 All right, so my name is Feta, I'm one of the librarians at DePaul University who's on the planning committee here. And I just want to say thank you, thank you all so much for being here and for the wonderful conversations that we've had and hopefully we'll continue to have as we build on the connections that we've made here. And I have the wonderful pleasure of introducing our closing keynote, Michael Spikes, the co-founder of the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition, which maybe you've heard something about as you think through what the new media literacy standards in the state curricula requirements and how they got there. Michael is also a PhD student, almost done, at Northwestern University in the School of Education and a former educator and somebody who has had the great luck, I think, to work with both librarians and educators in the past and I think in addition to his own perspective on news literacy and journalism is able to kind of connect conversations across multiple disciplines. So Michael is going to be telling us a little bit about a media literacy framework for news media literacy and I'm hopeful that, you know, it's a good way for us to sum up all the many conversations that we've had today and again probably start with some additional questions when we come back together next year and in the many times that we interact beyond. So I'm going to hand it over to you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Okay, well good afternoon everybody. I just want to make sure is my slide up. We'll get slides up in a second. Now we have, okay, great. So first thing I want to thank all of you for sticking around. I thought I was going to look out here and see the room like half full first of all because I mean I understand. It's Friday afternoon. I mean even in my own head I'm thinking, how long is it going to take me to get home? So I want to make sure that I stay on time. So I really want to thank all of you for staying throughout the whole day and everything that I've learned from all of our speakers that we've had here today from all of the colleagues that I've been reacquainted with that so many of us have seen each other in little Zoom windows for so long but to see everybody in person has always been a really great thing. So just like you heard on Mike Spikes from Northwestern University both as a student and as a faculty member in the Medeal School of Journalism and I'm going to be talking to you today a little bit about some work that my colleague and I have done in developing a framework for media literacy and I'm going to hope to bring to you a lesson and a tool that you can use that takes some of the parts of that framework and connects it to my area of expertise which is a sub-domain of media literacy known as news media literacy. And what news media literacy looks to do is it takes the practices of journalists and brings those to the news consumer to try to help them to engage in the same practices that journalists do to both verify and find and get out credible information. But because I'm talking to a group of librarians because most of you are librarians, I wanted to start with a little warm up question because like any good sort of class you always like to first off activate the prior knowledge of your students, right? So I wanted to start off with this question. What is media literacy? And because so many of you are librarians, most of you, and this is a summit on information literacy. So trying to answer the question of what is media literacy, what is information literacy and what distinguishes these two different disciplines. So what I want you to do is to which of shoulder partner at your table discuss what you think are some of the distinctions between or that you make between media literacy and information literacy, okay? Let's start there. Let's take about like three minutes for that conversation. Okay, ready? And go. And wrap up your last comments. Let's come back together. Okay, let's hear from someone what came out of discussions at your tables of how you think about, how you answer the question of what is media literacy. So I know our mic is on this side. So I'm gonna go to my table one, two, three right there. Don't move. He voluntarily told you. So we thought that maybe information literacy was a bigger umbrella that media literacy fits under. So information literacy has the bigger umbrella and the media literacy is sort of fitting under that. Okay? That is what some of us thought, yeah. Okay, so let me have somebody, so we got another mic on this side. Let me have somebody else say some more on it, right here. So our conversation went more along the lines of information literacy being the navigation through a database and figuring out how to utilize the information to get what you want. Whereas media literacy being along the lines of being fed to you. The comparison that we gave was you're going out to eat and you could either go to a sushi restaurant where there's like a conveyor belt and you sort of grab what you can and that'd be media literacy and information literacy being like a buffet where you have to navigate through and find where to go get what you want. So that could be, yes. I think that could be a good way of looking at both. So because as we know, like these days, media a lot of times as we heard, I think as part of the opening keynote, media does not so much, we don't so much seek it out. Information now seeks us out, right? Because I can't tell you the number of times during the day that this thing goes off and tries to tell me here's the most important thing you need to pay attention to right now, right? And how do we deal with that? So media literacy