 So thank you all for being with us. We are about to start our webinar today. There are different ways of interaction. You will see that today it will be a very interactive meeting. This is Antonella Poce and I'm talking to you from Italy, from Rome, where I teach at Roma Trai University Department of Education Experimental Pedagogy. That's my field of study. I'm Eden Fellow and I'll be your moderator today. I've been working in distance education and in particular in the last five years in critical thinking, assessment and enhancement. That's why I'm very much interested, as all of you I think, in the topic today. You have the opportunity to meet our speakers today. Please be aware that you can ask questions and we'll try to have the most questions we can live with our speakers. You can put your questions in the question and answer box that you can find in the bar below the main image you are seeing at the moment. There's a chat and you are already using it as I can see. But the questions, please leave them on the question and answer box. You have also the streaming possibility on YouTube and we'll try to collect questions also from there. What are we going to talk about today? What happens when the communication of the 2000 Hancock pandemic generates a new wave of information overload? How can you help your students manage it? How can you manage it yourself? Recent research analyzed the level of this perception or misperception of facts due to the way they are told or narrated. Why do we tend to overestimate some information instead of others? Media tends to attract our attention for commercial reasons. News are not focused on the truth but on the viral power that they have. An infodemic of information is thus spread and this limits our rationality and the awareness of reality. It is difficult to make the right decisions starting from wrong points, of course. Moreover, such sort of information generates addiction. To understand how to cope with this kind of pandemic that has an impact also on health and well-being, I leave, of course, the floor to our remarkable speakers. Irem Katz, Senior Research Director of Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey, USA. Francesca Amanduni, PhD student at Romatra University and newly elected member of the network of academics and professionals from the Eden European Distance and the Learning Network. Irem, let me say a few words about Irem Katz, who is Senior Research Director of the Cognitive Technology Sciences Centre at the Educational Testing Service, Princeton. Throughout his almost 30-year career at ETS, he has conducted research at the intersection of cognitive psychology, psychometrics and technology. His research involves developing methods for applying cognitive theory and the design of assessments, building cognitive models to guide interpretation of test taker's performance and investigating the cognitive and psychometric implications of highly interactive digital performance assessments. The Cognitive and Technology Science Centre that E-Direct comprises staff with a wide range of expertise who conduct research and development at the forefront of educational assessments serving the current and future needs of ETS programs and clients promoting quality and equity. Current research and development areas include simulation, game scenario and conversion-based assessment, training of human raters, theoretically-driven analysis of test taker process data, score reporting and cognitive models. So, I leave the floor to you, Irem, and I thank you so much for being with us today. After Irem's presentation, we'll ask a few, very few questions to Irem and then we'll leave the floor to Francesca and again an interactive session with her. Thank you so much to both of you. Please, Irem, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Antonella, and thank you to Antonella, Francesca and our colleagues at Eden for this opportunity to speak with you all today. Today, I'm going to talk about digital information literacy as a type of vaccine or inoculation against the infodemic. Information literacy, digital information literacy represents a type of critical thinking and I'll discuss a little bit more about what it is, the types of tasks we've used to assess it and therefore the types of instruction that might be used to teach these types of skills and I hope we'll have an interesting conversation about how to have students be more digitally information literate. There's a couple of takeaways that I'm going to return to at the end of the presentation that I'd like you to think about as I go through the presentation. First off, often when we think about digital literacy, we often think about just evaluation of information. Is this information I'm reading about on a website, in the news, or on a tweet? Is this real? Is this biased in some way? And I'd like to point out the digital information. What I'll discuss is how digital literacy includes is a full range of skills, not just evaluation. In addition, although digital literacy is digital and related to technology, certainly it is very much a cognitive skill. These types of skills I'll be discussing today have been discussed for years. They were first defined in some ways in the 1970s. Later there have been other developments in the 90s and then even more recently in 2000, 2010, they've been returned to again and again as a way of dealing with information and evaluating information and finding information in order to build knowledge. Finally, the other point I want to be talking about is that digital literacy, digital information literacy is integrated. Although I'll talk about various types of skills that comprise digital literacy, they should be thought of all as part of a single whole. It's not a piecemeal set of skills that you can be better or worse on. These