News Literacy, Susan Currie Sivek

Journal of Media Literacy Education

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences’ emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption. This essay explores the role of emotion in the “fake news” phenomenon and the implementation of emotion analytics tools in news distribution. I examine the function of emotion in news consumption and the current status of emotion within existing news literacy training programs. Finally, I offer suggestions for …

Fighting Fake News And Biases With Cognitive Psychology, Marlee Givens, Seth Porter, Karen Viars, Liz Holdsworth

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Fake news, faulty data, and questionable research outputs: how do we find the truth when so much information is uncertain? Part of this problem is cognitive biases in our decision-making process. The mind will create a durable narrative around knowns and ignore unknowns. Scholar Daniel Kahneman (2012) refers to this phenomenon as, "What you see is all there is" or WYSIATI. Another common heuristic, the "availability cascade," causes the mind to prefer immediate examples that come to mind over more reliable information that is less easily recalled. These biases limit the accuracy of the information that people understand, as well …

You Deserve The Truth: Helping Students Understand The Causes And Consequences Of Fake News, Ngaire I. Smith, Heather Cyre

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Can dandelions cure cancer? Is Bill Murray running for President? Was a pizza place in New Jersey running a human trafficking ring? In this age of digital and social media it may be difficult for students to differentiate between authoritative information and fake news.

After a brief presentation on the history of fake news and its prevalence in social media, workshop participants (acting as an early college seminar class) will watch a video about the PizzaGate incident and discuss the phenomenon of fake news, why people create it, and why people share it. Next the class will develop a fake …

Who’S Evaluating The Evaluators? Cognitive Biases, Fake News, And Information Literacy, Jon C. Pope, Kim Becnel

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

In response to the increased attention to “fake news” and “alternative facts” as information challenges in the wake of the recent election cycle, librarians and educators have dramatically stepped up efforts to cultivate basic information literacy skills, especially prioritizing the careful evaluation of online sources of information. While these critical source evaluation skills are an essential component of functional information literacy, the recent emphasis on them is predicated on a model of communication that assumes that the readers of these online sources are capable—and desirous—of making informed, objective judgments about the credibility of an external information source. Rhetorical theories, however, …

The Promises, Challenges, And Futures Of Media Literacy, Monica Bulger, Patrick Davison

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media literacy has become a center of gravity for countering fake news, and a diverse array of stakeholders – from educators to legislators, philanthropists to technologists – have pushed significant resources toward media literacy programs. Media literacy, however, cannot be treated as a panacea. This paper provides a foundation for evaluating media literacy efforts and contextualizing them relative to the current media landscape. Media literacy is traditionally conceived as a process or set of skills based on critical thinking. It has a long history of development aligned along the dialectic between protection and participation. Contemporary media literacy tends to organize …