By examining information as a product of people’s contingent choices, rather than as an impartial recording of unchanging truths, the critically information-literate student develops an outlook toward information characterized by a robust sense of agency and a heightened concern for justice.

21st Century Skills (21C Skills)

reach and meet the growing number of diverse audiences using the web

cognition is thus ecological:

Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society.

Achieving literacy is a lifelong learning process.

Literacy is more than just reading, writing, and numeracy. It's not about being literate or illiterate anymore, but having adequate skills for today's demands.

Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen, and use numeracy and technology

We all know what "literacy" means, right? Well, maybe not.

It is based on reciprocity and a level of trust that each party is actively seeking value-added information for the other.

Every student brings their own personal digital practices

technical difficulties

societies without trust come to bad ends.

combat prescriptive approaches to grammar, mechanics, and usage.

Poor health literacy is a silent and ubiquitous health care issue, and the field of neurosurgery is particularly prone to the consequent adverse effects. Failure to address low health literacy has several detrimental health and economic consequences, and numerous policies have been initiated to address these. Better facilitating patient understanding of neurosurgical disease, treatment options, and care surrounding the operative period may have a positive impact on the health care economy and ultimately achieve improved outcomes for patients.

Deyo et al. (8) demonstrated a reduction in the adverse impact of inadequate health literacy in the neurosurgical field. The impact of an interactive videodisc program that informs patients of their treatment options for back surgery on patient outcome and surgical choices was evaluated. The program helped facilitate decision making and ensured informed consent. It also reduced surgery rates for patients with herniated disks. The authors of this study also implemented the use of patient-oriented multimedia to augment comprehension and advocated a similar strategy for other clinicians. Further commitment is needed to put health literacy at the forefront of improving health care and reducing health expenditures, especially in neurosurgery.

Paasche-Orlow et al. (18) suggested 3 principles to ameliorate health literacy disparities. The first is to promote productive interactions. Clinicians need to develop better communication abilities and take appropriate measures to ensure adequate comprehension of health information. Educating youth and establishing health literacy standards in the educational system can help improve existing and future health literacy rates. Incorporating health literacy classes as a component of training for health professionals and in studies of preventive services can increase awareness among providers, facilitating better communication and quality of care (19). Additionally, transmitting complex ideas can be aided with the use of technology platforms. Yin et al. (25) investigated the plausibility of a pictogram-based intervention program to reduce medication administration errors. The authors found that when the intervention was used as part of medication counseling, there was a decrease in medication dosage errors compared with standard medication counseling.The second principle is concerned with addressing the organization of health care. Paasche-Orlow et al. advocated patient-centered care, streamlined access to health care, and incentives to promote collaboration to address the needs of the health illiterate population. The U.S. government created and enacted several major policies that address this principle to diminish the adverse effects of poor health literacy. The first is the Affordable Care Act, which stipulates that health plans and insurers must provide understandable and clear health information regarding coverage and benefits (11). Because most Americans receiving coverage through the new legislative act have limited health literacy, standardized information about health care would greatly assist these Americans in making better-informed health decisions (15). Another policy is the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy (22). This is the first plan of its kind to create health literacy goals for the entire country. It intends to provide all Americans with access to accurate health information, deliver patient-focused services, and support learning and skills that improve health. All of these acts and policies have the potential to improve 3 keys to health care: access, quality, and cost.The third principle from the study by Paasche-Orlaw et al. involves establishing an objective and sincere voice for better delivery of health information to the community. Individuals may have appropriate health literacy levels, but other personal or environmental factors can contribute to a lower understanding of vital health information. Ito (9) analyzed Vietnamese refugees who tested positive for inactive tuberculosis and their response to prophylactic tuberculosis treatment. Ito found that the immigrants were more hesitant to complete the medication regimen because the side effects were too “hot.” Instead, the immigrants preferred Asian herbal medications as they were considered “cooling.” Von Goeler et al. (23) investigated diabetes self-management among Puerto Rican adults with type 2 diabetes and found that the participants regularly self-monitored their blood glucose levels. However, they did not use that information to control their diabetes properly because of financial and social barriers such as competing family concerns. Situations such as these call for a voice, a cultural broker, who understands the environmental obstacles to comprehending and using health information fully.