skills tend to travel together. People tend to be good at the skills overall. Not so good at the skills or not so good at the skills. So although there are these different facets of digital literacy, you should think of them all as one integrated set of skills. So a key point that I want to make is that digital literacy is more than technology skills. Certainly nowadays students are very facile with technology. They're able to, they tweet, they use Instagram, Facebook for us older folks, email and so forth. Websites is a wide range of technology that is being used, but that's only one piece of the puzzle. People need to be able to judge the authenticity of information that they see. They need to be able to organize information and summarize and adapt information when they are, because people are not only consumers of information, they're also producers of information. So they should be able to communicate information effectively, disseminate that information, understand where to go for more information to get more ideas about what they might be reading. And you can think of all of these skills related to technology, but it's really a type of critical thinking that I think Francesca will be talking more about. So what is digital information literacy? What does it consist of? These seven skills on the right defining, accessing, evaluating, evaluating, managing, integrating, creating and communicating were defined originally as part of digital information literacy by an international panel, actually back in about 2000, 2001, and later refined by representatives of U.S. colleges and universities, primarily people involved in the library at U.S. colleges and universities. Librarians for many years, librarians have been the keepers of what might be thought of as information literacy, what makes good information, how to find reliable information, how to define an information need. This is all part and parcel of what happens as what librarians are trained to do. And we work with a lot of librarians from across the U.S. as well as other faculty members when defining these digital literacy and what it's made of. So what are some of these skills? The one that most people talk about and think about when they think about the infodemic is evaluating information. And I'll just go through a couple of these skills right now, but we can talk more about them during the Q&A. So evaluating information is determining the degree to which information satisfies a particular need. In this case, for example, finding out about current numbers, about testing for the coronavirus, finding out whether or not policies that are being implemented by governments are actually real. There's a lot of fake news nowadays. And so this is all part and parcel of types of evaluating. A key thing that I always think about when it comes to evaluating information, and Francesca got at this in her introductory remarks, is why is the person who created this information, why is this person communicating it? What's in it for them? In some cases, it might be an altruistic idea of providing information for the benefit of many people. In other cases, there might be a particular political or social slant on the information. That doesn't mean that the information is necessarily problematically biased, but it does mean that you have to think about who created this information. So activities that might be involved on everyday basis, evaluating information, selecting the best database or websites in order to find information, find reliable information. Someone might be ranking webpages, evaluating webpages in terms of their authority, their relevance to a particular research question, how biased they are. And determining also part of this is determining whether the information that you've collected when you're building some understanding of some issue, whether that's sufficient. Another important type of skill is integrating information. That is taking information from multiple sources and forming some type of summary or conclusions. For example, synthesizing information from a website into a tweet. And this is something we see a lot of where people might draw information, draw ideas from a number of different websites and summarize them somehow in 280 characters. Comparing and contrasting information from a variety of sources, news, social media, and so forth in the spreadsheet, just as one example to try to understand that we as researchers might do this to try to understand a particular issue. And then just drawing conclusions from all the onslaught of information that we get, whether it be emails, tweets, Instagram, webpages, or print, on particular issues and trying to understand that. This is another aspect of digital information literacy, integrating these pieces of information together. And the last one that I'm going to speak about, sorry, I was looking at the Q&A. A very interesting question that I'll get to near the end and I agree with. Communicating information, communication. People are not just consumers of information. They're also producers of information. They communicate. And understanding not only how to create TikTok videos, tweets, other video mashups, websites, and so forth, but how to communicate them appropriately to an audience, to tell them, to the audience, to tell them to the particular approach that you want to take. How you create a tweet and how you think about a tweet is very different than how you think about a presentation, for example. These are all a part and parcel of digital information literacy. So creating a graph that helps you think of, to help you make a decision or to understand better about some issue. We've seen a lot of that, particularly lately in the news. Adapting presentation slides to a new audience, I would present to a set of students versus to a set of