The ABCs: Academic Bases Covered

Before the fun and fascinating activities start, see how they align to key information literacy skills from ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries), program learning outcomes, and essential employability skills as defined by the Ministry of Training, Colleges, and Universities (MTCU). These bundle into the goals for the activities below.

Information Thresholds

• Authority Is constructed and contextual
• Information has value
• Research as inquiry
• Searching as strategic exploration

Associated Ministry Standards

These tasks assist learners in becoming more informed global citizens and aware critical thinkers. Current Ministry standards haven’t adequately captured the risks associated with the ever-evolving information and technology landscape for each citizen.

These skills are key to all college programs and as the tasks centre around a subject of general interest, they are appropriate for any discipline.

Essential Employability Skills

• Communicate clearly, concisely, and correctly in the written, spoken, and visual form that fulfills the purpose and meets the needs of the audience.
• Locate, select, organize, and document information using appropriate technology and information systems.
• Analyze, evaluate, and apply relevant information from a variety of sources.

Goals

Learners will develop and demonstrate skills to:

• evaluate information and its sources critically;
• determine whether to incorporate or reject viewpoints encountered;
• distinguish among the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information;
• access and use information ethically and legally.

Check In Before You Dive In

There may be new or unfamiliar vocabulary with this assignment; take a few moments to understand terms in potential use for these activities.

Assignment Details

Synopsis: Choose Video or Text Option

Text

No judgement (well a tad of judgement as an information professional), but more and more citizens are choosing to receive their news and information from social media sites e.g., Twitter and Facebook rather than established journalistic sources e.g., The Globe and Mail, CBC. We won’t be detailing the pros and cons or debating the decline of professional journalism against the rise of citizen journalism, but that is a fruitful debate! Instead we will reveal a lesser known aspect to this new way of information and news gathering.

An oversimplification might help underscore the differences between information gathering in the past versus current practice ~ pull versus push respectively. I am tempted to begin, “When I was your age, we had to…”. Newspapers, either at the corner store or online, all provided readers with the same information. If you were reading The Globe and Mail in Windsor ON, it was the same G&M another was reading in Queen Charlotte, BC. You were required to venture forth and pull the information to you either by physically buying a paper at your local Circle K or accessing the news online.

As online news platforms evolved, you were able to filter stories for your preferences. For example, you could target your local news, science and technology, and entertainment to land in your inbox, customizing your access to only deliver news on areas of interest. The process was still mainly pull with you in charge of the information seeking. The information is now pushed to you. While you may still be seeking, at the same time, information is constantly being pushed to you.

This evolution actually removes choice and makes the reader the target or the micro-target of the push. After compiling data on your personality, habits, and preferences through your daily online activities, companies package information ‘tailored’ to you. To remain a critically thinking consumer, rather than a passive target, you need to the gain the skills to be an active participant | consumer of information with the ability to distinguish fact from fiction and unpack the often flashy, nuggets of information landing in your inbox, feed, and side panes.

Video: Personalized But Impersonal?

Getting on the Same Page

Micro-targeting. The term may be new to you. It is worth 5 minutes to gain a fuller understanding of the term before we begin to consider the potential consequences and impacts.

With every click or swipe, researchers and companies gather oceans of data that assist in profiling and pinpointing your disposition.

Moving from marketing | advertising, micro-targeting now impacts not only your decisions in the grocery store, at the mall, in restaurants, but directs awareness of critical issues in society.

Referred to as the love child of predictive analytics and data insights, micro-targeting (also called micro-niche targeting or people-based targeting) is a marketing strategy that capitalizes on the consumer’s demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioural data to predict buying behaviour, interests, opinions, and seeks to influence that behaviour with the help of a hyper-targeted advertising strategy.

Setting the Scene

While there is no way to avoid being a target of advertisers, politicians, companies, etc. wishing to push their products and agendas on you ~ short of withdrawing from all media ~ becoming aware of their end goals and growing your own social media savviness will go a long way toward developing your abilities as an informed consumer and active participant in the information ecology.

Michael Caulfield’s Web literacy for student fact-checkers outlines four moves and one habit for improved literacy. It is worth a full perusal, but for our purposes we will jump to the third move and explore what it means to “read laterally”. When information is pushed at you from all angles, a natural tendency is to dig deeper into the information itself in hopes of critically assessing its authority, points, biases, etc. Caulfield recommends another tactic, from Sam Wineburg’s research team at Stanford – lateral reading.