Koh et al. (11) detailed a cycle of crisis care elaborating the nature of high medical costs, possibly resulting from fear and denial. First, an individual is in need of medical help, so he or she goes to a physician's office where the staff asks the individual to fill out a complex and confusing form. The physician examines the patient and explains the condition and treatment options using medical jargon. Numerous prescriptions, laboratory tests, and referrals are given without confirmation of the patient's comprehension. The staff sends the patient home with complicated instructions. Inevitably, the patient may consume medication incorrectly or miss follow-up appointments, and his or her condition worsens. Eventually, the patient presents to the emergency department, and the hospital staff develops a new treatment plan. Again, no one confirms the patient's understanding. When the patient is discharged, he or she is likely to get sick again and repeat the cycle (11)

Instructional Design Strategies for Intensive Online Courses: An Objectivist-Constructivist Blended Approach

Digital Promise

Distance Education Trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration

LINCS is a national leadership initiative of the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) to expand evidence-based practice in the field of adult education. LINCS demonstrates OCTAE’s commitment to delivering high-quality, on-demand educational opportunities to practitioners of adult education, so those practitioners can help adult learners successfully transition to postsecondary education and 21st century jobs.

while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up.

For students to work in the open, everything they use has to be original content, openly licensed, or in the public domain

There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own.

teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read.

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn't necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

End-Users

But you can see how other editorial dynamic insertion frameworks can be designed and executed. For example, in theory, the tech allows for better targeting, and as such, if you could reliably identify the location of a listener, you could deliver editorial programming or journalistic information to that person specific to her city, town, or state

Most Americans pay at least a little attention to current events, but they differ enormously in where they turn to get their news and which stories they pay attention to. To get a better sense of how a busy news cycle played out in homes across the country, we repeated an experiment, teaming up with YouGov to ask 1,000 people nationwide to describe their news consumption and respond to a simple prompt: “In your own words, please describe what you would say happened in the news on Tuesday.”

differing nomenclature makes the search for a commonly agreed definition or understanding of digital literacies even more elusive

Representation of Digital Intelligence

Make it a policy to always teach a new technology, with new literacies, to your weakest reader(s) first. This enables struggling readers and writers to become literate in this new technology before other, higher-performing students in reading. Those who struggle with reading and writing become literate in a new literacy before others and can teach this new literacy to others who are not literate with this new form. This is a powerful principle that positions weaker readers as experts

However, this does not nec-essarily mean they are skilled in the effective use of online information, perhaps the most important aspect of the Internet. Studies show that stu-dents lack critical evaluation skills when reading online (Bennet, Maton, & Kervin, 2008; Forzani & Maykel, 2013; Graham & Metaxas, 2003) and that they are not especially skilled with reading to locate information online (Kuiper & Volman, 2008).

print out enough copies of the first page of search results for each student. Dis-tribute these. Then see if students can locate the best link on the search results page for each question that you ask such as, “Which link will take you to a site developed by an Egyptologist?”

Make it a policy to always teach a new technology, with new literacies, to your weakest reader(s) first

Thus, when we speak of New Literacies in an online age we mean that literacy is not just “new” today; it becomes “new” every day of our lives.

We’ve built an information ecosystem where information can fly through social networks (both technical and personal). Folks keep looking to the architects of technical networks to solve the problem. I’m confident that these companies can do a lot to curb some of the groups who have capitalized on what’s happening to seek financial gain. But the battles over ideology and attention are going to be far trickier. What’s at stake isn’t “fake news.” What’s at stake is the increasing capacity of those committed to a form of isolationist and hate-driven tribalism that has been around for a very long time. They have evolved with the information landscape, becoming sophisticated in leveraging whatever tools are available to achieve power, status, and attention. And those seeking a progressive and inclusive agenda, those seeking to combat tribalism to form a more perfect union —  they haven’t kept up.

How many years did it take for the US military to learn that waging war with tribal networks couldn’t be fought with traditional military strategies? How long will it take for the news media to wake up and recognize that they’re being played? And how long after that will it take for editors and publishers to start evolving their strategies?

News agencies, long trained to focus on reporting information and maintaining a conceptual model of standards, are ill-equipped to understand that they may have a role in this war, that their actions and decisions are shaping the way the war plays out.

