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2.2 Digital Literacy

Digital literacy is whether or not you can understand, evaluate and utilize what you find online, whether that’s Web sites, email, podcasts, etc. It’s important for educators to have a good grasp of digital literacy for their own learning and research, and to pass this skill on to students.

Is It Real? Determining Reliability on the Internet

The Internet provides access to a wealth of valuable information, but there is also a lot of material on Web pages, social media sites and in emails with questionable reliability, or is just wrong. Learners (along with educators, parents and the general public) need to have a the skills to help them determine what is a reliable source and how to find out if what they read online is accurate.

There are a number of resources that can be used to determine if something online is a hoax, including checking the "urban legend" debunking site Snopes Links to an external site.. This site can often be used, for example, to determine if a claim you saw in an email about a public person, company or product is true.

Recognizing the signs that an source may not be reliable is an important skill to have. For example, a health claim made on the Website of a company that is trying to sell its product may not be reliable.

Several years ago a Website was developed that appeared to be an educational site about American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The site, however, turned out to be from a known American hate group. Learners can easily be fooled if they don't know what or who is really behind a Website. Key things to look for when determining the factual accuracy of online sources include:

  • The source - Who is behind the Website? Are they really an objective source or do they stand to personally benefit from you believing what you read on the Website?
  • The date - How current is the information on the Website? Is there any indication of when it was last updated?
  • The quality of the site - Are there a lot of grammatical mistakes? Does the design look amateur?
  • The tone - Is there any information on the site that makes you question whether the author / creator is not being objective? Look for leading language that may be trying to sway opinion instead of simply stating facts.

 

CRAAP

A common method of determining the quality of material on a Website is by using the CRAAP test. CRAAP stands for:

Currency

Relevance

Authenticity

Authority

Purpose

 

The following video will explain these five aspects. You will be completing an activity related to this for your discussion post this week.

 

 

Digital Filters

As we discussed in Week 1, your personal learning network can act as a filter to help you with everything from avoiding information overload to getting a recommendation for a good restaurant. Digital filters can also create problems, keeping you from seeing the whole picture about a current or historical event, or even missing out on a great new movie because nobody you know has seen it. In the following TED Talk, Eli Pariser talks about the dangers of online "filter bubbles".

 

Eli Pariser: Beware Online "Filter Bubbles"

 

Acceptable Use Policies and Social Media Guidelines 

Acceptable use policies (AUPs) and social media guidelines are frequently part of an educational institutions tool box for teaching about digital literacy.

AUPs and social media guidelines are common at educational institutions (both in higher education and K-12). AUPs cover what is appropriate and acceptable uses for technology at an institution. They generally apply to all members of that educational community (students, faculty and staff). AUPs might include responsibilities of all members of the institution, what information is tracked / collected by the institution, and what the consequences may be if the policy is violated. They might be short and include little detail or lengthy and be very specific.

Social media guidelines usually suggest ways of using social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) so as to protect your privacy and safety as well as that of your students. They are generally just guidelines, but some institutions consider them policy.

Ideally both AUPs and social media guidelines should take pedagogy into account as well so as not to create barriers to effective uses of technology.

Reading

Please complete the following readings related to the topic of digital literacy.

Links

The following links are from the University of Saskatchewan. Be sure to look for the AUP and social media guidelines for your educational institution, organization or company.

Discussion

Enter a simple search term into Google on a topic of your interest. Go to the second page of results and pick the second link. Use this page to do the CRAAP test that you learned about in this module.

Add a post to the discussion forum Digital Literacy of no more than 250 words that includes your search term, the URL of the page you used for this activity and a summary of the results of your CRAAP test of that page.

Respond to the posts of some of the other learners in the course with posts of no more than 200 words.