I’ve been fascinated by this topic – the issue of how young
people discover and critically evaluate information that they find online.
It’s a discussion that applies not just to young people,
either – all internet users have different levels of web-skills and need to
constantly be alert of internet scams and deliberate attempts at deceit. I’m
sure we’ve all had spam pretending to be from our banks landing in our
inbox and despite feeling pretty ‘web-savvy’, have been amazed at the sophisticated
appearance of such junk emails. (My tip, if you do open such an email, is to
always hover over any links so that the address is displayed in your browser –
this never fails to reveal that it is not, in fact, ‘halifax.com’ that you will
be taken to, but a long-winded URL often with an unrecognisable domain).
The article ‘Teaching Zack To Think’ by Alan November (1998) deals
with similar methodologies which, although now slightly out-dated, pin-point
some foundations in source-checking that people can be encouraged to actively
apply whilst conducting online research.
The above article suggests that “The Internet is a place
where you can find “proof” of essentially any belief system that you can
imagine". To test this theory, I put “are strawberries aliens?”
into Google and I was actually surprised to see that there were no exact matches.
But of course, my digital fluency tells me that this only means that by ‘Google’
search terms, there are no worthy articles to show – there may be a page out
there asking this very question.
In ‘Truth, lies and the internet’, Bartlett and Miller
(1998) reveal the findings from their research into digital fluency, conducted
by means of a literature review and a widespread teacher survey.
I found the initial stages of this report problematic from
the context of cultural values and freedom of information – by declaring the
internet as a ‘danger’ riddled with ‘inaccurate content’, it felt as though the
authors were seeking to define set views on what is truth and what is lies in a
very Orwellian way. Thankfully, Bartlett and Miller agreed that censorship was not
an option and the report recommended that we need to equip young people with
critical skills to make their own judgements about online information.
The topics that arise from these papers soon spiral into
ethics, cultural values and politics. The key educational issue at the
heart of Bartlett and Miller's report, and in terms of digital fluency, however, is
criticality. Many traditional schooling methods teach pupils to be ‘recipients
of knowledge’, and as such, in an internet environment, this lack of questioning
and critical skills places a young person in a vulnerable position when
confronted with the many, many millions of web pages on the internet.
As a result of the above reading, I went on to discover some
fantastic online resources for helping to equip young people with these skills –
such as the ‘Propaganda Machine’ (pictured to the left).
I would certainly consider using online challenges such as
these if I were facilitating a session with young people that involved them
actively researching the internet. It may seem at first that certain subjects
are more vulnerable than others when it comes to propaganda and culturally
sensitive issues – such as history and politics for example. In reality we are
confronted with information all the time - from my junk e-mail experience
cited at the start of this post, to the mobile telephone television adverts
presented on the ‘Propaganda machine’. So these skills do not just apply to the
internet and with the amount of information we are receiving on a daily basis, it
is more urgent than ever that we encourage critical thinking amongst young
learners.
References:
Bartlett, J. and Miller, C. (2011) Truth, lies and the internet - a report into young people’s digital
fluency. London: Demos.
November, A. (1998) Teaching
Zack to Think, [online]. Available: http://www.mmiweb.org.uk/learningandnewtech/resources/teaching-zack.pdf
[Accessed: 27/04/12]
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