colleagues would be, for example, very different. So I'm going to turn now to some examples of these types of skills and how they might look. I should say that these were created for an assessment that was specifically designed for use in the U.S. My examples are, I recognize them U.S. centric. However, the basic ideas behind them, I think if understanding the basic ideas behind them means that it's, you know, you'll see that with some small changes, you can make them more globally relevant pretty easily. So the first task is related to evaluating information. The ideas require students to think critically about information found on the internet. This scenario here provides the context for evaluating the information. For each of several websites, the students are asked to decide the usefulness of the site's information that's relevance, it's timeliness, the authority, point of view, and so forth. So here, for example, you're finding, you want to find unbiased information about global warming and as a research step, you've identified several potential promising sites. Now you need to decide whether these sites are reliable and relevant. So there are a variety of websites given in this task, and it's up on top and there's scrolling, and then down at the bottom you indicate whether the sites are useful, authoritative, not authoritative, potentially biased, and so forth. So just to focus on one of these tasks, one of these scientific panel funded by a consortium of state utility companies about information, about climate change, and you could say, well, this one, number one, it might not be completely current because it's about 10 years old or so, 15 years old, but also it's potentially problematically biased because of the source of the information. Another is the results of a climate change panel, but it was way back in 1995, although many of these issues are relevant, it might be that these are not, in fact, current and best information that we have nowadays. So you can see how you could adapt and develop new types of tasks that would be better suited to current issues, but still, and maybe in a different frame, but with different technologies such as tweets and Instagram and so forth, but still get at the same basic underlying skills of evaluation in this case. Here's another type of skill that's more along the lines of searching for information because when we receive information, when we're deciding, okay, should I believe this, part of that decision process, part of that thinking, the critical thinking about information is to go out and find additional information that either that might support what we're seeing, the conclusions we're seeing or to give us a broader understanding. So here's a very simple task where you're working, you're taking a class in history, the U.S. Constitution. Again, I said this was U.S.-based questions, but you can make this really about anything you'd like. And your colleagues or all have suggested ways of searching, alternative ways of searching rather than the search given right here, and the idea is for you to figure out what's the best solution, what's the best way of starting off a search on this particular issue related to the U.S. Constitution. Here are some I-messages, I-m's, texts from friends about some suggestions. What's important here is not that this is effectively a multiple-choice question, what's important here is that the different options result in broader or narrower ways of finding information. For example, a very broad thing was just adding, we should try searching this one in the lower right, we should try searching on history of the U.S. Constitution. That would get you a lot of information. And then there's the correct answer, which is to just put quotes around the specific thing you want to find so that you find those specific texts with those specific words would give you the most, and then the other two provide narrower, but not narrow enough types of results. And we're interested in saying how well people can rank order these different options. Interestingly enough, when we've used this assessment, generally people, even on something as simple as this, tend not to be good at these skills, and we found this generally with many of the skills. So in this case, the correct answer was found by about 36% of college students. And this has been replicated a number of different times, admittedly, not necessarily, immediately recently some people might be better at this now, but it's been fairly, fairly stable. So to conclude, let me turn back to my takeaways. First, digital literacy includes the Florian skills, not just evaluation. This is suggesting for you all that when teaching about digital information literacy, instruction should be broad, not just focusing on one or the other of different pieces of what might go into digital literacy, but cover a wide range of skills. Digital literacy is cognitive, not just about technology. Instruction should try to focus on the cognitive skills, not just on how you determined, for example, how you search for more information through Twitter or through Google or so forth, but actually try to look beyond the specific technology to the actual cognitive skills that underlie digital literacy. And finally, as I said before, digital literacy is integrated. It's not these piecemeal things. Often instruction tends to focus, when I've worked with instructors in the past, tend to focus on one or the other of these various skills to the detriment of some of them. The instruction should not only be integrated but pervasive. I've worked with faculty at universities who've engaged, who've worked with the library at the universities to help develop for a wide variety of different types of classes, appropriate digital information, literacy instruction, and assignments that would not only