Social Media and Information Literacy: Reaching Students Where They are #ECIL2023

Pam McKinney live blogging from the first afternoon session of the 3rd day of the ECIL conference in Krakow, Poland. Jennifer Jacobs from Texas Tech university is an information literacy teaching librarian, and one of her courses looks at social media and information literacy.
People make split second decisions about information they find on social media and decide whether and how they are going to use it. Social media has fundamentally changed how we interact with information, and it’s important to reflect on how we share information we find on social media, as much Mis and dis information is found on social media.
The mid-term assignment for students is to go on their social media and find a video that has information in it. They have to decide if that information is truthful, and what value it has for them. The focus is to capture how students interact with social media, before trying to teach them about evaluation skills.
Some students showed good evaluation skills and had videos that were truthful. Some posters had expertise in the subjects they were sharing videos about, and students recognised this. Several students chose very emotional videos e.g. about the use of animal testing in cosmetics, because this video was shared by PETA, an animal rights pressure group, it was probably biased.
Students usually accepted information on social media without checking the source. Truth can be blurred by high emotion videos. Without fore-knowledge, students struggled to articulate how they judged the truthfulness of information. Students had to present their videos to the class and talk about the,, which students liked as an activity. The activity could be adapted to many contexts, and can inform the development of learning materials about information evaluation.
The abstract for this talk is on this page
Photo by Pam McKinney