ResearchEd Presentation - Daniel Willingham - Helping Students to think critically about internet sources.
Watch the presentation and I will post questions at the beginning of July
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ResearchEd Presentation - Daniel Willingham - Helping Students to think critically about internet sources.
Watch the presentation and I will post questions at the beginning of July
1. “60% of teachers think that technology makes it harder to find information” Was this statistic a surprise to you and does knowing this help you in any way?
It shows there is a need to teach students how to navigate digital information. Teaching them to use contents/index/glossary of a book chosen for them is easy in comparison!
I agree @Kimberley Lawson. What I found surprising about this statistic was the little impact this number has on how teachers are working towards changing this. If so many believe that finding information online is hard for students what are they doing to help make it easier? More a rhetorical question than one for you Kim :)
This is an interesting statistic. I would be interested to know the reasons for it. I am wondering if it's a case of too much information making it hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. By contrast to a physical library, as the speaker mentioned right at the beginning of his talk, being carefully curated. So some of the sorting has already been done for you.
2. Many school librarians know about and teach central clues through tools like the CRAAP test. Do you think that this is still important?
Yes, I do think the CRAAP test is still important but we need to go further in teaching peripheral cues as well. I think the webinar didn't focus on central cues because this is already quite well recognised. It was interesting to learn about the shortfalls of teaching central cues alone.
@Kimberley Lawson I must admit that in the past I would not of gone further than the central cues even when I did know about the others. Some of it was time related but as you say if our students already know about the central cues our value is in the peripheral...Nice to bring something new to the table in a positive way.
I think it's important to teach central cues, but I think teaching peripheral cues may potentially be more important because I suspect that's where a lot of the unconscious bias comes in, especially with fake news and online misinformation. We need to get across that the website may look attractive or it may be a celebrity saying it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. If students recognise we're all guilty of that sort of bias, it might make it easier to then evaluate the central cues.
3. Were you aware of the ‘peripheral’ clues? Attractiveness and Authority are commonly known but were you already aware of the ‘social proof” element and will that make a difference to the way you teach this?
I had not thought about Authority only being a peripheral cue for offline content but when Daniel mentioned it, it's kind of obvious. Social proof I was aware of - I find myself not wanting to trust a website that's on the second page of results! I don't know if there just are more ads than there used to be or if Google has got better at signposting them but for some searches you *have* to go to the second page to get a hit that isn't an ad. I will definitely bring this into lessons.
@Kimberley Lawson I thought it was interesting that he highlighted that Authority is very difficult to assess online. Unless you 'know' someone is reliable it is very difficult to find out without doing a lateral search. I think this makes complete sense and is an easy one to teach...
Yes, I think I was aware, but as @Kimberley Lawson says, may not have linked to peripheral clues. The attractiveness one made me smile - it's that unconscious bias creeping in again, but definitely need to remind students!
4.. ‘Students understand that there is a problem but do not get better at evaluating online content’. How can school librarians and teachers help students to do something about this?
I think trying to teach skills as part of curriculum work so they are applying the skills to a problem they have to do. I also think holding students accountable for their research sources would make a difference. I find a lot of students don't care that much about the sources as they don't view it as a valued part of the work. They know that teachers don't care what source they use as long as they write something down (and even then they aren't consistently expected to do so). If teachers demanded source lists and treated them as part of the marking I think it would change that attitude.
Thanks for joining in @Kateri Wilson-Whalley I agree that within the curriculum the teachers need to see this as a valuable skill. Without that why would students put any time to it? I wonder if this has something to do with teachers lacking the skill or experience to mark this effectively. Maybe it is something that the school librarian can offer to mark occasionally if working with a teacher? A good opportunity for collaboration and highlighting their expertise and knowledge in this area.
I agree @Elizabeth that there is potential to support but I think it also comes from higher up. If it's not a curriculum priority across the board then it's down to individual teachers to decide if it's valuable or not to spend time on. As a school librarian I have been saying for 14 years this should be a priority but it's not because there are many competing priorities and this one never makes it to the top of the pile as it doesn't come from higher in the system. I have worked with individual teachers or even departments over the years but if it's a message not repeated in other classes/departments pupils forget about it.
5. Professional fact checkers read laterally, demonstrate click restraint and use Wikipedia wisely. Can you see yourself using these techniques to support student research?
Definitely. I've been mulling over ideas around use of Wikipedia for a while. I like the sound of "Read Laterally" and "Demonstrate Click Restraint", they could sound quite catchy as a little mantra maybe.
I think these are useful things to know because they're quite straightforward concepts to get across. As @Kimberley Lawson mentioned, they're also catchy. They could easily be on a powerpoint slide or a poster near the computers to act as a reminder.
Nice ideas @Kimberley Lawson and @Stephanie Maybe we should produce some...
6. At the end of this webinar a teacher asked what tasks would you do to teach 11year olds this. It made me smile because this is what school librarians teach. How would you of answered that question?
I'd have suggested the basics - CRAAP plus making them aware of the problem using fake websites to highlight. Though I also liked the ID task of real or paid for news articles from a website - I reckon that would be a good basic lesson to add in. So many 'reliable' sources have a butt load of clickbait at the bottom or mixed in, I feel this would be a really useful first skill to develop.
7. Daniel mentioned ‘North West tree octopus’ as a good spoof website. We all know this is now a very old website. Do you have any better suggestions you could share?
https://www.allaboutexplorers.com/ is one written by teachers filled with errors and some fabrications. They have teaching materials as well which might be useful plus it's web address doesn't give the game away. I found it really hard to find stuff that didn't look unattractive/dated. It might be that fake news stories are the way ahead rather than spoof websites.
8. What was your biggest takeaway from this webinar?
It's entirely understandable that the more you know about something, the easier it is to just the accuracy of what you're reading. But if you're looking at something new: read around, check other sources, don't just click on the first thing you see.
The idea that fact checkers stop and google rather than look on the website - it's an easy thing to do, saves time and I reckon will be a lot more popular than CRAAP checking a website with the pupils.
I think it was the reading laterally and click restraint, probably because I've been hearing a lot about it recently too. That fact checkers leave the website they are evaluating on the basis that if it is designed to deceive us, why stay on it? It is so blindingly obvious, but I feel I haven't demonstrated this to students, forcefully enough. They do look at the "About Us" and justify it's a credible site.
The use of teaching with Wikipedia has also come up previously, but it's good to have the same thinking reinforced and the fact that we are still unlikely to be able to penetrate and impact deeply held beliefs. (People are not motivated solely by belief to represent the world accurately.)
@micwag @Kateri Wilson-Whalley @Stephanie @Kimberley Lawson I thought I would share this resources with you as I only came across it today and it links perfectly with our conversation. Susan Merrick who I follow on twitter @merrilibrarian pointed out Mike Caulfield's Online Verification Skills videos on Youtube enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsSbsdukQ8VYy88IiSJhz4NyBxxtLzsNr&app=desktop