really tries to deal with those kinds of issues. So I think that could be a good way of looking at both. Do we have one more distinction that might be that you talked about at your tables between these two disciplines? How about, see, yes, I'm that teacher. I go, okay, we got the left. We got the right. How about we go to the middle? So I'm gonna go to my table. One, two, right there. I would say it's push and pull technologies. One is push to you, the media and information literacy. We are the ones initiating it. So the push and the pull. So again, thinking about media is coming towards us and us seeking out information. So the push and the pull. I think that's a really good way of thinking about that too. So thank you for those. So in bringing some of this information to you and really trying to think about these distinction, I think it's something that for those of us in this area, I know I think about it a lot because we've heard, we hear so many of these different kinds of literacies. We hear information literacy, media literacy, digital literacy, online civic literacy, news literacy, all these different kinds of literacies. And even when we talk about literacy, what does that mean? Does it mean that I know how to understand things? Does it mean that I know how to critically evaluate things? It encompasses so many different parts and pieces. But some of the things that I hope to bring to you today can help you to sort of make some sense out of that, just like the title of my talk says. But before I get to that, I wanted to give you just a little bit of background on me and to show you some connections to you all's profession. So the picture back here shows you where my own career in education started. Some 18 years ago, wait, was that right? 2004, see, I can't do math. So in 2004, I started off as a media specialist at an elementary school. Now it was, I gotta admit, it was the media specialist part that got me to apply. And then they told me, oh, you're gonna be working as the librarian at the elementary school. And I said, I'm about to do what? But I have to say, it was one of the best jobs I've had. It really got me engaged with the young people from Grace K through six. And not only just engaging in materials that were in the library, but also at that time, I also became, as I'm sure some of you that might be working in schools, you become like this sort of catch-all person that I was the computer lab specialist. And I was the technology specialist in all these other kinds of things, right? So you sort of take on all those kinds of roles, but it can be helpful to sort of do that. But also in my background, I had also been involved with media production as a youth radio producer in Ohio and outside of Cleveland where I actually grew up. And then that sort of transitioned over to working with the Center for News Literacy. I should say there was a couple of jumps in between with teaching young people in the Washington D.C. public schools and media studies and media production. And then I moved to start working with the Center for News Literacy when I learned about their curriculum and model for news literacy. And a lot of that work also connected back to libraries where I did some work with the American Library Association, working on, in particular, their media literacy at your library series, which focused on work with public libraries. And then a lot of that work has then transitioned into newer initiatives, such as working with a colleague of mine by the name of Yanti Frisum. He's at Columbia College, Chicago. We are both the co-founders of the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition. And we started this sort of grouping of interested individuals after when it seemed that the media literacy requirement that now brings a unit of media literacy to all high school students in Illinois and us being the first state to do so, what would implementation of that look like? Because we had seen in other states that had implemented media literacy into their standards for learning, what we found was that some players was sort of swooping. And as we heard, I think we heard from one of the speakers this morning, they would talk about media literacy as digital citizenship. So it became more about how to stay safe online and not so much about how to become more mindful of media consumers and producers. Now along with that, I've also continued work in doing research in this area where I've started to look at how are these sort of pedagogies enacted in classrooms? So in my own research, I've gone into high school civics classrooms to look at what are the practices that teachers use when they are teaching their students about media literacy? Because in a lot of cases, that's not their primary subject. Their primary subject may be in the social sciences or in my particular case in civics. And I wanted to look at what were the differences in the practices that those teachers took on. One of the things that I found in particular was that they sort of leaned very heavily on pre-produced materials. And a lot of times what tended to happen in classrooms where I saw teachers move very, I'm trying to think what's the word I'm thinking of, very fluidly between more constructivist sort of practices. So like what I had you do talk to your partner or go and create a thing, these more sort of means for constructing knowledge, rather than these sort of, I talk, you listen styles of teaching, which is known as more of like instructionist practices. And what I found was that many of these teachers sort of leaned on these more instructionist practices. They read slides all for PowerPoint presentations. They gave students worksheets to do and