Tag Archives: CRAAP test

Information literacy in real life

I’ve become a student again this fall, taking an online master’s degree program at University of Edinburgh. Approaching research and citations (in Harvard style, something I’d never seen before) from a student viewpoint has made feel for my information literacy students even more than I already did. It really helps to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

One thing I’m surprised about is that while some of my classmates cite academic sources, others — almost all scientists and all working in jobs that require them to seek and use information — choose what I would consider weak sources, such as websites that wouldn’t pass the CRAAP test.  On the plus side, I have some new examples to show colleagues in a couple of weeks when I present an introduction to information literacy to fellow administrative and academic support staff at work. But I’ve also gained a new appreciation for how people in their daily lives and work could benefit from thinking critically about how and where they find information and how reliable it is, which are the keys to information literacy.

Yes, I did pay attention during the last national election and realize that people relying on poor sources of information is nothing new. But I thought much of the “fake news” problem was related to the way news is shared and also the way it is marketed today. I’m aware of the importance of teaching undergraduates information literacy, as they are emerging adults who don’t have much experience thinking critically. I hadn’t considered that basic information literacy could be enormously beneficial to adults and to their workplaces and communities.

Public libraries are offering more “how to spot fake news” programming and resources, which is useful, but again this puts the emphasis on news as the sources that might be misleading or counterfactual. Perhaps this should go further. Not all adults go to college or use libraries, so who can or should teach people to find and choose better sources of information in real life — work, volunteer positions, or even just looking stuff up at home? I know that high schools are not all teaching this, since most of my students have never thought much about evaluating information. Should there be public service announcements? Training in workplaces? Pop-up workshops in public places, led by librarians? “How to find reliable information” handouts for every registered voter, or enclosed with every drivers’ license?

What do you think?

 

 

 

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The importance of information literacy, continued

I knew it had been a little while since I posted here but didn’t realize until just now that it’s been since just before the Presidential election here in the U.S. A combination of being understaffed at work and having a lot of other things going on in my life have prevented me from taking time to blog. I’ll try to post more regularly!

In my last post, I talked about librarians’ role in educating people about filter bubbles, distorted perceptions and other information issues ahead of the election. Last week I launched a new semester of library instruction, and I’m using a new tab I created in our Evaluating Online Information LibGuide. I created this tab about evaluating news as a resource for students in the wake of a mass outcry about “fake” news. But I agree with Snopes.com, which ran a piece called “We Have A Bad News Problem, Not a Fake News Problem.” Misleading people with information is not a new problem, and the distortion of real news is as important as the fakery out there.

The message I gave my students this week — and that they responded to with enthusiasm — is that they already have the tools to spot misleading, poorly reported, distorted, or fake information because they know how to use the C.R.A.A.P. test (see the left hand tab in the LibGuide). What it boils down to is who created this website/post/article/tweet and why? What is the point — to persuade? Obscure? Confuse? Provoke? Inform? Who authored the information, on what authority, and with what kind of information to back them up?

The Computer Scientist pointed me to two episodes of a podcast we both listen to this week. These two episodes of On Being speak to the way people are feeling about online information these days. The first was with Maria Popova of Brain Pickings. Popova once said literature is the original Internet, because the way literature speaks to what came before it is a kind of hyperlink. Her thoughtful approach — bringing the best of a thinking life to the medium where many people are thoughtless — is an antidote to clickbait. The other episode, from last week, is with Anil Dash. He speaks to the lack of ethics education in computer science, and the ways that the tech industry acts to create and deploy cool technological innovations without thinking through the human impact.

I think these are both things I can help my student see — the Internet, I tell them, is wonderful in many ways, but we have to be deliberate in our interaction with it, we have to be intentional and critical (in the thinking sense of that word) about what we find there, and we have to use it for good, which requires the hard work of determining what that means.

The good news? The young people I work with seem to really get this and care about it. They were really amazed by some of the things I showed them this week, including a white supremacy group’s website about MLK Jr.which appears at first glance to be a site dedicated to his memory (I refuse to link to it here) and a NYT article about a person their age who created fake news stories about Hillary Clinton and profited wildly. But their amazement was tinged with indignation of the best kind, and I feel good about this part of my work. I am hopeful that one person at a time, I can arm at least some of my students to take back their own futures from those who want to distract, numb, or fool them.

 

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