Reflections on Fluency

 As a history teacher I was drawn to the two videos about fake news and misinformation as these are topics that get discussed in my class on a daily basis, and it also helped that one of the articles was along the same line. 

In the first video clip: Endless Curiosity: The Source of Fake News, it was a super short that got right to the point about how fake news spreads. One point that I took from it that I'll be sharing with my students is that information overload contributes/makes us share junk. I not only talk to my students about this but I also have to make sure that I'm mindful of it myself, that I'm checking things before I share and or post information. As an activity when talking about fake news I have my students pick a topic, it can be whatever they choose and then have to keep a record of how often it comes up in their social media for one week; at the end students are usually shocked by their numbers. 

In the next video TED Talk: Why People Fall for Misconceptions, I love that J. Isaac's refers to the spread of the misinformation as a game of telephone because it's so true. Two things that really stood out to me in this one was when he said that misinformation often comes from mistakes and or human error and even proved that with the tastebuds image. We all do this we just know something is right then we look again the information is recorded wrong or missing information but usually by the time we figure this out we have already accidentally spread the wrong information. Another point what that it is very hard to change our perception of something even when we're presented with new evidence. I see this a lot with my students they "know" all this information for example about WWII and when you try to show them evidence that doesn't match up to what they know they don't want to accept it. I've even tested students and when I grade them students will have used their misinformation because that's so ingrained in them. 

Sticking along with the same lines next I chose to read the article, My Daily Info-Wrangling Routine by Bryan Alexander. I am super excited to teach my students the "seek, sense, share" method that he uses; I can't wait to start consciously using this in my own daily routine. Again this article ties into the two videos I watched about picking correct information and verifying it. Personally when I'm doing the sharing on my social media I'm bad about not using a variety of sources and that was something he talked about that I though was really interesting as well. 

Lastly the article: The Journey From Digital Literacy to Digital Fluency by Karen Lirenman. I chose this article because honestly before reading this I wasn't clear on what the difference what between digital literacy and digital fluency. In this article she did a really good job breaking the two down in simple terms with great comparison to help me understand. What I took away was when you can read, write, and speak in digital language that's considered digital literacy; then when you can read, write, speak, and think in digital language that's digital fluency. The analogy she used about learning a new language made the difference was awesome!