everything was very declarative. So it got me to really think about how can we help teachers build more of these more sort of constructivist styles of teaching for their students, especially in a subject in which it's not so much about what you learn in the classroom but it's about how do you take that out into the world and use it continuously, right? So with that being said, I have connected that sort of work to that of news literacy and what news literacy sort of talks about again is how do we take the practices of journalists, use them as news consumers, one, to become more mindful consumers of information, but then how can we also use news media as a platform for practicing those skills? How can we turn around and say, journalists say they have this big responsibility to society, so then how do we as consumers look back at them and say, look, you ain't doing that, right? How can we talk back to them? So some of the ways we do so is by talking about it and you'll see me talk about this a little bit today, like what is this news literacy thing? Why does it matter? We'll also talk about how do we make distinctions between different genres of information or I should say media, such as journalism, propaganda and so on. We'll talk about what makes news different than all of these different genres. Also, how do we make distinctions between journalistic opinion, mere assertions because we have a media ecosystem in which there are tons of people who will assert beliefs upon us without actually going and verifying that information. We also talk a little bit about what is bias and I've heard the term bias and I have to say that I have a particular definition that I bring to it especially that comes from the news literacy sort of context that really tries to base it in the concepts of fairness and balance. Is the presentation of what I'm seeing fair and also if it's warranted, is it balanced? So I won't be talking about that lesson today but that's also one of the ways that I try to look at bias. And then all of these sort of come together into what we sort of call the capstone skill which is known as deconstruction of media. And yes, there are a lot of these questions on this screen that you can see. No, I don't have a acronym that goes with this. But we try to bring all of these skills together through having students look at news stories and say how do I know this is reliable by using some of the tools that we taught. So it all sort of comes together into that. Now, as I mentioned, coming back to media literacy and trying to work on all of these skills, the main, I already went through that, sorry, but one of the main documents that my colleague, Yanti Friesem and I sort of put together and thinking about how do we help teachers move again if you consider that research I had done before where those teachers had done a lot of that more sort of teaching as telling sort of practices in their classrooms, how do we help teachers really think about and incorporate skills that may not only be new to their students but may also be new to them. Now, this is not to say that teachers are not smart people, they are, but we generally tend to think that in order for teachers to implement new sort of approaches, new curriculum into their already existing practices, they need to find ways to integrate it well and assimilate it to what they already do. Because research does show that if teachers are brought new policies, and that policy is so different than what they already do, what they tend to do is they do it with very sort of surface level changes. So they say, oh, the principal say I gotta do X, so I'm gonna do it when the principal come around, but I'm still gonna do all the stuff I was already used to doing, right? So how do we make those kind of connections? So one of the ways we tried to do that is through what we call our media literacy framework. Now that framework is built off of a definition of media literacy, which does come from the National Association of Media Literacy Education that defines media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and communicate using a variety of forms, no matter what they are. Now, that's a lot, right? We got a number of objectives there that we can do. But some of the things that we like to emphasize as part of our framework is that, yes, media literacy encompasses a wide variety of skills. It is a collection of knowledge about media and the skills that are informed by it. And because of that, we try to emphasize to teachers that no one lesson is gonna make you media literate, SIFT does not make you media literate. Crap, doesn't make you, well, yeah, you can go with that. But so it is something that we learn over time and we build upon. So we also emphasize to our teachers that media literacy should be thought of as an ongoing practice that both you as educators and your learners exercise in a wide variety of ways. And with that, what we hope the primary sort of outcome of media literacy is that it can give control to the consumer of media, or we also say user, because as we know, in these days we are not just media consumers, we are also publishers, we are creators now, so that we can have the choice of what media to use, how and when to use it, and how to address how it impacts us. So we like to emphasize this idea of control, okay? It's not just we see media and we react, we see media and we think instead, okay? So we break this down into four central pillars and for the essence of time and to also encourage you to check out our framework, which I did not mention here on our website, ilmlc.org, you can get the full framework there. I'm gonna give you one of those four pillars because I think it connects