My Media Literacy Campaign

Part 2

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I've been on a somewhat secret media literacy campaign. With "summer" winding down and my plate brimming over with webinars, virtual conferences, online workshops, and prep for a school year of distance learning, I didn't mount as much as an offensive as I had hoped. Still, I found and shared some cool stuff that I hope provoked some deeper thinking amongst my social media acquaintances.

Just as I was face-palming about people failing to critically analyze what they come across online, two things happened.

1. PBS re-aired the documentary Fake: Searching for Truth in the Age of Misinformation. Somehow I missed it when it was originally broadcast back in February, but I stumbled upon on it my local public television station while searching for another documentary. You can watch the full program below or click here to go to the PBS website.

2. The Stanford History Education Group released it's new Civic Online Reasoning curriculum. Based on a study that SHEG completed a few years ago, COR is an amazing set of lessons and videos – including a 10-part series from John Green and Crash Course – and I can't wait to apply some of its principals in my classroom this year. Watch the intro video below.

The skill of lateral reading is a big component of Civic Online Reasoning. You can learn more about lateral reading strategies here and check out the intro video below.

Besides those three videos, I also shared two episodes of Above the Noise from KQED. The first, "Why Do Our Brains Love Fake News" is from 2017, but clearly it is not out-of-date. I especially enjoyed learning the concept "illusion of explanatory depth."

The second is a follow-up called "Can You Win an Argument with a Conspiracy Theorist?"

This one introduced me to "illusory pattern perception" and the concept of falsifiability.

On an interesting note, I actually received one comment from an old friend (not the same one from my previous post 😜) that simply said, "Bill Nye is not a scientist." Bill Nye shows up for only a brief moment at the end of the video in a sort of after-credits scene, but he is in the thumbnail. Apparently – and I honestly had no idea about this – Bill Nye is a hated figure among many people of a certain ideological persuasion. Just seeing his face is a trigger. I asked my friend if he even watched the video, but he never replied. This isn't really the time for an analysis of Bill Nye, but he is a trained mechanical engineer, a science educator and advocate, and I don't even know if he's ever actually claimed to be a scientist.

Here's one more Above the Noise episode that I'll post later today, especially since there's been so much in the news lately about hydroxychloroquine:

Last in this multimedia barrage is a podcast series that I recommend if you'd like to take a deeper dive into all of this internet truth-telling business. It's called Rabbit Hole from The New York Times. Rabbit Hole is an eight-part series that looks at internet extremism, algorithms, Youtube personalities, and conspiracy theories. Click below to listen to a preview.

And my old buddy who helped spur this whole project on, well, he continues to post things that he doesn't read, memes and "facts" that are easily debunked, and articles from a variety of dubious news sources, but I did get through to him the other day in one thread. After I called him out on a quote he shared that dissed teachers (thank you, Thomas Sowell), he claimed that the majority of the people arrested by the government in Portland were teachers who were members of Antifa. After I sent him links to articles that proved that claim was false (here and here), he actually gave me a thumbs up. It was a small step in the right direction, I hope.