Information Literacy

        I took the online course "Is it legit? Evaluating news sources". In this course, I was given examples of good sources and bad sources and asked to choose whether it was good or bad, as well as what qualities supported my belief. Then there were video explanations of steps to take to make sure a source is reliable or "legit". Basically, the course instructed me to do a web search on the source of information, look for the source's code of ethics, check for transparency, look for an author/byline, examine how they correct their mistakes, assess what other content they put out, look for spelling/grammar errors, and see if other places posting the same content. The basics of fact checking.

        One term I had never heard before in this article was "pink slime sources". According to the course, a pink slime source is a source made to look like an unbiased local news center but their content is controlled by a political party. Usually what they post is completely fabricated. Since I am attempting to be a media literate person, I googled it. The Washington Post has an article called "How ‘pink slime’ journalism exploits our faith in local news" about the term, where the author confirms the definition and says "The term is a reference to the controversial paste-like meat byproduct that was, according to reports at the time, supposedly being added to ground beef on supermarket shelves without a label". There is also a lesson on PBS about pink slime journalism called “Journalistic Meat or Fraudulent Filler”. It is a very interesting concept, and I was surprised to find lesson plans around the idea.

The course also used the term "standards" a lot. I obviously know what standards are, but what I didn't know was that a majority of reputable sources have a page showing their code of conduct/ethics. For example, the New York Times has "A Handbook of Values and Practices for the News and Opinion Departments". 

        In middle school, I had an English teacher who made a lesson on media literacy because she kept getting students turning in papers full of misinformation. This was in the early years of our school using Chromebooks, so a majority of kids were using online sources and not fact checking. She required MLA format for our papers, so she said that the first red flag is if you cannot fill in most of the key parts of a bibliography. That included the author, date published, publisher's name, etc. The next red flag she shared would be if there are ads everywhere. She said that if the source is reliable, they don't need to make money off of ads all over the website. The last step to make sure the source was reliable was to find other sources that agree. If she read something in our papers that she wasn't sure was true, she told us she would make us prove it, so we had to make sure other reliable sources agreed. These ideas align with what the online "Is it legit?"course was talking about.

        While this course was very informative, I don't feel like I learned anything new. I can see how this course would be helpful for others, but to me it seemed like common sense. If you read a piece of important news, make sure its true. It would be naive to assume everything I read online is true. Like I said before, I could see it being a helpful resource, but maybe just not for me.