Web Literacy and Misinformation
In this class we will learn about web literacy and misinformation. You will learn why misinformation matters and gain strategies, tactics, and tools to discover the truth about the content you see on the web. Some of the skills you will learn include how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds; how to see if a tweet is from a celebrity or imposter; how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote; how to avoid including confirmation bias into your search terms; how to search for the source of an image; and how to find out who is behind the website you are looking at, and what their agenda is.
We are also interested in the way you currently evaluate information on the web, and the impact of the skills we will teach you. In order to do this, we are asking you to complete a 4-question survey at the beginning of the semester that looks at some information from the web, and gathers your perceptions of it. Then, you will have 2 weeks of instruction on online civic reasoning. After the instruction, you will complete a similar survey that gathers your perceptions. The survey questions will be answered online in Google forms. An anonymous code will be created to match the results of this survey to one that you will take later in the semester. While we will be able to match your survey responses to one another, we will not be able to match your responses to you in any way. We won’t know how you responded as an individual, but we will be able to see how effective the instruction was overall. Your participation is voluntary.