For one, much of the new research centers on U.S. politics and, specifically, elections. But social networks drive conversations about many other topics such as business, education, health, and personal relationships. To battle bad online information, it would be helpful to know whether people respond to these sorts of topics differently than they respond to information about political candidates and elections. It also would be useful to know whether myths about certain subjects — for instance, a business product or education trend — are trickier to correct than others.

Alan poses a question in his TEDx talk that we should ask students: “Do you know how to use Google?” Of greater importance, the same question should be asked of teachers.

The Teaching Tolerance Digital Literacy Framework offers seven key areas in which students need support developing digital and civic literacy skills. The numbered items represent the overarching knowledge and skills that make up the framework. The bullets represent more granular examples of student behaviors to help educators evaluate mastery.

Digital skills focus on what and how. Digital literacy focuses on why, when, who, and for whom.

Digital skills focus on what and how. Digital literacy focuses on why, when, who, and for whom.

open access to the skills and know-how needed to use the web to improve their lives, careers, and organizations.

Ian O’Byrne, an assistant professor of education at the College of Charleston, wrote, “As an educator and researcher who studies these digital places and tools, I’m in front of screens a lot. I experiment and play in these spaces. I’m also writing and researching the impact of these screens and their impact on the well-being of others as it relates to children and adolescents. The problem in this is that one of the other hats that I wear is as a parent and husband. I am not only critical of my engagement and use of these digital technologies, but I’m also cautious/cognizant of their role as a mediator in my relationships with my children and significant other. These screens and digital tools play a strong role in our lives and interactions in and out of our home. In our home we have screens and devices all over the place. We have a video server that is ready to serve content to any one of these screens on demand. We have voice-assistive devices listening and waiting for our commands. I believe it is important as an educator and researcher to play with and examine how these devices are playing a role in our lives, so I can bring this work to others. Even with these opportunities, I’m still struck by times when technology seems too intrusive. This is plainly evident when I’m sitting with my family and watching a television show together, and I’m gazing off into my device reading my RSS feed for the day. Previously I would enjoy watching the funniest home videos and laughing together. Now, I am distant. The first thing in the morning when I’m driving my kids in to school and stop at a red light, previously I would enjoy the time to stop, listen to the radio, look at the clouds or bumper stickers on cars around me. Now, I pull out the phone to see if I received a notification in the last 20 minutes. When I call out for the voice-activated device in my home to play some music or ask a question, my request is quickly echoed by my 2-year-old who is just learning to talk. She is echoing these conversations I’m having with an artificial intelligence. I’m trying to weigh this all out in my mind and figure what it means for us personally. The professional understanding may come later.”

How do users identify and evaluate online “resource containers” of information?

The visual context and cues that print containers provide used to help individuals identify a document’s origins and measure its value

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series of videos showing students basic web techniques for source verification and contextualization

In other words, low digital literacy (among both students and faculty) likely shapes preferences for textbook format.

Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or conceptualizing its meaning

We will define “dialogic literacy” as the ability to engage productively in discourse whose purpose is to generate new knowledge and understanding

where you spend your trust

the protection of private information in an online environment has become the responsibility of user

Digital Pedagogy to Foster Digital Literacies

realize that the web was not something that happened to them but they were happening to

understanding how Web applications work “under the hood” and how databases and scripts interact

considering the interplay between design and content

organizing and architecting an online space

when Americans get news online, they increasingly reach for a smartphone (55%), with computer use falling significantly

the figure is just 53 percent when people are asked specifically about the news that they themselves use

people do not always distinguish between news reports and advertising on news sites, and the contrast between a professionally reported story and the “around the web” recommendations that may accompany it can be jarring

Technology is the problem. When the profit motive trumps the public good

How information is accessed, created, and shared is revealing about the future of learning

what does it mean to be human in a digital age

how we make decisions with that data needs to be as transparent as the content

And so, that part I think was the second marking point for me was this idea of connectedness, and that by being connected-- being transparent and connected-- you produced this huge array of potential knowledge futures in these areas.

Our work, said Campbell, is not to graduate more students, but to enable students to graduate themselves

Digital literacy has also been positioned as an enabler of rights. Unless people have choice and agency, they cannot act in their own interests.

