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Information Quality & News Literacy Modules

Based on previous research efforts and Lab activities, the Youth and Media team has made great strides building a curriculum focusing on information quality, particularly in the context of online news and journalism.

So far, the young members of the lab, together with the core Youth and Media team, have developed six modules about Information Quality & News Literacy:

1. Information Quality: Research Methods

Because the internet is a vast and ever-expanding place, it can be difficult to know where to search for information, particularly for academic research purposes. And once the information is found, how can we discern how high-quality the information is? This module, which incorporates the Information Quality Game, asks participants to consider the variety of factors which make up information quality, while also engaging participants in an exploration of different potential sources for research, from the familiar (such as Google Scholar) to the new (such as Twitter).

Information Quality: Research Methods – PDF
Information Quality: Research Methods – PPT

Research Resources Handout – PDF
Research Resources Handout – DOCX

IQ Game Cards (Sample + 5 rounds)
IQ Game Card Generator

2. Information Quality: The Game

This module familiarizes participants with the different factors which are important for consideration when searching for and evaluating information. From there, participants can create promotional campaigns for their projects in order to engage in the creation process and put into action those elements which they identified as compelling during search and evaluation.

Information Quality: The Game – PDF
Information Quality: The Game – PPT

3. News Stories (Evaluating Source and Search Online)

News media is frequently filled with reports whose details are later disputed, dismissed, or proven false. Such cases are typical with stories that receive ongoing investigation or that are contingent on previously withheld information being released. On the other hand, news stories premised on entirely false information make headlines less frequently (though at the same time, perhaps more than we realize). In this workshop students stand to gain an appreciation of what is at stake when evaluating online content and they gain greater awareness of their own evaluation practices.

Evaluating Source and Search Online – PDF
Evaluating Source and Search Online – PPT

4. Same Image, Different Story

News stories can be told from different points of view highlighting or omitting certain characters and facts. This activity familiarizes students with the numerous perspectives from which any given narrative could be understood. Focusing on the specific phenomenon of a couple caught kissing on camera during the Vancouver riots of 2011, students look at different videos, pictures and news articles to explore the importance of evaluating different sources and points of view.

Same Image, Different Story – PDF
Same Image, Different Story – PPT

5. Thinking Caps (Perspectives on Personal Information)

Online personal information, especially in social networking sites (SNS), is open to interpretation. Various stories about us can emerge when personal information is evaluated from different perspectives. This activity is meant to demonstrate the role of perspective in shaping the evaluation process and to emphasize reflection on the positive and negative implications of such evaluation.

Perspectives on Personal Information – PDF
Perspectives on Personal Information – PPT

6. Headline Cut-Ups

In this activity students engage with news stories from an ongoing event and have the opportunity to discuss how stories develop over time and to recognize differences between multiple sources of information. Students discuss the importance of headlines in describing news stories and identifying key words. Furthermore, students are introduced to the concept of chronology and create a timeline in groups.

Headline Cut-Ups – PDF
Headline Cut-Ups – PPT

If you would like to know more about our modules, please feel free to send us (youthandmedia@cyber.law.harvard.edu) an email anytime. We are happy to provide you with additional information and/or share the actual modules with you.

Teaching and Outreach

Over the last few years, the YaM team has produced an evolving collection of tools that enable people (e.g., youth, educators, parents) to learn more about topics such as digital privacy, digital citizenship, and STEM interest and career exploration through digital spaces. These tools aim to equip people with knowledge about connected learning environments, empower youth to make better choices, and support adults in teaching, parenting, and giving valuable guidance.

Across these efforts, we aim to:

1) Co-design with youth

In the educational space, youth are often viewed as the consumers, versus active users and co-creators, of learning and educational materials. We attempt to overcome this dichotomy by involving young people in the co-design process of learning experiences.

2) Design for different audiences

We currently design educational resources for both educators and youth. We aim to expand our reach by also creating educational materials for parents and caregivers.