very well to my news literacy lesson. And that first pillar mentions that all media messages are constructed towards a specific purpose. What we emphasize in this is that media do not simply mirror reality, but instead represent it through a series of purposeful choices made by their creators and consumers. Now by this, what we try to highlight is when we watch the news at night, we do not just see someone set up a camera on the corner and it just watches the corner for 30 minutes, right? The journalists make choices, purposeful choices to figure out who to interview, how to structure stories, how to put them together towards a particular purpose. Now hopefully for journalists, we hope for that purpose to be to inform and educate their audiences, right? Just like for myself, I've put together media and even this talk I'm giving to you can almost be thought of, well, could it be thought of as media? I'm looking at Stephanie because she might, yes, it can be thought of as media, thank you, right? This can also be thought of as a piece of media. I have constructed it in a particular way because I have a purpose to bring you a particular message, right? So with this, it's important for us to think specifically about what is the purpose behind a piece of media. And this is not only applied to the creators, so we as consumers, we look at why did somebody create this? We also play a role in this construction of reality. We as consumers of media make choices about what we will pay attention to and what we won't pay attention to, right? So we both play active roles in this construction. So how can we think about this? I got a really good lesson from a kindergarten teacher that I thought really sets this up well. So as you see, if we were to take the story of the three little pigs, no, I don't wanna say, I know everybody knows this story because not everybody knows the story, but most people know the story of the three little pigs. Three little pigs go out to seek their, I think they go out to seek their fortune or just to get paid, let's just say that. One builds their house out of straw, one out of sticks, one out of bricks, and along comes who? The big bad wolf. But question, why is the wolf big and bad? Whose point of view is this story being told from? Well, yeah, it's the pig's point of view, right? So the pig, because of course the wolf comes around, they say he's gonna eat us, so I think he's bad, right? He, she, whoever, right? So in these particular cases, and especially in K through eight, or I would say, let's just say, well, I remember elementary, but in primary grades, we talked to our students about point of view, and point of view helps to shape that story. So because of that point of view, we get the wolf is bad, the wolves are good. But what happens if we change that point of view over to the wolf's point of view? The story completely changes, right? The wolf says, oh, I wasn't really out to get those pigs, I just needed to get a cup of sugar for my, to make a cake for my grandmother, right? And you can see how that story changes based on that point of view. So this is a sort of like, a sort of simplified way of thinking about probably, if you were to, I'm sure for many of you, if you were to introduce to your students like media or constructions of reality, that sounded a little scary, right? But instead if you were to say point of view, whose point of view am I hearing from, okay? So with that being said, that was my first part of the framework. So now you can get the rest of it by again going to imlc.org, you get the rest of that, right? But now I wanna pull this back to the other area that I want to talk a little bit about, which is news literacy. Now news literacy, and I know I've talked to a number of educators about news literacy, and they get a little worried about engaging with news literacy in a couple of occasions because they think news and they think politics, right? They think specifically, I'm just gonna bring all kinds of problems into my classroom, right? But one of the things I try to emphasize in the learning of news literacy is it's not so much about engagement, just engagement with news, it's more so about the skills that we can acquire from like journalists that I would sort of categorize as some of our information specialists, such as all of you in this room, you are experts on dealing with information, what could we learn from you all and what could we learn from the practices of journalists? So one of the things we try to highlight in this lesson on primarily distinguishing news from lots of other places is we try to emphasize for our students what kind of skills can we look for that journalists engage with as part of their practices? But to start off, we'd like to start with what are the challenges for today's news consumer? Or I should say always information consumer. We break this out into four main challenges. The first one being speed versus accuracy. Now as you see on this little chart here, information that comes at a super fast sometimes is not always the most reliable. So like I'm sure many of you talk to your students about if you do a Google search, rank does not equal reliability, right? Just because it's at the top and it's easy for you to click on does not always mean it's the most accurate. And we've almost in a way the sort of Google-fication of the world, we've sort of been lulled into this idea that if we have a question we can hurry up and get an answer just by Googling it, right? And one of the things we try to emphasize to our students is in order to get reliable information or I should say credible information, it takes time. We have to go out, we do research, we talk to people and