Educators are designating this week to a focus on digital citizenship. This term means different things to different people and concerns multiple recommendations. Among the skills typically prioritized is the capacity to seek and process online information in a way to understand issues accurately. This goal is not easy as biased information is difficult to identify and information located can be processed in a biased manner. A digital citizen recognizes both challenges and seeks to avoid both biases.
One simple strategy is to seek information on a given topic from multiple and varied sources. This can require giving up on some personal selection as our own biases can influence what we select.
The Google News Aggregator offers one approach. First, it identifies important topics of the day and offers multiple sources of information related to these general topics. Second, it differentiates content suited to your personal history from a more general collection of sources. See the following image.
The two opportunities are identified in this image by the red boxes. The box surrounding “More headlines” provides a way to find multiple sources and multiple formats (news stories, images, tweets) related to a given topic and the box in the upper left shows the effort to differentiate top stories from the more personal selection “for you”. These two options are revealed when opening the drop down menu under the Google News heading.
Yes, the title of “fair and balanced” was used in a sarcastic way.
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