3) Leverage the BKC network

In collaboration with interns, staff, and fellows we have create learning resources on a wide array of thematic areas, from freedom of expression to cybersecurity to the intersection between law and virtual reality. We have also collaborated with the Cyberlaw Clinic in the creation of learning and educational materials about copyright, fair use, and privacy.

4) Develop content in much needed areas

Over the last several years, the YaM+ team has produced over 100 educational resources. Initially, we focussed on information quality, privacy, safety (e.g., cyberbullying), and creative expression but more recently we are exploring additional areas of youth life based on the Digital Citizenship+ mapping.

Press Pass TV

Press Pass TV -a Boston based organization- targets youth as consumers of media and leads them through an interactive learning experience, teaching them to become critical thinkers, community producers, and agents of change. Through partnerships with community based organizations and schools, Press Pass TV gives students the tools and skills to make change in their communities through video journalism and social action.

Update: Workshops with Press Pass TV, July 2013, Boston, MA:

In July 2013, the Youth and Media team visited Press Pass TV again for two workshops. This time, the team aimed to discuss information quality in the context of doing research, asking participants to consider certain platforms, such as Twitter, as alternative sources. To find out more, click here.

Update: Workshop with Press Pass TV, July 2012, Boston, MA:

In July 2012, the Youth and Media team, again, visited Press Pass TV at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury, Boston. In this workshop, the team aimed to deepen participants’ understanding of factors to take into consideration when searching for and evaluating information online through playing the Information Quality Game. Then, building on this understanding, youth engaged in a design session to suggest strategic promotional campaigns targeting multiple audiences for Press Pass TV.

Workshop with Press Pass TV, July 14, 2011, Boston, MA:

On July 14, 2011, the Youth and Media team visited Press Pass TV at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School in Roxbury, Boston.

The success of our visit to Press Pass TV reflects, more than anything else, the amount of time we spent in preparation – the numerous meetings we held to identify our key goals, to design, test, and refine our learning activities. The pedagogical concepts of situated knowledge, experiential learning, and constructivism guided our curriculum design.

Throughout the design process we relied heavily on the advise of members of our own team, of other interns, and of various Berkman Klein fellows and Research Assistants.  It was largely due to such collaboration that we were able to develop a learning activity both fun and informative.

Press Pass TV
We met up with Joanna Marinova and her team during their second week at the summer camp which was held at Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, Boston. The focus of  this camp was video production and journalism.

During the first hour, we talked with the young media producers about how they use Facebook and YouTube, and discussed with them their experiences at the camp thus far.  Some of the teenagers interviewed members of the YaM team, demonstrating their burgeoning skills in interviewing, videography, and journalism.

During the second hour, we ran a workshop on news, searching, and evaluation. We began by exploring their ideas about news stories and everyday sources of information. Through a ‘Sticky Note’ exercise we talked with the kids about different news sources and their beliefs towards them.  Each student wrote words on sticky notes describing their positive, negative or neutral feelings towards different sources (i.e. blogs and newspapers) and put them on the board. We then had a short discussion about how people value different sources of information. The goal of the exercise was to make students aware that their own opinions about certain news (or rather information) sources influences which sources they are most likely to use. When asked what they thought the aim of this exercise was, one of the participants said“I think the purpose of this exercise was to get the opinions of all the individuals about what each source of media means to them and how reliable and/or effective they feel the source is.”

After this warm-up activity, we introduced the participants to a an information quest and asked them to form groups of three. We told them that a blogger in Syria had been reported missing. The goal for each group was to find out what happened to this Syrian blogger. They had to answer three questions within five minutes and they could use an online search engine. We read the  questions out loud and they had to write down which search terms they used and why. The groups had to find out as much information as possible in a limited amount of time (5 minutes per question). Each group had one YaM team member at its side for answering specific questions about their task. All the participants were really involved and engaged in the activity and the teens seemed to be having a lot of fun. When the time was up, each group presented their findings and we created a table on the board comparing the different answers, key terms, and sources to the questions.