be integrated, not only focus on the cognitive, but work within, for example, a history course, a writing course, a speaking course, and so forth. So the biology course. Librarians have very good ideas about how information and literacy appears in a variety of domains and working with them to help develop projects and assignments that train digital literacy is a good idea. So just some discussion points that we might raise in the Q&A or for you to all think about. So digital literacy tends to be very difficult to teach, and I'm curious as to people's ideas about the type of instruction that best leads to the sort of skeptical eye that you want people to have in order to evaluate information. And then we recognize that it's really hard. We learn something in the classroom, but then when we're out in the real world, it's really hard to apply the skills that we've learned in the classroom. And so a question is for you all, how can we encourage, how can we teach in a way that helps the students recognize when these skills can be applied in everyday life? I'll leave my contact information down there. And with that, thank you very much. And I will, I'll turn it back to Antonello or should I answer some of the questions in the chat? So I'll go to the Q&A. Thank you so much for your presentation here. Yes, there are different very interesting questions coming from the audience. And I wish you could ask her to, yes, this question especially that is in the chat and I think you can read it. Emotional exploitation of literature through fake videos is a serious threat for political ends by anonymous experts how to evaluate it as a fake, conspiracy behind it and deal with it. I think this is really a relevant question and also what you highlighted related to the connection between digital literacy and what we got continuously on our personal devices is really threatening. So can you give us some advice regarding that? This is a really good, relevant point that we've seen a lot of lately, especially with the ability to create what's now been calling deep fake videos. One of the approaches that I've taken when I look at these is not only is to, number one, always look for the source of the information. How much do we know about who is either posting this or where this information came from? That will in turn lead you to, and if you can find the source of any information or there's no way to find out about the organization or what have you that created it, then you obviously need to doubt the information. But the trickier one is that what if we are seeing these fake videos that actually are showing things that we agree with. That's actually probably one of the cases where students need to think more carefully about they're seeing some video, they're going along with it and those are the ones where we're more likely to be fooled because it's agreeing with our worldview and those are the ones where it's most important to seek who is the author of this and what potential ideas that this person is trying to promote. Yeah, in fact, the issue there is exactly that the media are tending to focus on what can be viral and so they focus on not tracing the truth but going to find people's agreement so what's more popular will be most viral and that's the thing that we should look for in our way of transferring information to our students but also enhancing their critical thinking skills and we are going to learn more about that with Francesca's presentation. But I want to pick up another question from the audience and then we'll move to the second presentation but I'm telling the audience that we're going to answer we'll try to answer all of your questions also afterwards so don't worry if we are not going to ask all the questions to our presenters. Another question is that when from blood when digital literacy skills are very low it is difficult to protect oneself from the infodemic or fake or irrelevant news could you point us to a free online course for people who have low digital literacy skills or maybe a European will be difficult maybe for Irv to answer but we'll try to answer about that also with Francesca but Irv can you tell us how can we protect from the infodemic or fake or irrelevant news something you already told us? Well I'm afraid that I don't know so I'm more in the assessment world than in the instructional world although I've worked with colleges and university professors before but I do know that UNESCO at one point several years ago had developed a digital information literacy I think at the time they called it IACT literacy instruction I don't know what the current state of that is right I can certainly yeah I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for that but anybody else in the audience does but Francesca I'm sure will give us more information about that also different European projects developed to try to answer and to give some directions the last one and then we leave the floor to Francesca how would you differentiate digital literacy from digital fluency? Well really the words themselves are not I've heard these exact skills and in fact these exact skills I've discussed this digital fluency the words change a lot digital literacy digital information literacy ICT literacy the hard part and you could say the same thing about critical thinking which I believe is the topic of Francesca's talk it really boils down to not the label but how you define the specific skills are you focusing more on the technology and the facility with the technology do people use that digital fluency to mean that or are you focusing more on the cognitive skills that exist beyond a particular technology? Yes thank you so much here so we'll try to be back to both of you in the end if there will be time so to have the possibility to answer more questions but I'm going to