doing all of that takes time. So how can we help them to think about their own consumption of information differently by highlighting this as a particular challenge? Our media ecosystem today makes that even more difficult where again information comes at us so fast, so quickly that it can be difficult for us to make sense of it. And that highlights the second challenge which is there's just too much of it. We get information from so many places from so many different sources. It can be difficult for us to engage in a practice of asking questions like where did this come from? How do they know that? And research shows that when we are bombarded with too much information all of those facilities they shut down. We just go, okay, well forget it, I'll just let it just wash over me and I don't really think about it. A quote that I like to use with my students that highlights this well is that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. When everything's trying to get your attention you have nowhere to sort of point it at, okay? So it becomes more and more important for us to become more and more intentional about our own consumption and even the sharing of information. Then this sort of overload of information leads into our third big challenge which is that of the disintermediation of media. And what this refers to is a practice in which the middle man that usually sat in between the creator of information and the consumer of information who would make choices about is this relevant for this person? Is this credible information? Is it good information? They're largely gone. So just like our sort of definition of this highlights is that this is a system of media creation and sharing that's largely characterized by direct content between creators and consumers and those human intermediaries are mostly gone. Now, the good part of this has been we now hear from so many more voices and perspectives that we didn't always hear from because you had to have access to the technologies and the ability to then broadcast information out broadly and not everyone had access today. But also at the same time what that has done it has taken out and I try to emphasize these human intermediaries are gone from that process now. We have algorithms that try to do the same thing. They're not always great at doing it as we see, but we try. So with that, this also highlights a bit of blurring of the lines between the different kinds of media that we see and I think an example might highlight this embedded in me going into a complex sort of description of it. So here are two Facebook posts. The one on the left comes from NPR. Which we would use to think, oh, that's a news source. And the one on the right comes from Home Chef. Now if we were just scrolling through both of these usually what I do at this point is I have everybody turn around and talk to their partner and say, what's different between these two posts? Some of the things we might see, but I gotta move a little bit faster. So a couple of things we might see here is so we see these images here what a lot of people will emphasize is they say, oh, well, that's a video and that's a still image. If you were to live in Orlando as we see here you might look at this and say, well, that looks like the people I see on the news. Maybe that is news too. But there's something in particular on this post that distinguishes it from the one on the left. Anybody see that? I noticed it might be a little hard to see here. We see sponsored up there, right? We see that as sponsor and then we see the shop now. This is actually a button down here and we see get $30 off your first order, huh? Now both of these look very much the same but they have very different intentions. One is to inform, one is to sell. But on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, all of these places, the media all gets flattened. And although, you know, I've got this on a, I don't know how big the screen is, maybe like seven, eight feet and I highlighted for you like, you should be thinking about this. You would go, oh yeah, I can tell the difference between the two but we don't always make that distinction where we just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll through, right? So this highlights this sort of blurring of the lines between categories that we get on all of these new platforms. What this also has run into and has created for us is a bit of a crisis of authenticity. So we see things like this video in it seems like we're seeing this like behind the scenes video with Tom Cruise. He's talking to us about what's happening on this red carpet, so on and so on. But as some of you might know, this is actually known as a deep fake, right? This is somebody else that said these things and then modeled their face on Tom Cruise and it was able to create this sort of synthesized video, right? So we now seeing is not always believing, right? We also run into this or maybe not platforms that are just news but we also run into this on things like Amazon reviews. There's been studies that have looked at a selection of Amazon reviews and have found that lots of them are auto created by sometimes I guess like groups of people who get together to sort of put very good reviews in for certain products. And if you look closely at them, you'll see they sort of say the same thing. They use the same language. And I would even have to admit I have been a person that has been approached by companies after I have wrote a bad review. And maybe some of you have, you write a bad review about something and the company comes back around and say we'll send you a free one just because we didn't want to inconvenience you. But then they say, could