by Alecia Magnifico
This piece was originally published by the Macarthur Foundation on their Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning blog (original link).
Young people already use web search services, wikipedia, blogs, and online news to learn about their world and complete their school assignments. When it’s easy to find thousands of hits on just about any topic - some fascinating, some irrelevant - with a simple Google search, it is not surprising that they report learning far more from the internet than they do from school, and enjoying that learning more. But are they getting accurate information from the explorations that they do on their own?
In the recent Macarthur session on games and learning, Jonathan Fanton reported that one goal of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning project is to better understand how young people evaluate information that they find on the internet. In our work on Science.net, an epistemic game in which middle schoolers spend several weeks role-playing as science journalists and writing several stories for an online newsmagazine, we have found that our reporters begin the game feeling comfortable with the internet. They tell us about using web sources for school reports, for chatting, for playing games with their friends. They even report knowing that anyone with a webpage can publish opinions for the world to see. 
The majority of them, however, don’t have a strategy for assessing the reliability of the information that they find. Here’s one typical pre-game interview response: “You never know, it’s the internet. If it’s like the first thing that pops up and then it looks pretty professional, then I’d use it…”
I wonder how much of this finding comes from the simple fact that young people don’t often need to check or even understand their sources: textbooks and teachers are the authorities, and they must be believed (even memorized!) in order to get good grades. A teenager questioning commonly-held information would likely be perceived as antagonistic in many classrooms, although the same behavior would be rewarded for a researcher developing a new theory or a doctor treating a pernicious ailment. These divisions between school and working-world occupations have led several education theorists to label most classrooms as “inauthentic” - composed of facts to memorize and “test questions” to which teachers have set responses - rather than “authentic” explorations of complex issues that may not have absolute answers.
In short, the tight strictures of state-mandated, achievement-tested knowledge don’t allow time for most teachers to delve into multiple answers (much less controversial issues) in classrooms, even when those issues are under lively debate in other settings.
Science.net players, on the other hand, role-play as reporters and thus take on clearly authentic tasks: (1) to learn about a scientific issue that is current and important, in order to (2) write a well-researched, balanced story that will help news readers form their own opinions about the issue. Along the way, they learn to do research on the internet and find credible sites that capture several different perspectives on their issue. They interview scientists for expert opinions on (for instance) stem cell research, nanotechnology, or avian flu. They learn journalism techniques - like writing in the neutral voice and sourcing all opinions - from journalists, and they come to understand why those techniques are important in writing news for public consumption.
More importantly from a media literacy standpoint, however, is that Science.net reporters become more critical consumers of the information that they encounter. In the post-game interviews, 83% of them told us that it’s important to check a source’s reliability or verify the information before using it somewhere else: “[I’d use information] from a reputable website… You have to think about why they’re giving you the information. You can’t [trust it] if it’s to sell a product or something.”
In this age of constant information and advertising, that perspective is important to everyone - not just middle school students.
No comments:
Post a Comment