introduce you in a minute Francesca Amindouni as I said she is a PhD student at Roma Trial University but newly elected member of the Network of Academics and Professionals Eden Network she studies PhD student in education culture and communication at Roma Trial University she has developed her expertise in the learning field both as practitioner and researcher at national and international level she carried out research on blended learning and her current PhD project regards semi-automated assessment of critical thinking short essays and open-ended answers part of her research has been developed at ETS Princeton where she spent a term period as visiting student funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research through the Leonardo Da Vinci Scholarship I can add also that she was one of the very very few PhD students all over the country to get this scholarship so we have to congratulate her for that and she has been working as a researcher in several European projects in the field so that's why I was telling you in advance that she's going to give you some feedback on where to collect information about courses related to digital skills, enhancement support and especially cross-sectional skills development so Francesca the floor is all yours thank you I will share my presentation you can see no sorry okay now you can see my presentation one moment okay thank you to be here with me today today I feel more than ever the responsibility of what I'm saying and I will try to share reliable and trustworthy information because I don't want to contribute negatively to the current infodemic so I will speak I will provide you a definition of what infodemic is and I also will try to speak with you about some research results of the current infodemic then we will speak about two antibodies for infodemic that I think that could be critical thinking and digital literacy and finally we will speak also about innovative methods to assess critical thinking and digital literacy so we know that the current pandemic is strongly related with technological progress for better and for worse one of the facts of the technological progress related with information is also known as information overload the idea is that with internet we receive more information than the information that our mind can understand and process when the phenomenon of information overload meet pandemic we are in front of what World Health Organization call infodemic infodemic was defined as an overabundance of information some accurate and some not that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it but why World Health Organization interested in infodemic the World Health Organization is interested because of the danger of misinformation during the management of virus outbreaks since it could even speed up the epidemic process by influencing and fragmenting social response here I'm showing you some picture of examples of fragmentation of social response that can create danger for singular individual but also for group of people the World Health Organization has been trying to monitor the spread of fake news through partnership with big information and social media companies such as Twitter, Google and Facebook probably if you go on social media you see that social media give you advice to go to official website here I show you an example of my Twitter page if I write COVID-19 of my Twitter page, Twitter suggest me to go to the Ministero della Salute that is the Minister of Health in Italy despite the efforts by World Health Organization and social media platforms hundreds of thousands of people have consumed a reliable contents about the coronavirus on this platform also suggested by New York Time, UGOV and Economist Survey this infodemic phenomenon is so huge that epidemiologists are starting to find ways to ensure the impact of communication dynamics on epidemics so the idea is that infodemic and information regarding information spreading can be used as a variable to understand to forecast the virus spreading as I told you researcher are starting to work on research related to the current infodemic so I wish to present you briefly some results related to the content most common to the rate of information spreading and to our tendency to share our reliable information here you can see that some researchers nearly and colleagues through natural language processing techniques were able to understand which were the contents most common in different social media platform mainstream social media platform where YouTube, Instagram and Twitter and some as known social media platform are Reddit and GAB we can see that most of the contents are not very alarming however there are also some related contents for example something related Bill Gates Foundation simulation something relating biological warfare and in general contents related to racism people that study infodemiology also wanted to understand to find an index to measure the information spreading maybe you listen in the newspaper about R0 R0 is an index used in epidemiologists to say how many people can be affected after being in contact with a person that is infected infodemiologists try to use the same index to say how many contents are produced after someone is exposed to a content related to COVID-19 so that in different social media platform the number is between 1 and 3 this means that after being exposed to one content related to COVID it's possible that people in average produce 1 to 3 other contents related to COVID of course these contents are not for sure are reliable they can be both reliable or are reliable however we know from another study colleagues that people have a tendency to share a reliable information researchers ask the participant to consider a mixture of true and false headline about the COVID-19 outbreak when