2017 Charleston Library Conference

Promoting and teaching digital literacy skills is particularly important when it is increasingly difficult to evaluate the credibility of Internet content. From fake news to alternative facts to clickbait, we find ourselves bombarded with information created with the notion that we will share it freely and perhaps mindlessly. With this digital firehose trained upon us, what mechanisms and tools can we turn to when we want to determine information credibility? One model, which has been gathering success and attention, is Climate Feedback (Climatefeedback.org), a network of 180+ climate scientists that distributes and fact-checks articles on different aspects of climate change. The team looks for statistics and claims that are out of context, factually inaccurate, or unduly vague, and then annotates the articles with corrections and connections to related web resources. Likewise, a network of courses has been introduced under the Digital Polarization Project (Digipo) to enable instructors to provide students with a toolkit for sourcing, fact-checking, and evaluating digital content. Librarians, teachers, and publishers are natural allies to develop additional projects along the lines of Digipo and Climate Feedback.  Learn more about the tools that help these instructors and scientists work to bring better information to light and brainstorm how you might take lessons from these projects back to your organization or campus.