Education 2.0 & 3.0

Racist/racialized malinformation is the phenomenon of how we are conditioned, socialized, and repeatedly bombarded with racist and negative images and stereotypes. These stereotypes are repeated and normalized until they become malinformation. But how can these deleterious and destructive forces be eliminated? They need to be addressed and battled just as other societal ailments are, and critical cultural literacy can aid in this fight.

For almost 20 years, instruction librarians have relied on variations of two models, the CRAAP Test and SIFT, to teach students how to evaluate printed and web-based materials. Dramatic changes to the information ecosystem, however, present new challenges amid a flood of misinformation where algorithms lie beneath the surface of popular and library platforms collecting clicks and shaping content. When applied to increasingly connected networks, these existing evaluation heuristics have limited value. Drawing on our combined experience at community colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, and with Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research institute studying college students’ information practices for the past decade, this paper presents a new evaluative approach for teaching students to see information as the agent, rather than themselves. Opportunities and strategies are identified for evaluating the veracity of sources, first as students, leveraging the expertise they bring with them into the classroom, and then as lifelong learners in search of information they can trust and rely on.