participants were asked to judge the accuracy of the statement they said that the fake news was true about 25% of time however when they were asked if they will share the headline around 35% said that they will share a reliable content 10% more than in the other condition so researchers suggest that even if people can discriminate between misleading information in a good percentage of the case when they were asked to share they are more prone to make mistakes what can we learn as educators from this epidemic despite the work held organization and government are tried to do the same we need to develop antibodies for the infodemic we think that these antibodies are critical thinking and digital literacy we learn also the methods that people that study infodemic use can be also adopt researchers and educators to study contents that for example students share in online discussion forums so as Dr. Katz said before I will speak a little bit more about critical thinking I want to say that there is not an agreement regarding what critical thinking is however researchers agreed with the idea that thinking is composed by both skills for example analyze, evaluate make inference and argument and dispositions dispositions means to be open-minded to be skeptical, to be inquisitive to be reflective but why we need critical thinking because much of our knowledge of the world comes from others rather than being the results of direct experience we need to analyze and evaluate critical information because information receive affect our belief and our belief as a consequence affect our behaviors and we are seeing that our behaviors in this case can be very dangerous for ourselves and also for other people so critical thinking as a role not only when we speak about citizenship when we speak about studying but for our surviving in this case nowadays a great amount of info change happens online especially in the case of the so-called infodemic so as Torkoff showed before there are similarities between critical thinking and digital literacy however according to Ox reading a text online require greater challenges compare reading a text offline why because of multimodality and because of links that create no-sequential kinds of text so we need not only skills related to text processing but also skills related to navigation now I want to involve you in a very short quiz and I ask the technical team if they can share the poll with the audience sorry ok this is the poll you find free questions and I will explain later more about this free question I read the question with you the first one is Emily's father has three daughters the first two are named April and May daughter's name June, July we cannot say none of this the second question is if you are running a race and you pass the person in second place what place are you in first, second we cannot say none of this the third question is a little bit more challenging because it requires you to go to the website you don't have to do it but if you want to challenge yourself you can do it you have to go to the data section of the official website and look for data relating to employment in the ICT sector ICT Employment I think part of the question was cut but I remember the question for too Natalie so it is which country has 4.7% of employment maybe I can write you in the chat so you don't have difficulties to remember ok ok I'm not ok let me see if I can go to the chat ok here is the chat 4.7% of employment which country I will give you another minute percent of employment ok let me know if all the questions are clear you can write in the chat I'm reading you especially with the third question ok all clear thanks I don't want to disturb you other few seconds I will explain soon the reason of this questions we cannot see the chat ok I think that we can go on and we cannot see the the card but are you are you speaking about the ox website or are you are not seeing the poll I don't know what you mean but I need to go on so maybe the technical yes because I will I will speak later this is about our digital literacy skills so with this the data from ox if you go to the website of ox you should see in the data section but maybe later I can show you the way to solve this task so I will go on we'll speak about this assessment method the first two questions were not aimed at assessing critical thinking skills but they were more related with critical thinking disposition the two items were taken by the cognitive reflection test that is open and if you want you can access on the publication watching the item and this test is aimed at seeing if we are able to evaluate our our fast and spontaneous answer for example in the first item about Emily's daughter the fast answer will be June because the item ask you about the Emily's daughter the name of the Emily's daughter were April and May everyone has in mind is June however the correct answer is Emily because of course Emily's father has three daughters one is April, May and the other one is Emily I'm sorry Francesca do you want me to share the results with the attendees of the poll maybe we can show it now yes we can show it now if you want yes okay in this case the correct answer would be none of this because the correct answer would be Emily the second question was taken both by also by the cognitive reflective test and the correct answer was second was the second so also in this case we ask ourselves to inhibit the fast answer and okay perfect the correct answer in the third question was Japan the third question is taken by the web trotter challenge that is a challenge realized in Italy to assess digital literacy of students in high school and this that question was aimed specifically at assessing the skill of navigating and a goal directed navigation so I hope that these examples could be used by