you take down the bad review? Okay. So again, this is part of this whole ecosystem of information that we draw upon to make decisions and take actions. So from that, we get to our last challenge which is best summed up with this clip. I'll answer the question. You want answers? I think I'm entitled. You want answers. I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. And that there's the truth. All right. Because one of the other things we try to emphasize for our students is that it is very difficult for us to overcome our own predispositions when we come towards new information. One of the lines I like to use with my students is that when we come towards new information or something that's novel, we bring all our baggage with us. We bring our previous experiences, what we've learned, where we grew up, all of these things with us. And they sometimes can make us somewhat blind to new perspectives and ideas. So some of the things we highlight for our students as part of news literacy is some of the psychological phenomenon that we run into. Some of these you may have heard today. These include cognitive dissonance, which is our brains do not, we have a very difficult time holding in our minds, ideas that clash with one another. It actually can cause us pain, stress, and our brains try to tell us, I don't want that, so don't think about that. Don't think about it. Don't process it. Don't do anything with it. We also talk about confirmation bias, which is we like information that tells us, yes, you are right. Yes, you are smart. You are the smartest person in the room. Don't nobody know as much as you do, right? And we come towards that kind of information, right? And then I actually recently just changed this because it's used to say backfire effect, which I know is a little controversial, but this idea of belief perseverance. And that is when one has a very deep held belief, if somebody comes to them and says, let me give you some evidence that tells you why that's not true, instead of us being open to saying, huh, I didn't think about that that way. We instead will double down in that belief, right? So we've heard this morning that these ideas about fact checking, which we see a lot of are not always that effective, right? So now from this, what do we do? So we have things like fact checking. We have technologies like News Guard. We have checklists that might tell us, check this and do that and do this and do that. But what happens when we encounter a situation when this thing doesn't work for it? News Guard hasn't evaluated it. The checklists mentioned something different that doesn't align with that or somebody has in fact checked it yet. Now it becomes more upon us to do that work. And some researchers grant it as an educator of this kind of work. I like to draw on talks about the effectiveness of bringing a disposition towards information for finding reliable information. And that's what media, I would like to say media literacy and news literacy tries to emphasize. It's about, as Stephanie talked about earlier, building that inoculation against the effects of misinformation, okay? So how do we build this? Somebody's come through interventions like media literacy and news literacy which can be thought of as a collection of concepts for more mindful media consumption. And for news literacy, it uses journalism as their platform for development of these skills. And very specifically, the definition of news literacy emphasizes the ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports no matter where they come from. Now one of the ways that I've sort of tried to update this definition has been it's not just news because as I've talked about with colleagues, our definitions of news are changing. When we think about news, we think about newspapers, we think about news on TV and so on. But we get lots of different kinds of information that helps us make our ways through the world. So I've actually started to make updates to this definition to say this is more so about finding reliable, incredible information that allows us to take actions or actionable information. And what is actionable information? It is information that allows us to make a decision, take action or share it with others responsibly. And what lastly we emphasize as part of this sort of introduction is that now much of that work is on us because now it is on the consumer to be in charge of determining what's reliable and what's not because these days we are not only consumers, we are also publishers. All right, as I move very, very quickly, sorry for throwing so much information at you. I wanna move to the lesson that I talked about a little bit earlier about making distinctions. So if you recall earlier in the talk I talked about what are the intentions or what are the purposes of pieces of media? Thinking about this as a sort of beginning stage for media literacy practices and for us news literacy. So in this particular case, what I'd like to emphasize is what are some of the differences or what distinguishes journalism from all of these other sort of genres? One of the ways that I tend to do so, I was skipping a few slides here, is through something known as information neighborhoods. Now this idea comes from the Center for News Literacy. If you've engaged with curricula from the News Literacy Project, you may have heard these called info zones. What all of these emphasize are the different genres of media such as journalism, entertainment, advertising, publicity, propaganda and for all information and you see on the left side there are different criteria that we can use to distinguish them. There's also a short link here if you wanna pull this up yourself. For