Bucknell Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship

Instead of burrowing into a silo or vertical on a single webpage, as our Gen Z digital natives do, fact checkers tended to read laterally, a strategy that sent them zipping off a site to open new tabs across the horizontal axis of their screens. And their first stop was often the site we tell kids they should avoid: Wikipedia. But checkers used Wikipedia differently than the rest of us often do, skipping the main article to dive straight into the references, where more established sources can be found. They knew that the more controversial the topic, the more likely the entry was to be "protected," through the various locks Wikipedia applies to prevent changes by anyone except high-ranking editors. Further, the fact checkers knew how to use a Wikipedia article's "Talk" page, the tab hiding in plain sight right next to the article—a feature few students even know about, still less consult. It's the "Talk" page where an article's claims are established, disputed, and, when the evidence merits it, altered.

In the short term, we can do a few useful things. First, let's make sure that kids (and their teachers) possess some basic skills for evaluating digital claims. Some quick advice: When you land on an unfamiliar website, don't get taken in by official-looking logos or snazzy graphics. Open a new tab (better yet, several) and Google the group that's trying to persuade you. Second, don't click on the first result. Take a tip from fact checkers and practice click restraint: Scan the snippets (the brief sentence accompanying each search result) and make a smart first choice.

What if the answer isn't more media literacy, but a different kind of media literacy?