you for designing your test however I will share the slide with you and you can find the reference that you can consult in order to design your assessment test I didn't show you assessment method to assess critical thinking skills because they are larger and more require more efforts of course because critical thinking requires effort so let's go on how can we develop digital critical thinking skills research that social interaction and language are fundamental tools for the development of higher or their cognitive skills and when we speak about language we don't speak only about verbal language but also mathematical language artistic language so the critical activities could be deep reading not only about texts especially literary texts because they are more complex but also pieces of art and I would suggest you to look at the massive open online course realized by National Gallery of Art in Washington DC because they created a very beautiful educational resource to understand how to develop critical thinking through art another exercise that you can use is writing exercise especially essays and thirdly dialogue both online and offline from a Socratic tradition the good news that are working at the moment online is that online dialogue and logic interaction could be even better than offline interactions and this because online interaction allow more time for reflecting and allow people during their argumentation for example to use more references compared to asynchronous discussion however if you have big classes of students and you want to have more discussion forums it can be challenging thus recently educators with cognitive scientists and computer scientists are working together and they develop a new research that is named learning analytics and educational data mining there is a growing number of attempts to automatically analyze critical thinking related skills through which processing techniques and professor Poce and her team in which I include the work on this and however this is a new field and we need more research and our goal is to support teachers in the future providing them tools to monitor critical thinking of their students in discussion forums and for this reason at the end of this presentation I will put in the chat a link that would contribute to my PhD thesis research so I would be very grateful if you can participate in my research at the end of this presentation and there are someone that will put the link also on YouTube to sum up the current info dynamic is making more evident that citizens need to develop critical thinking skills and digital skills critical thinking digital literacy skills could be developed in a learning environment combining deep reading writing activities and dialogic activities and we can learn from info dynamic some methodological tools to assess critical thinking and digital literacy in a learning platform in the same way that researchers work on social media platforms I want to let you with a provocative thought by Tobelli that wrote an essay that I suggest you to read that is named avoid news go without news cut it out completely after a while you will realize that despite your personal news blackout you have not missed and you are not going to miss any important facts if some bit of information is truly important to your profession, your company, your family or your community you will learn it in time for your friends, your mother-in-law or whomever you talk to or see when you are with your friends ask them if anything important is happening in the world the question is a great conversation starter most of the time the answer will be not really this is a provocative thought I'm not suggesting you to not read the news but I suggest you to read the essay from Tobelli and thank you for your time and I hope that it was interesting for you absolutely Francesca thank you so much for your presentation comments are coming in the chat congratulating you so thank you so much I think we have a little bit of time for at least a couple of questions for each of our presenters I wanted to start with Irv and then we'll come back to Francesca with a very interesting topic that actually has a true impact on F and well-being we need to really understand the relevance and the importance of such an issue like infodemic because the relation with health and well-being is very strong and it can be really ample Irv my question to you comes from from the audience of course and is related to the topic of metacognitive skills how are they associated with digital skills and if they are associated in what way can you widen a bit the concept that was there in your presentation but maybe we can give more details about that so metacognitive skills skills about knowing what you're thinking about and being more self-reflective are an essential part of digital literacy in fact is something that the committees that I've worked with that have defined that we're defining these skills talked about a lot it's not specifically put anywhere because it pervades the entire sets of skills number one so for example just in evaluation you have to be reflective about what things you are being persuaded by and therefore what things you need to be skeptical about sorry excuse me but importantly and this was a point I raised all the way at the end of the talk how do we apply these skeptical critical thinking digital literacy skills how do we recognize this is a situation where I need to think hard as Francesca pointed out it's very time consuming and cognitively exhausting it can be to engage in these types of activities so we're going to be a little bit I wouldn't say necessarily lazy but let's say careful about when we look at this you have to have some awareness and self reflection about the situations in which you tend to be fooled and the types of