Please listen to the following 20 min recording by clicking on the picture below. This talk is about hate speech and misinformation across social media and the importance of digital literacy. The questions are below in the comments. Please join in when you can.
1. What is your definition of digital literacy? It is just the technical skills or is it more and if so what is it to you?
That it isn't just about technical ability, it's also about navigating misinformation and digging deeper for truth
2. According to this presentation, the technical skills of digital literacy are not enough to address the problems of fake news, fight against terror and misinformation. Were you surprised to hear this?
Not at all. The presenter asked what do we tell students regarding what is good and what is bad?
No - I think a lot of people might have at least some of the technical skills necessary, but it's also about how you approach fake news etc. I think it requires engaging critically with the material, and working out when to apply those technical skills, which means actively thinking about them more than a lot of us perhaps do normally. How do we approach teaching that?
3. Many people live in a social media bubble where they can be encouraged to share the populist view or become passive receivers. How can we encourage our students to get a wider view of the world and burst this bubble?
By teaching students to check and cross reference sources. I was surprised at some of the sources which were left or right leaning, which I would have thought to be reliable.
We all need to be aware that no source is entirely without bias. Some are more reliable than others, but even these need to be examined critically. I think encouraging students to examine and be aware of their own biases is also important. We all bring our own point of view to our interpretation of the information we find.
4. If social media is all about engagement over quality and allows trolls to exploit and spread hate, is there anything we can do within our roles to combat that?
Most students, in my experience, have no wish to spread hate. We need to warn them against passive sharing, perhaps by illustrating who may be getting hurt by this, and making it more personal to them.
5. Teaching our students to think critically plays a huge part in combatting hate speech and misinformation. Can you see a way to do this or are you already doing something you can share?
During Y7 Internet Search Skills lessons, we have touched on misinformation and how we can link this back to the truth. I have used really simple illustrations they are already familiar with, such as things that might have happened at school. They seem to understand these examples.
This has been a really thought-provoking session, which will change how I teach as we need to be ensuring students go deeper and learn to fact check.
Thanks for joining in
Thanks for this session and for highlighting this interesting piece of research, Elizabeth!
Thanks Elizabeth - a great video that makes some really interesting points about digital literacy and everything that involves!
Thanks for joining in this time