Countering Digital Polarization and Advancing Civic Information Literacy with SIFT

Countering Digital Polarization and Advancing Civic Information Literacy with SIFT

In 2018, the Indiana University Kokomo Library was invited to participate in a national initiative to counter digital polarization by developing media literacy skills in undergraduates. The initiative seeks to stem the tide of online misinformation and disinformation that we encounter every day in the digital era by teaching college students to verify, contextualize, and reason about information they find online with the goal of creating a more literate, informed citizenry in order to improve civic participation and discourse through misinformation awareness. This poster introduces an innovative technique to teach students how to think like fact checkers rather than evaluating an information source by applying a static checklist. The SIFT technique (Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, Trace to the original context) offers contemporized guidelines that adapt to changing technologies in the digital world. SIFT offers a new standard of professional practice for digital media literacy and information literacy. The presenter will use text and graphics in the poster to illustrate the concepts of digital polarization, the SIFT method, and results of student learning assessment. Attendees will take away concrete, practical ideas for initiating a similar program in their libraries.

He, Yan

Boruff-Jones, Polly

Chinese American Librarians Association

2020-06-24

application/pdf

eng

Poster

Text

2020-06-24

2020-06-24

He, Yan & Boruff-Jones, Polly (2020). Countering digital polarization and advancing civic information literacy with SIFT. The Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Annual Conference 2020 poster session. Online. June 24, 2020.