This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education concludes that the approach taken to prepare students to identify misinformation online is no longer effective. The authors suggest that popular strategies typically involve providing students a list of things that can look for within the content they are reading and they suggest that these red flags are too easy to eliminate should a content creator be serious about misinformation. They conclude that it is necessary to go beyond the content under consideration.
The necessary approach is to think like a “fact checker”. Open a couple of extra tabs and read laterally. Test facts offered by searching for other sources. Fact checking has become a part of the political scene as news sources identify a claim and then offer evidence from other sources that either verify or refute the claim.
What should be fact checked? I would think any claim that is crucial to the position being taken. I can imagine a situation in which a white board is used to display a web page. Students might then read and highlight core claims made in the article that is displayed. Students might then use their own devices to fact check these claims, save the sources, and paraphrase the critical material from these sources.
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