Monday, July 18, 2022

New articles: Countering misinformation

- Veletsianos, G., Houlden, S., Hodson, J. et al. (2022). An Evaluation of a Microlearning Intervention to Limit COVID-19 Online Misinformation. Journal of Formative Design in Learning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41686-022-00067-z "As part of a design-based research project, we designed, developed, and evaluated a web-based microlearning intervention in the form of a comic into the problem of COVID-19 online misinformation. In this paper, we report on our formative evaluation efforts. Specifically, we assessed the degree to which the comic was effective and engaging via responses to a questionnaire (n = 295) in a posttest-only non-experimental design. The intervention focused on two learning objectives, aiming to enable users to recognize (a) that online misinformation is often driven by strong emotions like fear and anger, and (b) that one strategy for disrupting the spread of misinformation can be the act of stopping before reacting to misinformation. Results indicate that the comic was both effective and engaging in achieving these learning objectives."
The comic is more like a poster, i.e. fairly short, and it is reproduced well in the article - worth taking a look at. 

 - Germani, F. & Biller-Andorno, N. (2022). How to counter the anti-vaccine rhetoric: Filling information voids and building resilience. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2022.2095825
An interesting article in its discussion of how you should aim to get to know what the concerns of the vaccine-hesitant are, so that you can persuade them more effectively (and not just use rational argument, but also use emotional images etc.) However the authors really needed to do some further reading before writing the sentence "The role of education in building information literacy has been widely discussed, but so far, it can be considered marginal" (in fact they then don't actually discuss information literacy, so I'm not sure they are fully up to speed with its meaning).

Photo by Sheila Webber: summaer berries, farmers market, May 2022

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