Category: News Literacy
ALA’s new publication “Media Literacy in the Library: A Guide for Library Practitioners”: Interviews with contributors Dr. Nicole A. Cooke and Kristen Calvert
Learn more about how ALA is helping librarians learn more about media literacy through its new publication “Media Literacy in the Library,” featuring an interview with 2 contributors, Dr. Nicole A. Cooke and Kristen Calvert.
Parlez-vous Free Speech?
Election disinformation believers, censored on Twitter but welcomed on Parler, prompt society to consider the value of the unfettered freedom to spread dangerously false information.
#BannedBooksWeek By the Numbers: Making Virtual-First Count
Among the many challenges of 2020, there is another challenge we’ve faced down in the past and will continue to face in the future: book challenges. Censorship doesn’t take a sick day – and book ban and challenge statistics reported by the Office of Intellectual Freedom prove it. But for the first time, our annual commemoration of the fight against book censorship and other content challenges went virtual-first. Inspired by the Harper’s Index, this post measures Banned Books Week 2020 by the numbers – and shows how intellectual freedom advocates made virtual-first count.
Shelter in Headspace: Survival Tips for the Information War
Surveillance. Censorship. Disinformation. Distrust. The information war marches on. This post offers specific suggestions for safeguarding one’s own mind in the “fog and friction” of information warfare, including privacy, “ladder reading,” open-mindedness, asking critical questions, and taking a “trust pause.”
Is the Truth Liberal?
We teach students to consider multiple points of view on topics in order to appreciate and understand diverse viewpoints, but what happens when there can’t be another point of view because the topic is false information?
The Trouble with Critical Thinking
Parent complaints over teachers’ use of CNN 10 reveals the trouble with teaching critical thinking skills.
The Far Reaches of Misinformation
The 2020 Presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and an increase in digital, remote learning reveal the importance of providing students with nuanced, varied learning opportunities related to misinformation.
Intellectual Freedom and Harmful Conspiracy Theories: Where do we draw the line?
The problem is not corporate censorship, it’s the idea that we can find all the reliable information we need on the internet with no guidelines or knowledge how to vet information or discriminate fact from fraud. Censorship becomes an issue when government entities start to take part – and this is why eliminating censorship within the construct of libraries is so important.
Meta-Information Literacy: Checking-in on Twitter’s Battle Against Disinformation
Twitter’s format of quick-bite information does more harm than good to one’s information literacy development. But the company’s recent partnership with UNESCO to promulgate this modern-day imperative is a step in the right direction.
COVID 19: Health care crisis and mis-information
As librarians, we can help during this current outbreak by curating lists of reliable sources and, as much as possible, being available (in many cases remotely) to provide reference services and point our users to reliable sources. We can continue to do what we always do – serve as touchstones for patrons looking for reliable information in a time of stress. We can do our best to help them sort through the bad and misleading information and promote the more reliable information.