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Approximately 650 Washington high school students, teachers and librarians traveled to local university campuses this month for MisinfoDay, an educational media literacy program that’s developed in recent years through a statewide partnership between the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.
As the CIP’s MisinfoDay program coordinator, it’s been gratifying to see this important work grow since I helped co-organize the first event at the UW Information School in 2019 as a Master of Library and Information Science student.
In Washington, we’re lucky to have so many passionate teachers, librarians, and students embrace this work, whether it be educators adapting these lessons for their classrooms or high school students working with us to provide feedback and insights about MisinfoDay’s core lessons and activities.
During this year’s events at the UW in Seattle and WSU Vancouver, our UW colleague Mike Caulfield, co-author of “Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online,” noted that while questioning whether something is true or false is indeed important, sometimes it’s better to start with the question: “Is this what I think it is?”
To demonstrate, Caulfield asked students to assess a viral news video from 2022 that showed climate protesters throwing a can of tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh painting. The video racked up more than 50 million views and sparked astonishment and anger around the globe.
When many people saw this video, they thought they were watching protesters destroy a priceless work of art. Had they stopped to check this impression, a quick Google search would have turned up plenty of news stories that confirm the existence of the tomato soup incident at the National Gallery in London and provide a key piece of missing context: the painting, “Sunflowers,” was behind glass, and suffered no damage. The video didn’t mean what people thought it did.
Caulfield, a digital literacy expert who developed the SIFT method for factchecking and contextualizing claims online, also pointed to the three vertical dots that appear next to Google search results as a helpful tool for navigating online information. When clicked, the three dots show additional details about the source, giving searchers more context that can help them better evaluate the information they’ve surfaced.
If there’s any unifying theme among the many lessons that were part of this year’s MisinfoDay events at UW, WSU in Pullman and WSU Vancouver, it’s the importance for all of us to slow down (that’s the S in SIFT) — especially when we have a strong emotional reaction, like people did to the soup protest video, to (I) investigate the source, (F) find better coverage and (T) trace claims and media back to their original context.
We can all benefit from practicing these skills. When people think about media and information literacy skills, they often think of them as something for other people, not themselves. Challenging this notion is one of the goals behind escape room style games that the CIP has developed through ongoing research collaborations at the UW iSchool and tested through events like MisinfoDay and in public libraries across the nation. As teams compete to solve puzzles, the games present players with a variety of manipulated media, social media bots, and deepfakes that show we’re all vulnerable to being tricked and fooled.
A student participant from Sedro-Woolley High School shared an astute observation with KUOW Public Radio’s Kim Malcolm, in a segment that aired on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
“I think honestly, adults might benefit more from it. Because they don’t usually think about that kind of stuff. We’re growing up in a very technological era. So we know we have to, but some adults are like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t affect me. Because I didn’t grow up like that.’”
That’s why many in our state want to see these important educational efforts grow to include opportunities for intergenerational learning. In recent years, we’ve been proud to support Washington educators in adapting MisinfoDay’s activities and lessons in their schools and the communities they serve. That includes the development of social science fairs where high school students, like those in Port Townsend and Ballard, share the media and information literacy skills they’re learning in the classroom with the adults in their lives, including their parents and grandparents.
At the UW Center for an Informed Public, our team is grateful for the support we’ve seen for this vital educational work from teachers, librarians, students, parents, public officials and community stakeholders across Washington. Educators, public officials and stakeholders in other states — including in Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and California, where a broad coalition in Monterey County has come together to host their first in-person MisinfoDay event in May — are paying attention to the innovative work that’s been fostered and taken root here in Washington.
Editor’s note: This is column is produced by a collaboration between The Seattle Times Save the Free Press initiative and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
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