Howard Rheingold on essential media literacies

21st century media literacies from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

How do we ensure that our students have the ability to search, sift and know?
“The abil­ity to know has sud­denly become the abil­ity to search and the abil­ity to sift” and dis­cern. “Skill plus social” is the key.

How do we teach critical and focused attention when students are mul­ti­task­ing more than ever before? Farhad Manjoo argues in, True Enough, Liv­ing in a Post-Fact Soci­ety that our citizens increasingly accept as true any­thing which is said loudly enough, repeated often enough and cir­cu­lated widely on the Inter­net.

Silicon Valley social media strategist JD Lasica offers suggestions for increasing online media literacy. We need to teach our students not only to use reliable news media, but also to fact check when they use blogs, Wikipedia, or alternative media publications. Check multiples sources and international coverage.

Teach students to vet Internet rumors using:

• Snopes 
• BreakTheChain.org 
• About.com: Urban Legends 
• ScamBusters.org 
• HoaxKill 
• Don’t Spread That Hoax! 
• Sophos 
• Vmyths (com­puter viruses)

Crowd source your fact checking on Twitter and also use New­sTrust, a news lit­er­acy tool which harnesses a bipar­ti­san com­mu­nity of news eval­u­a­tors who make judg­ments to deter­mine bias and  unver­i­fied fac­ts.

More vetting tools librarians need to use during the research process with our students:

• Cam­paign Desk  (Colum­bia Jour­nal­ism Review) cri­tiques media cov­er­age of pol­i­tics and pol­icy
• Factchecked.org pro­vides edu­ca­tors and stu­dents with a frame­work for ana­lyz­ing infor­ma­tion and avoid­ing decep­tion in the media.
• FactCheck.org, (Annen­berg Pub­lic Pol­icy Cen­ter) focuses on polit­i­cal bias in the news.
• Media Mat­ters for Amer­ica -a non­profit pro­gres­sive research and infor­ma­tion mon­i­tor­ing, ana­lyz­ing and cor­rect­ing con­ser­v­a­tive mis­in­for­ma­tion in the media.
• Fair­ness and Accu­racy in Report­ing (FAIR) is one of the longest-running media watch groups mon­i­tor­ing media bias and censorship.
• Metafil­ter and sim­i­lar com­mu­nity sites offer robust dis­cus­sions of cur­rent events.
• Twit­ter Jour­nal­ism (“Where News and Tweets Con­verge”) pub­lished a series of steps to ver­ify a tweet, includ­ing check­ing the his­tory of past tweets to check con­text before retweet­ing a claim about a news event.
• Dis­pute Finder Fire­fox Exten­sion  (Intel labs) “high­lights dis­puted claims on web pages you browse and shows you evi­dence for alter­na­tive points of view.”
• Ques­tion­ing Video -under­stand the vocab­u­lary of visual decep­tion that can be used to dis­tort TV news.

Check out Howard Rheingold's wiki resources related to critical thinking and Internet literacies.
See also:
Crap Detection 101
Crap Detection Video
Microsoft's search engine, Bing, has teamed up with Rheingold to create a curriculum - free eBook!