things that you tend to find compelling and not compelling in order to improve your own digital literacy and critical thinking this is and what about assessment you mentioned assessment of course in your presentation and some some examples were given but do you think that we should work on different ways of assessing certain skills in order to support and enhance them I know that there are different problems in especially in reliability and validity of course but can you tell us which could be the direction assessment could take also to help the enhancement of certain skills well when it comes to when it comes to when it comes to assessment one of the things that when we were developing the assessment that the examples I showed during the presentation we obviously were ETS so we paid very collateral attention to validity and reliability issues but I think the important thing is that the assessments and questions need to reflect scenarios and situations that people come across so that when they come across these things in the real life they hopefully would see the connection of course assessment is just a measure and we're measuring how well people can recognize these situations they do know that it's an assessment so that that means that it's they might not apply the skills in the real world but instruction should focus on a wide variety of cases and situations and ideally bringing things from the person's own own experience and life so that they begin to see the connections between what they're for example learning in the classroom and what's actually happening in the real world with ideas but when it comes to digital literacy and critical thinking they're important because recognizing the situations in which you need to apply these skills is critical absolutely I agree with you so Francesca can you give us I have lots of questions but I would like you to expand on the relation that deep reading and relevant cultural issues could bring to critical thinking enhancement I mean relevant cultural references could be in the literary world could be in the hard and heritage world so which is the relation that you could see and how we could exploit the availability of heritage resources in order to expand to support critical thinking skills thank you for the question I will start with the literary text and then we can explore what's happened with pieces of art literary text especially classic one are characterized by complexity so when you read a classic text usually you can find very different layers so you can read read again and train in this way your ability to analyze and evaluate so this is one of the reasons why literary text could be exploited by teachers that want to develop critical thinking in their students and in the same way pieces of art could be used to develop for example inquisitiveness so students can focus on details presented in pieces of art and try to make inferences, hypotheses regarding why that element is presented in that kind of painting what is the reason why the artist put that element in that painting so these are some reasons why literary text and pieces of art could be used and in relation with pieces of art we have a methodology named visual thinking that has been showed to be very useful for the development of critical thinking thank you thank you yes that's why we need to increase cultural heritage fruition in different ways so there are different reasons there are lots of other questions I would like to ask you by the time is really running we will have the opportunity to answer your questions also interestingly there are questions related to projects going on on our topics and we are going to to give you information related to those projects we have many going I would like to remind all the audience that we are going to have to go to give you other opportunities to participate in our online together initiative the next opportunity will be it's very very very close because immediately next next Wednesday we are going to have a webinar promoted by Eden through the network of academics and professionals that is due on Wednesday May 13th and the title is very intriguing again teaching online competencies debate in a post-confinement scenario with Alfredo Soheiro Eden EC member from the University of Porto or Daniel Ehlers Eden EC member Co-operative State University Baden-Buttenberg, Germany and the webinar will be moderated by Francesca Amenbuni as newly elected network of academics and professional steering committee member the next Eden online together initiative webinar will be on May 18th always at 5 Central European summertime the topic is education in time of pandemic practical tips for learning design with Joyce Snydker sorry I can't pronounce the name Jared Evans Open University UK Jilly Salmon UK academic director at online education services and will be moderated by Fabio Nascimbeni I ask you so to don't forget and register to those participants I also recommend you to visit our website and get information about our annual conference that will take place online this year hosted by University Politecnica Timisoara and I can tell you that some missions are still open so it will be a good very good opportunity to share our ideas our projects our project results and have a further interaction together I think it's all for today I thank you again our presenters Irv thank you so much for being with us today I am confident that there will be more opportunities to talk about critical thinking development and assessment thank you Francesca for your very live present and interactive presentation you will have the opportunity as NAP steering committee member to promote more your research and your findings thank you all thank you to the criteria that hosted the meeting and we are anyway available for any further inquiry thank you all