The studying strategy with “the greatest power,” she adds, involves deeply questioning the text — asking yourself if you agree with the author, and why or why not.

copyright is about ambiguity, not right and wrong answers, may be a helpful way of framing copyright education

want to remain neutral or impartial

University-wide 33–39% of faculty said that fewer than half of their undergraduates meet their expectations

2016 Student Textbookand Course Materials

pedagogy of research

Sometimes, even people immersed in a discipline don’t quite understand how or why information is organized

The Internet is this generation’s defining technology for literacy and learning within our global community.2.The Internet and related technologies require new literacies to fully access their potential.

The new literacies of online research and comprehension frames online reading comprehension as a process of problem-based inquiry involving the skills, strategies, dispositions, and social practices that take place as we use the Internet to conduct research, solve problems, and answer ques-tions.

How can we develop adequate understanding when the very object that we seek to study continuously changes?

Consider, for example, just a few of these new technologies: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Siri, Foursquare, Drop-box, Skype, Chrome, iMovie, Contribute, or any of many, many mobile “apps” and ebooks

It is the responsibility of educators in all grades and content areas to modify as needed for learners.

TPACK What knowledge do teachers need in order to facilitate student research? Understanding complex relationships among technology, pedagogy, and content with models like the TPACK framework may facilitate teacher growth in new literacies

when students share what they have learned not only about the information they found, but the sources and strategies they used to uncover that information.

1

Wikipedia is broadly misunderstood by faculty and students alike. While Wikipedia must be approached with caution, especially with articles that are covering contentious subjects or evolving events, it is often the best source to get a consensus viewpoint on a subject. Because the Wikipedia community has strict rules about sourcing facts to reliable sources, and because authors must adopt a neutral point of view, articles are often the best available introduction to a subject on the web.

The habit is simple. When you feel strong emotion — happiness, anger, pride, vindication — and that emotion pushes you to share a “fact” with others, STOP. Above all, it’s these things that you must fact-check. Why? Because you’re already likely to check things you know are important to get right, and you’re predisposed to analyze things that put you an intellectual frame of mind. But things that make you angry or overjoyed, well… our record as humans are not good with these things. As an example, we might cite this tweet which recently crossed my Twitter feed: You don’t need to know that much of the background here to see the emotionally charged nature of this. President Trump had insulted Chuck Schumer, a Democratic Senator from New York, saying tears that Schumer shed during a statement about refugees were “fake tears”.  This tweet reminds us that that Senator Schumer’s great grandmother died at the hands of the Nazis, which could explain Schumer’s emotional connection to the issue of refugees. Or does it? Do we actually know that Schumer’s great-grandmother died at the hands of the Nazis? And if we are not sure this is true, should we really be retweeting it?

Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research. Go upstream to the source: Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information. Read laterally: Read laterally.[1] Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network. Circle back: If you get lost, or hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.

FITness goes beyond traditional notions of computer literacy to require that persons understand information technology broadly enough to apply it productively at work and in their everyday lives, to recognize when information technology can assist or impede the achievement of a goal, and to continually adapt to changes in information technology. FITness, therefore, requires a deeper, more essential understanding and mastery of information technology for information processing, communication, and problem solving than does the traditional definition of computer literacy. Acquiring TK in this manner enables a person to accomplish a variety of different tasks using information technology and to develop different ways of accomplishing a given task. This conceptualization of TK does not posit an “end state,” but rather sees it developmentally, as evolving over a lifetime of generative, open-ended interaction with technology.

We’ve Made It Ridiculously Easy to Contribute to the Digital Polarization Initiative

The point is not to be defeatist, but to remind ourselves again and again that the process is always iterative, and that we must keep working to maintain, to improve, and thus to sustain our work.

How can I add value to this network – contribute, amplify, connect, share, listen, support?

When he read the Web address, http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html, he assumed that the domain name “northwestern.edu” automatically meant it was a credible source. He did not understand that the “~” character, inserted after the domain name, should be read as a personal Web page and not an official document of the university.

Syllabus: EDM510 2016 Summer

“The only way to save a democracy is to explain the way things work,” says Linus Neumann, a CCC spokesman and information security consultant. “Understanding things is a good immunization.”

Without a repertoire of reading strategies that can be applied to any text, students are being shortchanged in their education. In order to teach students to read effectively, teachers must be sure that they are not simply suppliers of information on a particular text but also instructors of techniques to build reading skills. Here are some ideas on how to incorporate reading skills lessons into a curriculum.

