Information literacy and COVID
Monday, September 27, 2021 at 09:40AM
Information jungle survival skill 3: Learn to tell the good berries from the bad berries.
Joey Rogers, Executive Director of the Urban Library Council, observes that libraries should have two large signs in them. The first hanging over the stacks that reads “Carefully selected by trained professionals” and the other hanging over the Internet terminals that reads “Whatever.”
Even very young students can and should be learning to tell the bad information berries from the good ones. Since junior high students often make websites that often look better than those of college professors, we teach students to look:
- For the same information from multiple sources.
- At the age of the page.
- At the credentials of the author.
- For unstated bias by the page author or sponsor. ...
As students use research to solve problems about controversial social and ethical issues, the ability to evaluate and defend one’s choice of information source becomes very important. From Survival Skills for the Information Jungle: Information Problem-Solving Activities Are More Important Than Ever (Creative Classroom, September 2001 issue)
The quote above comes from an article I wrote 20 years ago. 20 years. And yet just last week, I talked to two friends who were unhappy because they both have (adult) children and their spouses who have not yet gotten the COVID vaccine. Despite both sets of children being in medical professions, they cited concerns about the safety of the shots, including a fear of infertility. The circumstances led to my friend and me to ask whether the Internet and the content it contains is a blessing or a curse on the human race.
When I reflect on such questions, I try to think about my own “law” that I often cited to others as a technology director: Johnson’s Rule of Technology Neutrality: Tools are neither good nor bad. The same hammer can both break windows and build cathedrals. The Internet, like any technology, can be dangerous without instruction on its proper use. Hence my advocacy for safe and ethical instruction for all students in my writings and the presentations I gave for over 20 years.
Now in retirement, I seriously wonder whether these efforts actually made any difference when we seem to still have educated people who do not or cannot apply the basic rules of judging the reliability of information - even in matters as important as health.
A simple test of factual data can be done using the “five finger test.”
- Can the information be verified on multiple sources?
- Is the information current?
- What are the qualifications of the author?
- Is there any hidden agenda in what is being shared?
- Is the information from an edited/reviewed source?
An interesting activity I liked to do in workshops was to ask participants to apply the questions to a sample situation:
Your students have been researching current diseases and they come into the classroom with information from these sources. Could you help them determine which could be considered the most reliable? Might you as a teacher have a different opinion than some parents about the validity of information from some sources?
- Center for Disease Control
- Newsweek
- The bestseller The Hot Zone
- Flyers from an insurance company or HMO
- Personal webpage
- Chat room conversation
- Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show
- National Public Radio’s “Science Friday”
Is this 20-year-old activity still of value, changing Rush Limbaugh to Fox News and chat rooms to social media?
The most controversial part of verifying information usually revolves around the qualifications and motivation of the source of the information. A large part of society has little or no faith in established institutions traditionally regarded as credible: universities, researchers, government agencies, and the medical field as a whole. Often fed by conspiracy theories, the “establishment” (who I myself rallied against in the 1970s) is viewed as having hidden, sinister motives. And who is to say they do not.
I hope the current generation of librarians and teachers of information literacy have better luck than my generation of educators in creating thoughtful information seekers who analyze their data sources. The amount and availability of unvetted information will only be growing.
