Blog #7 Digital Literacy

Rheingold: Critical Consumption

Image Source:  (National University of Ireland Galway, 2018)

After reading Howard Rheingold's, "Attention and other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies," the literacy that stands out to me is Critical Consumption (2010). Why? This is exactly where I am at with my students. I do think that all the literacies, Attention, Participation, Collaboration, Network Awareness, and Critical Consumption that Rheingold writes about are important for educators to teach and for students to be aware of. I agree with Rheingold's comments when he writes, "we need to expand our thinking of digital skills or information literacies to include social media literacies" (Rheingold, 2010). I agree it is not enough to teach our students how to access and look at it critically, we also need to teach students how and what to share and the responsibility that comes with posting information for the world to read.
When it comes to Critical Consumption, I think not only students have difficulty with evaluating text, I think the same is true with adults. Here are a couple of examples, recently on my Facebook feed, I saw the post that Jack Klugman died. For those of you who do not know who he is, or I should say was, Jack was a big TV actor who starred in shows such as "The Odd Couple" and "Quincy". Well, it does not take a detective to do a simple search to find that Jack died in 2012. I have seen this post about poor Jack several times over the years and I find it sad that adults that I know keep posting this erroneous information and slightly humorous that Mr. Klugman died several times over the past few years. I am sure anyone reading this post has a similar story of when friends and family posted completely inaccurate information. 
The same could be said about students conducting research for a school project without verifying the sources, only to type false information. With a click of a mouse, the world is opened to us and it is our responsibility as consumers of information to dig deeper to find out what we are reading and viewing is fact, fiction, or a combination of both. I found as my students started researching facts and statistics to back up their argumentive essay claim, they had difficulty deciding what was true and not. I had to stop with the plans that I had so meticulously written and rewrite portions of my plans. Why? Well, it seems that I neglected a key component in research, validating the source. I assumed that my students knew how to decipher text from fact from fiction. It was not that I did not teach how to look at the text, but rather I did not give it the priority that I should have. Lesson learned and now my students are improving with their ability to look at text more critically. How did I do this? I started using a website called Checkology. Checkology is a website where teachers can work with students through an interactive video series that teachers consumers of information on how to determine what the author's purpose is and how to decipher information. There is a free and premium version. I use the free version, which works great if the lessons are gone through as a whole class. My students use small dry erase boards to write their answers and then we hold them up to see the answers, which leads to classroom discussions. Other worthy sites to help teach how to evaluate media are, "The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus," "Geno Choice," "Buy an Ancestor Online," "Mankato, Minnesota," "Ova Prima Foundation," "All About Explorers," and "Dog Island." All of these sites are fake sites, where students can examine with a critical eye to determine what is the site fake or real and why. Here is the site where the answers to what is wrong with the sites that are listed above. Test yourself and see if you can figure out what is wrong with the sites before you look at the answers. 

National University of Ireland Galway. (2018). LibGuides: Digital Literacy: Introduction. Retrieved from https://libguides.library.nuigalway.ie/DigitalLiteracy

Rheingold, H. (n.d.). Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies. Retrieved      September/October, 2010, from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2010/10/attention-and-other- 21stcentury-social-media-literacies