Are you looking to up your game in the evaluation of online information? Bestselling author John Green wants to help!
Misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and conspiracies have become so common that we stumble across these all the time in our web searches and in our news feeds. And it’s getting harder and harder to evaluate the information that we find. Really bad information is often presented in a professional looking manner with a great looking list of references. Those old checklists just don’t work anymore.
What we really need to do is find out who is behind the information and why they want us to see it. A great way to do this is to leave the webpage we’re on, open a new tab, and google the person or organization presenting the information. Instead of reading vertically, up and down the page we found, we need to read laterally, across the web, to find out what other people have to say about the presenter.
Here’s where John Green comes into the picture. His Crash Course YouTube series has produced a collection in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University to help us learn more about how misinformation is spread and to demonstrate how to use lateral reading skills to evaluate online information. The videos are really engaging and really helpful.
Check out the first Navigating Digital Information video below. As always, the MVCC Library has lots of helpful information as well. Click here for a sample.