The concern of fake news has been raising a lot of attention, even though people intentionally “fact-check” the content they have been feeding by “Googling it”, but according to this week’s reading that we know “Googling it” does not guarantee the correctness of an information. We began discussing Google search as a cognitive tool in our previous class. What are your perspectives on the search engine as a cognitive tool to ‘fact-check’?
The Common Sense Media https://www.commonsense.org/education/ (Links to an external site.) developed this Digital Citizenship Curriculum https://www.commonsense.org/education/scope-and-sequence (Links to an external site.) to help young people strive in the digital age. Please critically review the section of Strategic Searching for grade 6-8 (see attached file) while thinking about the prompts below:
(You will need to access the curriculum (6-8-unit1-strategicsearching.pdf download) for the discussion.)
1. What kind of reasoning methods do you think are essential for the young people to learn in order to avoid “fake news”, false information, and misinformation ?
2. How do you think this curriculum will cultivate adolescents’ media literacy? What other important skills of reasoning does this section miss?
3. Besides detecting false information, how do you think reasoning as a cognitive function contributes to other aspects of engagement with media such as computational skills or decision making about online relationships?