us in this particular case, I'm gonna focus on what are the goals of each of these genres of media and what are the intended outcomes? Okay, as we see for journalism, it's to inform, entertainment to amuse and so on. The outcomes being in journalism, empowering citizens, entertainment, distracting them, okay? So what I'm gonna do is I wanna show you an example and I want you to take into account what you think just looking at these goals, which genre or multiple genres of media do you think this fits into, okay? All right, here we go. Well it's now more important than ever. Selfie sticks have helped me a better shot but at the inconvenience of the hearing aid. At Ms. Muse, we understand the importance of looking great without giving up comfort. The selfie stick is a great solution to a problem but in turn it has created a new problem. This was the opportunity Ms. Muse to create an even greater solution. Introducing the selfie shoes. No matter where you go, you'll always be camera ready. Just insert your phone into the port, raise it to the perfect angle and click the internal button with the tap of your toe to take the photo. To get the best range of angles, we have also added a docking port on each shoe. So you can get a photo from either your right or your left shoe. The great thing about the selfie shoes is you no longer need to use your arm. So now both hands are free to be in photo. We're all super pumped about the selfie shoes. With wearable devices on the horizon, the possibilities are endless. We're working on a charging functionality as well as making the selfie shoes water-resistant. So really, we're just getting started. Sign up to be one of the first to get a pair at Ms. Muse.com slash selfie shoes. All right, the selfie shoe. So in taking into account the different genres of media that this may fit into and their particular goals, I want you to take a quick two minutes with your shoulder partner to try to determine which of these genres or multiple ones you think this fits into. Okay, go. Okay, a couple more seconds. Wrap up your last comments. Let's come back together. All right, so we're gonna do a quick show of hands. How many people thought that this was a piece of journalism? Yeah, I was hoping not. Okay, entertainment, advertising. Okay, good amount of people said both of those. Publicity, okay, a little fewer. Propaganda, sort of. If you go deep, deep. You'd be like, okay, let me tell you. Let me bring my critical scholars up in here, okay? Raw information. Okay, so for the second time, I'm gonna move a little bit faster here. But a couple of things I'd like to mention as I use this in lots of my workshops. And I'll say, has anybody heard of Ms. Muse before? Okay, a couple folks have, okay? And because a lot of people say, well, that just seemed like something I would have seen on SNL. So it's probably some fake company, right? But actually no, Ms. Muse is not fake. It's a real company and they sell what? They sell shoes. Now, in particular, they don't sell a selfie shoe. But they do sell shoes. And then I say to my audience that they released this video on April 1st on YouTube. So then you go, okay, now I sort of get it. So if we take all of those different pieces together, we can look at this as probably a piece of publicity that also overlaps entertainment, okay? It was funny, it got our attention, and really it's sort of purposes to build brand awareness for Ms. Muse, okay? So you can use examples like these to highlight that our ecosystem right now blurs a lot of these lines, right? It's kind of fun, right? Then I like to move on to things like this. Here is the news page from mba.com. And for the second time, I'm not gonna go through like each part here, but we also try to answer questions of which of these categories does this fit into? It's not as clear cut, okay? So how do we make distinctions between things that may call themselves news, but do they align with maybe how we might want to think about news, okay? So I'm gonna give you a definition that we use in our news literacy course for news, and that is, news is information of some public interest that's shared and subject to a journalistic process of verification for which an independent individual or organization is directly accountable. And this is usually the point where I say to my students, you see these words that's on the line, and then yellow, that mean you need to break this down, okay? So these are three things that we try to emphasize to our students to look for in information that labels itself as news. So how do we break down each of these? First, verification, verification being the process that confirms truth or accuracy of a claim. Like any story, well, I should say not any story, but I should say most news stories, they start off with a claim of some sort. So if we were to take a look at, say, a news story about the Omicron variant of COVID being half as risky of long COVID than the Delta variant, we first would ask ourselves, what claim is being made here? Well, we see it sort of like in the headline, and we may also see this in the lead or first sentence of the story. Omicron variant is much less likely than Delta to cause long COVID, according to a large scale study published about the long-term risk. Then our next question is, so we have the claim and we ask what evidence is used to support the claim? Now, some of that may also be here because it tells us how do they know this large scale study, okay? But if we look further in the story, we would look for more pieces of evidence. The findings published in the Lancet come from researchers at this place who tested, who tracked thousands of people who tested positive for COVID to