All of the groups successfully figured out that the story was about a kidnapped lesbian Syrian blogger from Damascus. They also found out her father’s name and that she had a cousin who had helped her and had reported her missing. The groups mainly had used the first link provided to them by Google and some checked a second source to be sure of the answer. We provided a timeline of the story highlighting the differences between the mainstream news sources and blogs. We asked the groups if they could find out what really happened to Syrian blogger.

After listening to their answers we confirmed (as some of the groups had figured out) that he Lesbian Syrian blogger did not exist at all. It was a hoax. The gay Syrian blogger from Damascus had been made up by an American man who had wanted to make a point and tell a particular story.  Surprisingly, only two teams figured this out.

We then discussed how news organizations also did not realize immediately the hoax surrounding this lesbian Syrian blogger. We told them that journalists and bloggers became suspicious about the story because they could not find out enough information about the gay girl from Damascus. Eventually, another journalists found out the truth and broke the story globally. The kids were surprised to find that sometimes even the news can get it wrong. As a wrap-up, we talked with them about their projects for the following weeks, discussing how they would also have to do background checks and how the searching and evaluating exercise provided them with some additional insight.

It was an inspiring afternoon. The feedback we received back from the participants was very positive, even though they seemed to enjoy the second part of the workshop better. One the participant framed the experience as follows: “it helped me to not believe the first thing i see .”

Team Reflections

Press Pass TV was our first foray into the community – our first attempt at transporting our work beyond the Berkman Klein Center.  Going into the day, we were somewhat uncertain, curious about how students would respond to our ideas and learning activities.  We were immediately thrilled by the students at Press Pass TV.  From the moment we walked in, they were engaged, excited, and willing to participate wholeheartedly in the activities. For many of us, the success of this visit added a new dimension to our work, making more meaningful our efforts, and bringing alive for us what before had been only in our imagination.

Curricular Modules

The Youth and Media team has focused on prototyping and field-testing curricular modules (through workshops and in-person engagement) to support youth in activities of peer learning1 (encouraging youth to be co-teachers/learners) and to assist educators in practice. The primary goal of our curricular development has been to build modules with the following characteristics:

  • Modularity: modules are learning activities that form the basis of Youth and Media workshops. They can be deployed individually or strung together in a series.
  • Scalability: most modules are designed to last one hour, though they can be adapted to both longer and shorter periods. Moreover, while most modules are designed with a specific age range and skill level in mind, one of our key objectives is to draw from our initial testing and deployment experiences and tailor different versions of each module to specific audiences. For instance, the module “News Stories” may focus more on functional navigation skills with a younger audience and higher-level discussion about the media ecosystem with an older one.
  • Adaptability: modules should be adaptable to formal and informal learning environments. We aim to create fun, engaging learning experiences for informal contexts such as summer camps and afterschool or not-for-credit academic programs (all of which are especially appropriate for peer learning). However, given our concern for classroom instruction and initial feedback from teachers, we are striving to design modules for formal curricular purposes as well.
  • Optimization: people using the modules are encouraged to tailor language and/or specific topics to the particular interests of the learner.

1 Some of the workshops, led by Youth and Media youth ambassadors, and the underlying curricular modules serve as “proof of concept” demonstrations for how youth can successfully engage with important issues identified in youth-related research by fostering greater awareness and reflection. They also demonstrate how youth can engage their peers in the exploration of such issues. Unlike conventional learning models, which are typically premised on a one-to-many transfer of knowledge from the teacher to learners, peer teaching/learning focuses on ways that youth can engage one another in a many-to-many process as both teachers and learners. Previous research has shown, for instance, that pairs of skilled peers teaching less skilled learners out-performed pairs of adults teaching children, and that peer teaching is especially successful in tasks that require discussion of issues.

All our modules are available on the DLRP: dlrp.berkman.harvard.edu

Two central concepts that have informed the modules are information quality/news literacy and social-emotional learning/online relationships, respectively.

 

Workshops

The Youth and Media Team has conducted workshops with organizations in Chicago, Boston, New York City, and Washington DC. We hope to conduct more workshops in the future and further our collaborations with other organizations.