When you start to read a book, a journal article, or a physical newspaper in the “real world,” you already know quite a bit about your source. You’ve subscribed to the newspaper, or picked it up from a newsstand because you’ve heard of it. You’ve ordered the book from Amazon or purchased it from a local bookstore because it was a book you were interested in reading. You’ve chosen a journal article either because of the quality of the journal article or because someone whose expertise and background you know cited it. In other words, when you get to the document you need to evaluate, the process of getting there has already given you some initial bearings.

Compared to these intellectual journeys, web reading is a bit more like teleportation. You arrive at a page, site, and author that are often all unknown to you. How do you analyze the author’s qualifications or the trustworthiness of the site?

Researchers have found that most people go about this the wrong way. When confronted with a new site, they poke around the site and try to find out what the site says about itself by going to the “about page,” clicking around in onsite author biographies, or scrolling up and down the page. This is a faulty strategy for two reasons. First, if the site is untrustworthy, then what the site says about itself is most likely untrustworthy, as well. And, even if the site is generally trustworthy, it is inclined to paint the most favo(u)rable picture of its expertise and credibility possible.

The solution to this is, in the words of Sam Wineburg’s Stanford research team, to “read laterally.” Lateral readers don’t spend time on the page or site until they’ve first gotten their bearings by looking at what other sites and resources say about the source at which they are looking.

For example, when presented with a new site that needs to be evaluated, professional fact-checkers don’t spend much time on the site itself. Instead they get off the page and see what other authoritative sources have said about the site. They open up many tabs in their browser, piecing together different bits of information from across the web to get a better picture of the site they’re investigating. Many of the questions they ask are the same as the vertical readers scrolling up and down the pages of the source they are evaluating. But unlike those readers, they realize that the truth is more likely to be found in the network of links to (and commentaries about) the site than in the site itself.

Only when they’ve gotten their bearings from the rest of the network do they re-engage with the content. Lateral readers gain a better understanding as to whether to trust the facts and analysis presented to them.

You can tell lateral readers at work: they have multiple tabs open and they perform web searches on the author of the piece and the ownership of the site. They also look at pages linking to the site, not just pages coming from it.

Lateral reading helps the reader understand both the perspective from which the site’s analyses come and if the site has an editorial process or expert reputation that would allow one to accept the truth of a site’s facts.

(Caulfield, 2018)

Example: The Power of Lateral Reading

Take a peek inside the experiment at Stanford that had different stakeholders at the university determining the credibility of two, seemingly similar websites purported to support children’s health. Place your bets on who will come out on top!

How To: Harness the Power of Lateral Reading

You may be unclear as to how to search outside the site for verification. Afterall, the world wide web is a pretty big pond and you might be hesitant to jump! Following two paths will get you swimming safely. Zero in on:

1. owner of the site
   • if there is an “About” or “Contact” link on the site, track the information found there
   • if there is no information about the site’s owner or provenance, try DomainBigData https://domainbigdata.com/
2. external verification of claims
   • copy and paste a section or claim in the article into an independent Google search and explore its origins

Want a little more assistance in the form of a demo? Check in with the expert debunkers at BuzzFeed as they show you how to efficiently investigate a website’s claim(s).

Your Tasks

1. Make sure to have a way to loosely document your steps. It might be the old fashioned pen and paper or it might be voice record on your phone. Whatever works for you. You will be documenting your steps and findings for this task.
2. Grab a headline or post from one of your social media sites e.g., Facebook, Twitter, or news feed.
3. Set a time limit of 5 or 10 minutes depending on your search skills. If you are super search savvy, try 5. If you are developing your skills, set it for 10. The time limit ensures you do not go too far down the rabbit hole when verifying information. Feel free to use a timer to keep you on track e.g., https://timer.onlineclock.net/
4. Using lateral reading techniques, can you determine (quickly!) if the headline or post is true | trustworthy | reliable?
5. Use the following embedded form to document your investigative skill and then submit findings according to your instructor’s instructions.

Research Boost

The following sections under the Research Hub in The Learning Portal will enhance your completion of this assignment:

• • “Search the Web” section