determine the risk of long COVID, okay? We've got another piece of evidence. Then we might go even further and learn even more about the methods and how they were able to make that claim. So there are multiple pieces of evidence here that help to verify the claim being made. Verification. Second, independence. And independence refers to freedom from control or influence of interested parties coupled with a system of checks and balances to avoid the influence of pre-existing beliefs. Now, for us as consumers, we have unfortunately lots of cases where we may have sources, I don't wanna say sources, but outlets of information or people who will publish information that are not always the most independent. This is probably an old example of this where a story of a small town mayor who took on a pseudonym in order to write stories about the city he led. We would probably not call him the most independent of sources, right? They have a self-interest in making the city look good. We also see examples of this in places where I have colleagues who study a phenomenon known as news deserts, the creation of news deserts in places where all of the local reporting has been gone. And we see other kinds of information that try to fill that gap. All around Illinois, probably many of you saw examples of these sort of shadow websites that looked like news, called themselves news, but really were sort of more like influenced campaigns. Cause when you read them more closely, you saw they were all for one particular candidate or one particular party, okay? We even saw like printed papers that had these, right? That again, examples that call themselves news but are not the most independent. So thinking about that independence is really important for us to keep in mind. Lateral reading, as you heard a number of times talked about today as a tool is a great tool for us to find out how independent an outlet can be, okay? Because while we might go to the about us page for that publication taken to consideration, that publication wrote that about us page, right? And lastly, we have accountability and that's being responsible for the information that's shared. So for us as news consumers, we would tend to say the ways that we find if a person or the writer is accountable is they say who they are with an actual name. They may also give us information that may allow us to contact them directly where say a journalist makes a mistake. Hopefully we as consumers of that information can say what that mistake was and highlight it. They may also take, be not proactive but take steps to highlight when things when they got things wrong and how they corrected those things, okay? So these are ways that we can look for accountability in the information we find. Now again, this is in a very particular context and I talk about it in terms of news but I think these same tools can be used for all kinds of information that we use to again take actions or make decisions or know whether to share them with, okay? So the big lesson that we take away from this, this concept is that a piece of information becomes news when it follows VIA. It's verified from an independent source that is accountable for that information and there are a few ways for us to fund that. So I have way too many examples in my slides. So our takeaways from this is that information can be separated into we call them information neighborhoods based on key characteristics. We saw those as like goals, the practitioners, the intended outcomes. It allows us to figure out what is the intended, what is the intention of the creator of that information and we can put them into a genre. These characteristics can allude to like I was just saying the intended goal of the media message being communicated. News is characterized with the acronym VINA. Let me move my pointer there. Verification, Independence and Accountability and we've seen some examples where other forms of media will borrow these characteristics creating a blurring of the lines between these categories. So what I've just brought to you is one tool out of many, many others that are out there that I hope can help you to think about how you can bring those into your own classrooms to use these with your students and even to enact them for yourselves to move all of us toward a disposition for finding reliable information no matter where it comes from. Lastly, what I'm gonna put up here is if you would like to learn more about some of this work I'm also gonna, since I got your attention, tell you that colleagues of mine at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and I will be running a workshop this summer on media literacy. We did a three-day workshop last year with a group of teachers in Urbana. We actually had a few teachers from the Chicago area as well where we're bringing them back together to hear them talk about and show how they're using these techniques in their classrooms. So they're gonna do a bit of that and we're gonna do a bit of a focus group with teachers, librarians and others, educators to talk with them about what they need from this kind of curriculum. That's happened on June 26th. You can find out more at that link from the iMedia Project. I'll also be teaching concepts of news literacy as part of a summer institute in digital literacy which is happening in Providence, Rhode Island. This is run by the Media Education Lab out of the University of Rhode Island. And as always, please feel free to reach out to me if you have further questions on anything I have presented here today or if you would like to think about ways to integrate this into your own work and maybe looking at this even more deeply. So I thank you all for your time today.