(2017-03-04) Caulfield How News Literacy Gets The Web Wrong

Mike Caulfield: How “News Literacy” Gets the Web Wrong

I have a simple Web Literacy (Digital Literacy) model. When confronted with a dubious claim: Check for previous Fact-Checking work; Go upstream to the source; Read laterally

They can spend hours on this, going to the site’s about page, reading up on Hunter

students, when they do this, are under the impression that this time and depth spent here shows real care and thought. Except it doesn’t. Because if your real goal is to find out if this is true, none of this matters.

once we see that — a way to get closer to the actual source of the fact, all those questions about who Hunter is and what his motives are and how well he spells things on this very orange looking site don’t matter

So going upstream comes to an end for us, and we move on to our next strategy — reading laterally

read laterally until you understand the source.

news literacy isn’t the big problem here. Web literacy is. And the Checkology curriculum doesn’t really address this.

if you include subquestions, there are twenty-three steps to Checkology’s list and they are all going to give me conflicting information of relatively minor importance

Even more disturbingly, this approach to fact-checking keeps me on the original page for ages

you got a dubious letter and just spent 20 minutes fact-checking the mailman. And then you actually opened the letter and found it was a signed letter from your Mom.

If you want to read how badly this fails, you can look at some of the stories about the program as it is used in the classroom

there’s a muddling here of the issues of claim, story, and source

Fundamentally, these efforts miss because what’s needed is not an understanding of news but of the web.