Mozilla Web Literacy Map (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/WebLiteracyMap).

these do not replace the conventional literacies of reading and writing, speaking and listening, but are supplemental to them

‘truth’ is something generally believed by people in a position to know, that are likely to tell the truth

The idea that you’ll get to truth by, for instance, just reading Breitbart and then Truthout, and somehow will come to truth, is kind of a bizarre idea

We need to start with a good term — could we call this vision one of “connected open”?

Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved

designed to help students fact-check and trace the circulation of online information—helps to answer both of these questions.

Digital Literacy and all those other literacies

1) No one can even agree on a definition of “fake news,” even though a ridiculous number of words are being spent trying to define it.2) Folks don’t seem to understand the evolving nature of the problem, the way that manipulation evolves, or how the approaches they propose can be misused by those with whom they fundamentally disagree.3) No amount of “fixing” Facebook or Google will address the underlying factors shaping the culture and information wars in which America is currently enmeshed.

librarians can do more to promote information literacy.

In 2017 the need to teach fact-checking and source analysis looms larger than ever

"This is an issue that cuts broadly across the social media and news industries, and we are working together to help people better understand the sources and authenticity of information before they share with their friends or family," Justin Osofsky, Facebook's vice-president of global operations and media partnerships, told AP.

"If you build the freeway, you have the responsibility to make sure the freeway is safe," he told AP."You shouldn't just say that if there are potholes, drivers should try to avoid them."

"Publishers need to take this finding seriously going forward and think about their readers as ambassadors to cultivate. Social media sites should also think seriously about transparency when it comes to emphasising where news articles originate."

The Media Insight Project had this advice for journalists, their employers, and social media networks like Facebook:To publishers and journalists: Your readers and followers are not just consumers to monetise, instead they may be social ambassadors whose own credibility with their friends affects your brand's reputation. It is the sharer's credibility, more than your own, which determines other people's willingness to believe you and engage with you. This underscores the importance of news organisations creating strong communities of followers who evangelise the organisation to others.To news-literacy advocates: In light of growing concerns about "fake news" spreading on social media, this experiment confirms that people make little distinction between known and unknown (even made-up) sources when it comes to trusting and sharing news. Even 19 per cent of people who saw our fictional news source would have been willing to recommend it to a friend.To Facebook and other social networks: Facebook and other social networks could do more to emphasise and provide information about the original sources for news articles. The fact that only two in 10 people in our experiment could recall the news reporting source accurately after seeing a Facebook-style post suggests that basic brand awareness has a long way to go. We found that sharers affect perceptions more than the original news reporting source — but might that change if Facebook made the reporting source label more prominent?

Ms Wardle said the research was a wake-up call for journalists, who should think of themselves as creators of individual "atoms of content", rather than focusing on their brand."Create content that is shareable, do excellent journalism that will be shared — but know that this will not always be enough," she said.

"So as citizens of information and consumers of information, we have to learn how to be critical of the information that we consume and journalists have got an important role to play in helping audiences navigate the news ecosystem.

"Times have changed. It used to be that we had gatekeepers; we had the ABC. [People] went to the newsagent and got their paper and paid their money. Now news comes to us via text message or email or Twitter or Facebook," she said.

"We now become publishers when we share. So we have a responsibility to think about that before we retweet."Claire Wardle

"When people see news from a person they trust, they are more likely to think it gets the facts right, contains diverse points of view, and is well reported than if the same article is shared by someone they are sceptical of," the researchers wrote.

The study found that what mattered most was whether the story was posted to Facebook by someone trusted, or someone previously tagged as not trusted by the social media user.

The study by the Media Insight Project found that people's trust in a piece of content on Facebook was stronger if they trusted the person who shared it — regardless of what organisation published it.

Your favourite social media star is more influential than media organisations that have built up their audience's trust over decades, according to a recent experiment.

many students I met were being told that Wikipedia was untrustworthy and were, instead, being encouraged to do research

Information literacy is not just a set of skills that are “nice to have”; such skills are truly a necessity of modern life.

For the past 40 years, society has demanded information literacy of students

Information literacy presumes a set of unbiased institutions and incorruptible instructors are waiting in the wings to begin inculcating the masses with the proper truth procedures.

A powerful media and information literacy project from UNESCO